Practice Stuff – Page 7 – Classical Guitar n Stuff

There is one skill in learning classical guitar and any other instrument for that matter which, if you don’t cultivate it, will seriously stymie your development.

What is that one skill?

Focus.

I’ve spoken about focus and its power and importance to learning and playing the guitar previously on the blog. I strongly believe (and have evidence from my own development) that short, focussed, regular and consistent practice sessions are waaaaaaay more beneficial for your learning and progress than longer, meandering sessions. For what reasons hopefully this will become apparent.

I’ve just finished reading a book this week called Focus The Hidden Driver of Excellence by psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman. Not a bad book, goes off on a few interesting tangents and drifts away a little at the end (not focussed?!), but has some pretty cool and potentially useful insights as well as some good reminders about focus and its importance. I highly recommend you check it out.

One of the topics discussed by Goleman is that of the “top down”, thinking brain system and the “bottom up”, automatic brain system. The former requires a lot of energy, your brain draws down quite a considerable amount of power when asked to perform “top down”, puzzling it out tasks, or address something new and novel. The latter, the automatic brain system, requires much much less energy; it’s the brain on auto-pilot doing something its done thousands of times before, pre-programmed movements.

This is why when learning a new piece, or puzzling out which fingers go where, is seemingly so tricky. You’re asking your brain to do something new, and that something new requires a lot of energy. It’s a natural human thing to want to conserve energy, and flip back into the automatic “bottom up” system, so this is probably why it seems so tempting, just so darn easy to just slip back into playing what you already know.

But it’s really worth persevering with the new, mentally hard stuff, I promise you. Slipping back into playing what you already know is not really helping you learn and develop (that is unless you’re drilling something you’ve already nutted out, is more or less sorted already and are committing it to memory). Aiming to do some stuff in each practice session that stretches you mentally is how you make progress.

Think about it – when you’re first starting out learning to play you have no choice but to go through that brain-melting “top down focussed state. Then you start to get to grips with things a little more, a little more, and you can play some tunes. And then comes a choice – (a) carry on down the path of always relatively easy, non-challenging, but not really developing as well as you might or (b) stretch yourself again and again, treating a part of each practice session and each lesson as if it were the very first, and watching and hearing yourself really develop.

My top tips for attaining focus and tuning into your “top down”, learning state:

Well, some days you’re going to be more in a focussed kind of headspace than other days, but there are a number of things that can help you get into the zone and ready for some good quality, focussed practice:

Think about what it is you really want to get out of your practice session before you start it and think about the things you might need to do to achieve that. Don’t just go into it mindlessly.

Chunk down your work on a piece or a technical exercise into small bite-size chunks. Focus on one thing at a time. Focus on getting that one thing right. Focus on what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and the sound you’re making. Focus on consistency in your playing and approach to whatever it is you’re working on. This is when you can start sending things down into the “bottom up” automatic system in the manner that you can build upon without tripping yourself up each time you come to play it.

Always aim for quality in a practice session over quantity. Don’t worry about time, other than breaking things down into small chunks. Work in whatever time periods feel right for you. If you’re not used to quality, mental concentration then the first periods of time will be quite small. That’s OK.

Avoid the temptation to check any incoming messages or calls on your phone, tablet or computer, emails or calls. Set you phone to silent, flight mode, turn it off or leave it outside the practice room.

Focus on the task at hand. Don’t concern yourself with what’s coming up in the rest of your day. Lay aside for a time any concerns, worries, day-to-day kind of stuff and just be present, right in the moment for your practice. Give it all of your attention and energy for that period you’ve set aside. And enjoy it!

And don’t chastise yourself, or force yourself if it’s not happening for you. Don’t struggle on with it – put your guitar away for a while, do something else and come back to it later. It takes practice to get focussed too – rather like the classical guitar the more you try it, the easier and more automatic it becomes 😉

Howdy folks. I thought that for today’s post I’d follow on my recent post on playing barrés (or barré chords) with another on some additional tips for getting your fingers around this technique.

Just to recap, I suggested that you need to think about using the bigger muscles of your arm, its weight and gravity to create the pressure required to sound the notes.

And instead of pressing hard between finger and thumb, actually remove your thumb from the guitar neck and think about moving your hand in toward the neck of the guitar. Yes, don’t be clamping that thumb down like you’re pressing a thumb tack into the wood!

Lightly with the thumb

You don’t have to keep the thumb away from the guitar neck completely and all the time. In fact that may add undue tension itself if you do that to actively. Think about just relaxing the thumb, and just resting it, just placing it on the back of the guitar neck to provide balance and an easy, relaxed touch point (whilst putting into practice previous advice around using the weight of the arm and larger muscles groups).

The thumb is still not actively involved, per se, in producing the barré, but provides a resting point for your thumb. Thinking about the thumb in this relaxed manner can also help with thinking about the rest of the hand and fingers in a relaxed manner too.

Don’t attack it straight on

This one kind of depends a little on the make up of your fingers, but most folks have a harder, bonier outer edge to their first left hand finger and a plumper, fleshier underside. Rotate your first finger slightly towards the outside of the fingers, on the harder, bonier part of the finger – this should make the barré a little easier to produce because (a) it’s a nice, relatively hard surface and (b) you’re not contending with (or contending less with) the grooves of the inside of your knuckles. That is to say, the strings will have less of a tendency to slip into those grooves and produce that oh-so-annoying thunking or buzzing of a string not quite down fully.

Be selective with the application of pressure

Ask yourself the questions – do I need to keep this whole barré down all the time? Do I just need a half or partial barré? Can I change from full to partial or vice versa? Where are the pauses or more relaxed points in the music where you could relax the barré temporarily before reapplying?

Another important question to consider is do I need to apply equal pressure across the whole six strings? Have a look at which strings you’re playing and when. See if you can, in fact, selectively apply pressure to those strings in the barré only as you need them and relaxing the finger or fingers elsewhere.