10,000 Steps To Playing Guitar?

What's the most common thing a guitar teacher hears? "I didn't have time to practice this week". The 21st century puts everyone in a time crunch. I always recommend having a "sofa guitar" handy in the living room; you can pick it up in all of those liminal moments one encounters there, or even while casually watching something on tv. Learning to compartmentalize small snippets of things to practice, committed to muscle memory, opens the door for (dare I say it...) "mindless repetition" that can be very beneficial. But here's another thing: A lot of people prioritize "getting their 10,000 steps in". Which is sensible, your health is obviously important. A lot/many/most people walk to do it. What if I told you "you can get a strap for your acoustic and practice playing while you walk".......? No, it's not ideal. As a beginner it might seem very cumbersome at first, you will have to commit to having a low wrist and playing by feel instead of by sight. That's ok, even if you're making mistakes; even if you just hold one chord and strum, you're getting exercise in two different ways simultaneously! And you can practice strumming on beat with the cadence of your walk: "on beat" with each step, or a multiple/subdivision. Or other strategies I might suggest as the guitar teacher.... I'm also going to go out on a limb and say the 10,000 steps will go by faster as well! The distraction WILL make it seem less of a chore - for both the walking AND the "guitar practice". I can recommend certain specific things one could do, but as I said, just strumming a chord might be good enough for a lot of people. You're doing an isometric workout, holding the chord down, as well as rhythmic practice in strumming. The next level up would be to change open chords back and forth "blind", not looking down, not trying to look over the front of the neck to see where your fingers are. Keep it simple and basic. Yes, you may attract some attention in your neighborhood or walking path. But maybe that not a bad thing? And it's certainly not as "strange" as some jogging fads that have happened in the past! 10,000 Steps To Playing Guitar, try it...

Sloppiness Pt. 1: For Whom Do You Play, and Pig Skateboards?

 On the planet right now, there are a gazillion different guitar players.  They all feel they slot into a mythical and intangible scale of "sloppy vs. not sloppy".

 

Part of my quiver

 

  A lot of people don't evaluate their outcome goals to meter that.  Worse, I think that the 80's wrecked a lot of people's sensibility regarding the concept and turned it into a overly simplistic, all encompassing unobtanium throne of "Perfect Technique".

 I'm going to digress (because it's easy), to an even earlier time of the mid-70s and tell a story about skateboards.  Then, I'll try to tie that into a useful analogy for guitar playing.  I call this "stunt blogging":

 In the early 70s skateboards were very skinny.  They were undeveloped engineering and design-wise, still mired in a limbo zone of being mostly a "toy".  Then, in the mid -70's skateboarding exploded and suddenly there were companies whose sole purpose was to make not only just skateboards, but skateboard parts.

 One company was Dogtown Skates.  Previously there had been a few companies making skateboards, but the shape and size of the skateboards was never really explored (except in length).  Somewhere along the line, the guys that rode their skateboard decks start noticing them getting bigger and bigger, and suddenly it became apparent that a wider board is more stable.  Boards reached beyond being 6-7" wide.  By the 80s people started using boards averaging 10" wide, or more.

 Since then, things have settled down into the typical popsicle stick board seen today, 7.5"-8.5" wide.  But wider than the early 70s, and some still prefer wider today.

At Dogtown, there was a guy in charge of cutting out the planks of wood for the new decks.  This was pre-CNC milling, computer controlled manufacturing.  What he was doing was taking and old deck, and using it as a template to cut out new boards.  Then for the next run, he'd take one of the new boards... and use it as a template for the even newer run of boards.

 Every time he made a new run of boards, he was gradually making them wider.

 For someone who doesn't have a real artistic mind set, the obvious answer to "what is an acceptable amount of sloppiness?" is "obviously" none at all.  The 80s saw the dawn of people staying at home in their bedrooms practicing for many hours a day with their amplifier probably no further than a few feet from their ear.

 The new urge to play faster and more technical led to countless people sitting in front of their amp - in a sonic-microscopic fashion, playing their favorite technically challenging guitar parts from recordings. 

 The thing is, the people they were copying didn't record in that fashion, with their ear up on their speaker.  They heard it blended in professionally by the recording engineer, or maybe out in the studio room with the rest of the band: a less than optimal way to hear what they were doing.  Unless they deliberately soloed their tracks, to polish what they were doing.

 But that was in a *studio* setting.  When that generation and prior was learning guitar, they were listening to more primitive recordings on more primitive playback gear.  They may or may not have been able to make out most of the detail of what their favorite Chuck Berry lick was.  Which was a good thing: this allowed for mutation and hybrids.

 Practice amps were not that great, nor were guitars for beginners prior to the 80s.  So the process of sitting in the bedroom to copy what one's Favorite Guitar Hero did was a more coarse experience, also not tempered by the social pressures of having to have extraordinary technical skill.

 So what was happening in the 80's was akin to the skateboard deck getting bigger and bigger by default. 

 People were transcribing guitar solos with more accuracy and precision than in some cases the original guitar part was played.

 Not only that, but since in most cases the guitar solo on the record represented the guitarist at his "best, peak performance", the practice of replicating that performance over and over and over in the bedroom meant that the Bedroom Guy's skill set was elevated over the original. 

Was art getting better by that process?

 Most would say "no".  Most became intimidated by the anti-punk philosophy of being not just pragmatically skilled, but highly skilled. Then it became trendy to say "no", and that begat the "alternative music" rebellion in the late 80s/early 90s. I think that was a harsh and moronic herd-mentality reflex, to the countless technically adept guitar players that came out of the 80s  unburdened by an artistic sense. But something else just as bad came out of it:

 The moronic, Dunning-Kruger notion of Attaining "Perfect Technique".

 It became kind of tres-cool to say things like "oh yeah, Hendrix... he was sloppy" in the 90s.  I would hear this from both metal guitar players, and technical blues Stevie Ray Vaughn aficionados.  Which was doubly stupid for the SRV fan to say, given Vaughn wouldn't have existed without being a Hendrix fan.

 That attitude matured into what is now a finely shaded and graded scale of "how perfect is your technique?" by a lot of players.  Finely shaded, because what constitutes "perfect" is different depending on who you ask, and actual reality.

 Here's reality: there is "sloppy", and there is "making mistakes". The question is: what is a pragmatic approach to being a a fallible, imperfect human?


 There are 3 concepts that should be recognized in this context, in order to have a practical, pragmatic and useful philosophical attitude on this subject... (outlined in Part 2):

 

 

Habitual Choice and Guitar Playing

 So I'm listening to Jude Gold's _No Guitar Is Safe_ podcast last week, and he's interviewing Zakk Wylde.

 Takeaway #1:

I'm not a big Zakk fan.  I am, however, a big Randy Rhoads fan.  But that's not why I was listening.  I was listening because even at my advanced age I still try to absorb everything I can. I listen with the hopeful expectation of gleaning some little morsel of something I didn't know before, a bit of wisdom, anything. 

 One of the cool things about Gold's podcast is that you get to hear the interviewer au naturel, playing along with Gold.  What the guitarist he's interviewing has to play through varies, and that in itself is interesting, as well as how they've apparently decided to set their sound as recorded in a less than perfect, less than pristine-studio condition.

 I digress.  The takeaway is that I listen and read everything when I'm not playing.  You should, too.


 Takeaway #2:

 While listening to said podcast, you hear Zakk fiddling around with various songs in a casual context.  Whenever he plays a chord for more than a beat - he puts vibrato on it.  It's obviously a nervous habit, and the basis of his ultra-aggressive vibrato. 

 The takeaway is that his habits are what makes him "Zakk Wylde".  Habits can be a good thing, and a necessary thing in the case of style.  You only acquire habits through practice; and what you practice is unique to you, and should be unique to you. 

 There are bad habits relative to technique, but that's not the same thing as a habit in choice.  
  

 The percentage of habitual choice relative to the generic is style. 

 You have to play.  A lot.  You have to play something you really like, a lot.  You have to do this to the point that it's automatic, a reflex.  When you think you might be doing it too much - that's maybe enough.


 When you improvise it has to be deliberate in the moment.  Not well before, and by "deliberate" not the byproduct of a conscious thought that requires math.

 If you don't have your entire life to devote to music, you have a choice: make a study of it, make it academic.  A worthy pursuit, if you're going to continue to listen to music the rest of your life, you should at least know something about how it works, right?

 Another choice is to embrace the habits of the value of specific things you love in music.  As an example for some it might just be the classic "Chuck Berry double stop lick".  In which case you should wear it out.  Don't worry about anything else for "a while", weeks, maybe months.  Be able to do it in all permutations, double time, backwards, off beat, accellerandos, pulling back, alternate picked, strummed, all of it.

 To the point where no matter the situation you're in, you can take that musical phrase and really and truly use it.  

 You have to make it a habit.  Style is the result of habits.  You must play enough, long enough with intent, to form habits if you want the musical "food" to produce the semblance of style.  Reading this, watching a video, reading a book on technique, buying a new pick or guitar won't make style happen.  Concentrated effort on a very specific thing is required for a habit to form.  Even if you only have one stylistic habit, it's the building block for a style.  You may as well start now...




 

The Uncanny Valley and Guitar

  "Uncanny Valley" is a term I'm swiping from the computer generated visual effects industry.  It's a term that describes the property of animated anthropomorphic/human depictions in that, as the animation technology goes from being "cartoony" to "perfectly realistic", it first looks stranger and stranger.  You know you are looking at something fake but you're not sure why it's fake. But, you know the attempt to fool you visually is underway.

 When people decide to pick up an instrument for the first time, what unfolds psychologically is something along the following graph:

(ACME Depiction of Written Text)

 This is an aggregate of a "Typical Beginner Student" general outlook.  There is a Heisenberg factor here of course, since once a student starts lessons they are theoretically following my instruction.  However, I present this as a way of perhaps enlightening the novice to being wary of a not-necessarily inevitable point of view that can be deleterious.

 These sort of "landmarks" are places I have found myself having to almost play the role of psychologist, in attempting to mentally nudge someone to move beyond the mire of their present thought process.  These places are traps.  In fact, I could argue that these places are about the only thing that prevents anyone from advancing to whatever musical goal they aspire to.

 More on that later, but for now - the Uncanny Valley:

 The closer one gets to achieving Actual Mastery over a particular phrase, mechanical movement, or conceptual control, the more likely one will be satisfied before the optimum result.

 The student practices, goes about their way in whatever fashion, and arrives at a "place" where they feel not only are they "getting it", but they're moving further ahead, into a "mastered" zone.

 I've watched this happened right before me.  For some people, they do the musical equivalent of passing out before the peak of the summit.  They just stop trying any further.  They're fine with having seen the top of Mount Nitaka.

 Others will vacillate with pushing that last meter.  Time to take a break.  The nausea sets in.

 Or tunnel vision happens, temporal distortion: that last meter suddenly seems infinitely far away, continued effort seems fruitless.

 Now and then I get the the person that (in mountain biker parlance) bonks.  They front loaded their effort too much.  It seemed to gain them an advantage, at the expense of running out of steam.  Lots of initial practice and vigor thrown at it, no reserve left over.  Pacing.

 That zone, the Uncanny Valley, can ensnare effectively anybody.  Knowing it's going to happen, knowing that one is "there", perhaps can help one to see it through.  The last 10% of effort is hard, but a lot easier if you know it's the last 10%.  Stopping, giving up, tricking oneself over that 10% is a shame - you get all the way to that place, and that last 10% is where "professional" exists.  You don't go on  to something else, take a break, or come back to it later.  It's the most tedious part of it, but also the most straightforward.