I have finally found that, and am excited to begin sharing it with you. I want to get guitarists excited about resurrecting their playing from the inside out.

Playing classical guitar is technically demanding. There are a lot of hurdles even if you want to play a relatively simple piece well enough for it to be satisfying.  The tendency for many players—and for many teachers—is to focus on technique, and leave everything else about music making largely to chance. Or to the advanced player. If you ever make it there.

And technique is usually attacked from a very dry and mechanical point of view.. …logic, how-to, mechanics, correct/incorrect positions, finger use, diagrams, principles, exercises, tricks, fixes….these sorts of words figure heavily in the language of classical guitar pedagogy.

And yet, most people start playing classical guitar because they fell in love with the sound of a piece of music, with a performance, or with the magic of a certain player.

But once they start playing, instead of re-encountering the joy that inspired them, they are immediately hit with an obsessive barrage of demands, expectations, shoulds and shouldn’ts,  a storm of tension-inducing pressures which I call the Technical Obsession Barrier.

Actually, I just came up with the term. But it’s a pretty descriptive one.

It may still be fun enough occasionally, but the joy of playing is often muddied, forestalled, blocked out of awareness,  even denied…and in its place is installed the Technical Obsession Barrier, a mountainous heap of technical to-dos which must be mastered before enjoyment can ever be regained.

The Technical Obsession Barrier is built out of endless levels,  ideal positions, never-ending tricks, studies and exercises. It is colored with frustration, confusion, expectation, and tension. It is fueled by the adrenaline of focusing on goals and hurdles and metronome numbers, meeting the demands of the teacher, performance expectations, comparisons with other guitarist, peers, and the need to impress….

You get the picture.

There is nothing wrong with technique. Don’t get me wrong. All good technique is all good, all the time. But great technique is not simply something that can be imposed from the outside. It cannot be created by a busy, overactive mind telling your fingers what to do.

Great technique is an experience, the experience of your hands and your body, balancing pressure and flow, in resonance with the guitar you are playing,  On a deeper level, it is the experience of your heart and of all your energy being in communion with the music that is flowing from all the parts becoming one, and about the magic that can happen from that.

Playing guitar is not merely about conquering technical hurdles:  it’s about bringing music to life.

And there are ways to conquer the technical hurdles WHILE keeping the musical spark constantly alive and never losing touch with the simple joy of playing.

In fact, technique learned in this way will be more solid, more reliable, more fully mastered,  more kick-ass, more amazing, than technique that is approached the “other” way.

That’s what I’m here to explore that’s what I hope to be privileged to teach you.

Jay

Listen to the richness and variety of Gallagher’s tone, and then zoom in and watch carefully to see if you can figure out what his right hand is doing to achieve this: subtle differences in hand use (the result of years of refinement and practice) make huge but always appropriate differences in how he is able to create a palette of sounds that shape the melody’s arc and give each chord meaning–and even character–without ever losing grasp of Tarrega’s shapely musical story-telling.

Almost in the same spirit, here’s a sketch I did of Tarrega, from many years ago:

Hint: look at what he’s using as a footstool….

Technically, a mandolin hero. But check out the innovative use of percussive rhythmic tapping and string plucking techniques, very advanced for a performer of this age. That and some impressive rapid strumming peppered throughout, an expressive and innovative vocal technique, and  a strategic nose scratching towards the end of the performance are no doubt responsible for this video having 43,000 + five star ratings.

Definitely something to inspire and aspire to.

It goes like this: “there was this guy, who my friend used to go to school with, a monster guitarist, who’d been taught so well as a child that he never developed any bad habits!“

His father showed him proper hand position when he was two,  and he went on to develop perfect technique, flawless tone, scales that flew from his fingers like a string of pearls or like machine gun bullets depending on your taste in music.

You name it, any technical challenge that has you cursing and moving on in frustration by the 20th attempt, he could pull off without even thinking twice. Basically, it was impossible for him to make any mistakes at all, because he’d long forgotten that they exist, sort of like most of us have forgotten that it was once a lot easier to crawl than it was to walk.

To the guitarist with no bad habits, we are all crawling, and this doesn’t make much sense to him, because it is so much easier and more fun to walk, don’t you know?

It could be that John Williams is the source of this urban legend…here’s an excerpted fan review of his Seville Concert DVD from Amazon

I have been a fan on John Williams for many years. Not many classical guitar players out there can express emotion through the instrument the way John Williams does. This guy doesn’t make mistakes. Every note is right on the money. Perfect. Excellent tone. John Williams is a true hero of the classical guitar.

To be a true classical guitar hero, it would seem, it helps to be a guitarist with no bad habits.. At least it helps you to earn the right to shoot your video concerts in the Alhambra.

Some people, watching a video like this, have also responded that he might have no bad habits, but he’s cold, removed from the heart of things, that he’s not putting any emotion into the music. (I’ve noticed that these are usually non-guitarists.)

But when I listen to the video without watching it, I hear a lot of emotion… and I’m reminded once more of when I first heard John Williams recordings as a kid and how much fire and passion seemed embedded in that prelude, and in every note that Williams recorded.

These days, more than fire and passion, what I hear is the hypnotic, zen-like unimpeded joy of playing gorgeous music with total focus and ease. That was always there, too. And now I’m interested in what mixture of habits, attitudes, passions, and musical gifts lead to the ability to perform like that. In an interview published on  Classical Guitar Review, Williams says, about technique

I guess I have been lucky to an extent, because having a well formed technique from an early age I haven’t really had to think too hard about it…..I don’t practise a lot. Contrary to popular belief, I do practise, but not in vast amounts. If I practised five hours a day, I’d have stronger hands, but I don’t.

Regardless of how Williams got to the top of his game, and how much real emotion is communicated in his performances, here’s the effect they had on me when I was in high school, as communicated by a picture that I drew back then:

Since I was living in the Philippines at the time and it was hard to find a teacher there, the habits I developed were a lot different from those of John Williams. I’m sure that John Williams inspired a lot of guitarists to practice like little manic impressarios, and I think this is because of the emotion and joy of playing that we heard in his playing, and I’m also sure that a lot of us were able to emulate the emotion and the joy of playing but never quite developed the same flawless good technical habits.

Is it ever possible to get to his level if your reflexes weren’t developed at a young age? Is it worth it to even want to? What other strengths can develop in lieu of the ability to walk where other guitarists mostly crawl or stumble? Is that last question a bit overly dramatic? (hint: yes it is.)

I’m trying to discover something useful, about how practicing, personality, circumstance all weave together to produce the habits that then create your musical personality and your way of expressing yourself on your instrument,

But the subject is vast. I’ll keep coming back to it.

A guitar with any number of interchangeable “resonator boxes”  that can be swapped out in ten seconds. The resonator boxes can be made from almost anything, and they determine the basic sound properties, but then are altered virtually—essentially turning each material into a virtual guitar, the shape and size and resonance of which is limited only by imagination….

Today’s musical instruments fall into three very distinct classes, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Traditional acoustic instruments offer richness and uniqueness of qualities that result from the unique properties of the physical materials of which they are made. The hand crafted construction qualities are very important here. Electric guitars are highly expressive tools that relay on their structure and materials. In contrast, computer based instruments lack this richness, uniqueness and expressivity; they produce very predictable and generic results, but offer the advantage of flexibility: they can be many instruments in one. The Chameleon Guitar presents a new approach of designing and building instruments, which attempts to combine the best of all. The approach is characterized by sampling the resonator’s physical matter and its acoustic properties and complemented by a physically simulated, a virtual shape or other digital effects. This approach to building digital objects maintains some of the rich qualities and variation found in real instruments (the result of natural materials combined with hand crafted elements) with the flexibility and open-endedness of digital ones.

Here’s the video:

http://www.thechameleonguitar.com/Chameleon_Guitar/Videos.html

I just always liked these pieces, bristling with disinterested beauty. A really nice performance.

In life, we cannot relive the same day repeatedly – but as musicians, we enter into the same musical situations repeatedly through the the art of repetition. Taking a phrase, a passage, or a full piece and playing it over and over again is absolutely necessary for memory, technique, understanding, endurance, listening, etc. However, the one aspect of repetition which is most often overlooked is how we feel when we repeat. By being conscious about how we want to feel during each repetition, we can progress much faster.

For example, a few days ago I taught someone who was having difficulty with a fast passage and was explaining to me how he had been “drilling and drilling this bit, but it doesn’t seem to get any better”. We checked fingering, preparation, etc. Everything seemed to be fine. I then asked him to play the passage for me a few times. Sure enough, each time he played it, I could tell that he was feeling like he couldn’t do it. He kept repeating the situation with the same mindset – and therefore getting similar results.

I then asked him to take a little time, breathe, relax, sit up straight, and think about how it would feel to be fully confident when playing the passage. Feel confident and stay focused on that feeling while playing. Now we began to repeat again. The first few repeats were no different than before, but this time instead of reacting to the mistakes, I asked him to keep refocusing on the feeling of confidence before and during the passage. Sometimes I would just tell him to say “this is easy” and imagine what it would feel like to be a player who had that kind of belief. Each time he would make a mistake, we would reset the feeling of confidence and repeat again.

Now this might seem like fantasy, but after about 6 or 7 repeats, he began to play the passage more accurately and fluidly. His body started to relax, his concentration increased, and although we were focusing on simply getting the passage accurate, even his tone and rhythm improved. At times, he would slip back to the old way (mental habits are hard to break) but the feeling of confidence or ease has to be practiced like anything else for it to take root. Awareness is key here, because it’s so easy to do and not feel. Feeling is often totally overlooked, but I’m finding that it has to be practiced hand in hand with doing. One of the best questions you can ask when you are practicing is “how am I feeling?” and then “how do I want to feel?”. Observe this as often as you can when you are working and keep refocusing on the feelings you want – practice having them now.

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