Category: Practice

Playing Classical Guitar and Trusting Yourself

Nicole NealLeave a comment

I was having a conversation with a former student of mine very recently (you know who you are!) about the need to trust and believe in oneself when playing classical guitar. It’s a thought that I’ve held true for some time now, but admittedly can be a pretty tough one to manage. Like a number of things, however, it’s a skill or an ability that doesn’t necessarily come easy at first, but the more that you practice doing it the less challenging it becomes.

What’s so important about trusting yourself when playing?

Trusting yourself is allowing yourself to make the music that you want to make (within your current technical abilities of course) and that that is that (whatever your level or technical ability is). Just is. Things can always be improved, tweaked and so on. It doesn’t mean that what you’re playing right now isn’t wonderful. Accepting this fact, and accepting that what you’re playing right now and how you’re playing it – trusting yourself in that – is just a snapshot in time in your journey with the guitar . This concept, for myself at least, has been quite liberating. Giving myself permission to trust myself!

How do you go about learning to trust yourself?John Price Guitar

This is really about letting go of expectations. Not expecting yourself to play in a certain way. Not putting pressure on yourself.

It’s about recognising that you’ve done a lot of work – think about all the practice you’ve done over the years, months, weeks and so on.

It’s about trusting that subconscious part of your brain, the part that you’ve been filing things away into and reinforcing with your regular, habitual practice. It’s about trusting that that part of the brain knows how to do its thing, especially when you’re relaxed and not putting undue stress on it. You know how when you’re racking your brain to try and think of a name or something you can’t remember? It’s just on the tip of your tongue? The more and more you try and think about it, the harder it becomes to think about it? Well, I’m guessing something similar goes on when we’re putting stress on ourselves to play in a certain way. Don’t try so hard, don’t think so much and the brain and the body will help you do your thing.

Trust that your muscle memory and all that hard work and practice you’ve been putting in will work for you.

Be “in the now” with what you’re playing in exactly that one moment – don’t worry about what you’ve just played or what’s coming up next. Just focus on the moment.

Try to maintain a calm, confident and centred demeanour when playing. Just sit with the music and almost feel like it’s coming through you rather than you trying to contrive it

The LMusA Diploma Journey – Update #3 – Practicing Whilst Travelling

Nicole Neal6 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of travelling with work recently – Sydney this week, outback Queensland last week, Adelaide the week before that. Next week I’ll no doubt be somewhere different again! I used to stress a little about travel time and time away from the guitar, especially when aiming to prepare for a concert or something or other. I learnt though that that really wasn’t getting me anywhere (just giving myself a blooming headache!), so I decided to let that stress go as it wasn’t really serving me at all and thought what else can I be doing to “practice” whilst I’m travelling.

I’ve tried the travel guitar thing (and I’ve written a post about that some time ago), but I’ve found that travelling around even with that can be a bit of a struggle and that the airlines are insisting now that it is checked in.cropped-guitar.jpg

So, this is my latest “practice routine” whilst I’m away – take a piece or the piece I’m currently most focused on in my practice (La Maja de Goya for me at the moment, as regular readers will know) and apply the following exercises:

  • Play the piece in my head through from the start (like an internal mp3) and with the aim of playing it through to the end. Whilst doing this in the early days (or even not so early days) of a piece there will be spots or even whole sections where the memory of the tune is a little fuzzy or where I can’t continue through. I make a note of this, as these are the spots where the aural memory is weakest – the spots I know least well musically. So the next time I come to sit down with the guitar these are spots to target before any others.
  • Play the piece in my head, visualising my left hand movements  – this is definitely way more patchy at the moment for me with La Maja de Goya than the aural memory. I probably get around 10 -12 bars in before things get a little fuzzy, but those opening bars I can clearly see the movement of my left hand. This tells me I most definitely know those opening bars and am feeling comfortable with them, and that next time with the guitar focussing on those in my practice is the least of my concerns. This is where some self-discipline comes in and resisting the urge to play through things from start to finish in practice time and being really focussed about what’s going to give the biggest bang for your practice buck in the time available.
  • It’s interesting to note that I’ve never done any visualisation with right hand movements, possibly because I tend to play just really looking at the left hand (if I am looking at hands), so I’m not sure right hand visualisation would be as effective for me. I may, however, next time attempt exploring mentally some of the chord voicings with right hand visualation. Kind of like checking to make sure I’m playing the correct strings but without actually playing them!
  • The next one is the most tricky (for me anyway) in the early days of getting to grips with a  piece and that’s visualising the score. Again I can very easily see the opening few bars, but beyond that it starts to get pretty fuzzy. At this stage I can visualise the approximate shapes and so on in a reasonable amount of the score, but nothing concrete. So I make a note of whereabouts it gets fuzzy and next time I have the score in front of me I’ll know where I need to start building up and securing the aural, physical, analytical knowledge of the music.
  • Not something I’m doing yet, but one to start trying next time I’m away from the guitar and that’s writing out the score on stave paper from memory – this will really show up how well that memory and knowledge of the piece is working! It will also help me in getting under the skin of the melodic and harmonic structure of the piece and getting to know it inside out.

This little routine, in whatever order and which ever steps, is something I can do in hotel rooms, aeroplanes, trains, airports, wherever. You could even do this on your daily commute to work on the train, tram or bus. Possibly not if you’re driving a car though!

Next time I’m travelling (which could well be next week again!) I think I may take a copy of the score with me (an electronic version on the iPad as that’s something I always have with me and I like to travel light) and add close study of that to the routine, plus using it as an aid to push a couple of extra bars with the memorisation of the dot points above. I’ll let you know how I go!