Tag: classical

Been playing guitar for a while? It it time to take a break?

Nicole Neal1 Comment

As regular readers of this blog will know I’ve recently been away on my holidays, visiting good ol’ Blightly (my mother country). And this was a holiday away from the guitar as much as anything else too.

Yes, believe it or not, there are times when I’m not playing guitar. This particular time I did have access to a guitar (I choose not to fly with my guitar if I can at all help it), courtesy of my brother in the UK, however, I think it is extremely important – just once or twice a year – to step away from the guitar completely for one, two or even three weeks.

Why is this?

Well, if you’re practicing and playing (or even teaching) on a regular (i.e. daily or more or less daily basis) then some downtime gives you a physical break from the rigours of that daily playing. Downtime, especially after an exam or other big performance, allows the fingers, hands, arms, shoulders and so on an opportunity to rest and recuperate.

If you’re practicing and playing regularly, taking a break of week or two is really not going to impact on your development. In fact, it’s likely to have the opposite effect. Rather like a professional athlete, who cannot maintain the same level and intensity of physical training throughout the year – this would almost certainly lead to injury and fatigue. We guitarists also need to take some time out.

Stepping back from your guitar for a week or two can also provide a mental rest. We all know that when we’re learning something new, and even when we’re working on something tried and true, it takes a fair amount of concentration, mental effort and energy to learn, prepare and play a piece of music.

So putting the guitar down for a little while can help you to refresh and recharge the mental batteries, giving you renewed energy and vigour for playing and moving on with your playing. Stepping back from the guitar for a time can also help you to see the woods for the trees with regard to a piece or pieces you’re learning or have even been playing for a while. When we’re playing the same things day in, day out we can run the risk of becoming that bit too close, too immersed in something that we may miss something, be that voicings, fingerings, notes in a chord, musical direction or whatever. A little bit of distance from the music for a while can sometimes help see and hear things in a different light.

And you may also surprise yourself, as I certainly did yesterday. Picking up my guitar yesterday for the first time really in three weeks and set about playing a piece I’d started to learn a couple of weeks before I went on holidays – I was very pleasantly surprised to find the piece a whole lot easier to play than I’d previously felt it to be (or recalled it to feel like). So along with some physical and mental rest time, I’d allowed my brain to stew on the information I’d been feeding it in the preceeding weeks.

So, whilst your fingers may feel a little like you’ve had a couple of pints before sitting down to play in that couple of days after your holiday (that will soon disappear), I’d strongly recommend taking a look at your schedule and programming in some rest from the guitar – it will do your playing a world of good!

 

Do you always practice from the start of a piece? Have a think about that….

Nicole Neal3 Comments

Once you’ve got the skeleton or an understanding of the framework of the piece together, I highly recommend commencing your practice of a piece, not from the start, but from a little stumbling block perhaps, a section or phrase or chord change that is proving tricky, or perhaps the start of a phrase or section that you want to work on and bed in further. Playing through pieces start to finish, skipping over stumbling blocks without addressing them, hoping they magically sort themselves out the next time we play the piece through in exactly the same way is not really going to get you too far.

Whatever your particular “stumbling block” might be, isolate it and work through it slowly and methodically. Pick it apart.  Find out EXACTLY what is going

Spanish guitar
Photo credit: aesedepece

wrong, or rather what is not quite working right and what you need to do with your left hand fingers AND your right hand fingers to get it working as you want it to sound.

It can take our brains around 20 or days to learn new patterns, apparently – so don’t stress if you can’t get that chord change or finger movement yet or a piece memorised after a couple of days. Just know that by carrying out this methodical work you’re embedding the new habit, the new muscle memory.

And when you do pick out that tricky spot to practice it in isolation DO NOT just go repeating it countless times without awareness of what you’re really doing. If it’s still not working go back to figuring out what you need to do to fix it up. And if you’re not sure what that is then it’s definitely one that your teacher will be able to help you with!

So, yes repeat it a few times when you’ve got it more or less figured out. Do this S-L-O-W-L-Y.  This is absolutely key. Don’t be in too much of a rush to get it up to speed just yet. There’s plenty of time for that. Just focus on getting it right, getting it rhythmically correct, getting it settled, getting it sounding exactly how you want. Speed comes later, and only ever to serve the music.

And then leave it to sink in for a while. You might want to come back to it later in your practice session. You definitely want to pick out that little tricky spot in your next practice session. I can pretty much guarantee it will be a lot less tricky the next day and the next, until you will have forgotten what all the fuss was about!

So, next time you sit down to practice, before you start playing your first piece from the very start to the very end without pausing for breath in between ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Do I really need to play this all the way through from the beginning right now? Would that be an effective use of my time now or am I just being a little bit lazy? 😉
  2. Where do I know I could begin focussing on instead? Which sections need the most work still?
  3. What is it about those sections that need further work, what do I need to do and what do I want to have achieved by the end of this practice session with those sections?