Daily Ditty 04282015 – Guitar Lessons Lynchburg

Today’s Daily Ditty was created after waking with Tom Petty in my head. Not literally, that would not end well. However, it was a mashup of ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ and ‘American Girl’.

That’s enough to make one’s head explode.

I am doing this Daily Ditty series to encourage you in your own creativity. You can see my creative process with its mistakes and my moments of thought. Not that you can tell what I’m thinking, but you can see the smoke coming from my ears.

Please share if you like it. You can share if you hate it too.

Daily Ditty 04272015 – Guitar Lessons Lynchburg

Here’s the idea: I play every morning before leaving for the office. This morning I created a new ‘tune’ and thought it might be interesting to make videos of me doing this daily. Nothing extravagant, but something nonetheless.

Be sure to share the ones you like with others.

Listen Hear Summer Rock Camp Ad – Guitar Lessons Lynchburg

Here is the commercial made by Life Focus Pictures for our Summer Rock Camp!

http://www.lifefocuspictures.com/

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Practice: Who has time?

Funny thing about being a musician and not having time to practice. I have spent the last two weeks implementing new ideas for my teaching business. I am very excited to be able to more for my students than ever before. However, my practicing has taken a backseat to all of the other activities I am doing to implement the new ideas.

I think I have practiced a total of 2 hours over the past ten days.

Most people think that musicians spend a lot of time just playing music; well, not so much. As a performing musician, we would need to do a lot of promotion and planning of events and other logistics. As a teacher, we need to engage in all the same activities just with different types of customers with different needs.

Teaching and performing are often the part-time, fun jobs we do after the regular 9-5 of developing opportunities to play or teach.

-Justin

http://guitarlessonslynchburg.com/

Eureka Moments

Greetings,

I had a eureka moment recently regarding my study of improvisation. I discovered that I spend entirely too much time making myself technically capable of playing certain concepts, but nowhere near enough time playing these concepts musically.

I have always heard that we should strive to play musically when learning new concepts; I just took it to mean that we would be musical eventually. Well, I was wrong to think that this would happen naturally. I now realize that I must make a conscious effort to be musical very early in my study of a new concept.

What has happened in your lessons that really ‘Flicks the Switch’ in your mind and makes something easier that you ever thought possible?

-Justin

http://guitarlessonslynchburg.com/

How to Practice II

In last week’s installment, I mentioned that I will give more detail of point one of the ‘How to Practice’ rules.Remember: 1. Know what you are doing.The reason this is rule #1 is because unless we understand what to do, we cannot be successful.It is impossible.

Our brains tell our bodies what to do.At least that is the process for most of us.

Recently, I have been working with a few students who are either struggling with playing a specific rhythm, or we are just working on some basic rhythm ideas.So, I will use rhythm practice for the examples in this article.

There is much confusion concerning written music’s notation of rhythm.I will not get too involved in my usual debunking of common thought concerning music’s notation of rhythm, while at the same time, hopefully creating a basic understanding of the concept of rhythm and its relationship to an underlying pulse.

First, let’s define ‘underlying pulse’.What I mean by ‘underlying pulse’ are the points during a song where we feel the need to clap, snap our fingers, and tap our foot.Perhaps not all three at once since we all have different levels of coordination.

Most of the music we hear on ‘Pop Radio’ is in a time feel of ‘4’.What I mean by ‘Pop Radio’ is everything other than jazz or classical that one would hear on a public radio station.Then again, what we hear on public radio does not always challenge our sense of time either, but I digress.

By the way, I certainly do not use the word ‘Pop’ in any condescending manner.I enjoy all music that is constructed and played well.I am just old and cannot keep up with all of the labels that seem to multiply exponentially.

Concerning the time feel of ‘4’, one could listen to nearly any radio station and count the beats where we would clap, snap our fingers, or tap our foot: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 …Try it; I’ll wait.

See what I mean?Now, here is the next exercise:Listen to an instrument in the song that you can hear very easily.Does this instrument play one thing per beat?How about two things per beat?Usually we would hear combinations of one, two, or more events per beat.As an example, if you listen to the bass instrument, we might hear one note per beat, two notes per beat, and sometimes four notes per beat.

This is the relationship I mentioned above.We have a beat in the music that we want to react to that is constant and we have other musical activities that are interacting with the beat and are usually in between the beats.This is where we start to understand the concept of ‘events per beat’.These are usually: 1, 2, 3, and 4 events per beat in most of the music that we hear.

When I start working with a student on playing in ‘time’, or with rhythm, we usually start by strumming one note per beat with a metronome.This is easiest because we hear the beat and we are playing a chord or note each time the beat happens.For those of you who have tried this, it is not quite as easy as it may seem.After this, we would play two strums of a chord, or two plucks of a note per beat.This is where the beginner usually has difficulty.

At first, we are playing at the same time as the metronome.The metronome clicks; we play our chord or note.With two events per beat, the second event is to be played while the metronome is in between beats.

What do we hear in between the beats?Well, we hear nothing in between the beats.That is what makes this difficult to do.We must listen to what we are playing in the silence and its relationship to the beats and hear that these are evenly spaced.Keep in mind, that as discussed in How to Practice I, we have no inherent ability to judge the passage of time.So, we are listening to the relationship of what we play and when the metronome clicks to hear whether or not we are ‘on time’.

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

Here is how to practice this concept of two events per beat:Play one chord or note per beat at 100 BPM (Beats Per Minute – Use a metronome!).Then change the metronome speed to 50 BPM and play at the same physical speed you were at 100 BPM (One event per beat at 100 BPM = Two events per beat at 50 BPM).Then, to eventually move to four events per beat, bring your skill up to two events per beat at 100 BPM and then change the metronome speed to 50 BPM and play at the same physical speed that you were just using at 100 BPM (Two events per beat at 100 BPM = Four events per beat at 50 BPM).

Please remember that if you are rather new to playing with a metronome, or you are new to playing in general, this process could take several weeks.Again, we must first understand what to do before we can develop the physical skill required to actually do it.

So, to summarize: Know the concept of events per beat; start with what is easiest – One event per beat; and move up in tempo until you can play just as fast and evenly with the metronome set at half the speed you were just playing.

Now let’s see who can achieve eight events per beat!

Godspeed,

Justin

P.S. If your mind is completely boggled by these concepts of time, or you would like to see this process demonstrated, let me know by e-mail or by comment below.I am chomping at the bit to have a subject to make a video of for my YouTube account.

http://guitarlessonslynchburg.com/

How to Practice I

I was recently having a discussion with a group of students concerning the definition of practicing. We only came up with two points.Simple, eh?

How to practice: 1. Know what you are doing.2. Do it correctly.

Most of what causes our practice to be unproductive is simply being wrong in one or both of the areas.

Let’s start with point two.You think I’m kidding?Break the mold.Be daring.Start with number two.

This is where, in my opinion, we all get it wrong.Yes, this includes me.

‘Well, I tried.’Have you ever thought this, or said it?This is the greatest obstacle for all of us.Have you ever heard the quote: ‘There is no try, only do’?We either do something, or we don’t do something.Sure, we can do poorly, and we can do well.In both instances we are doing.

We should give ourselves some room for error when we do something, but we should be certain to limit how many times we make errors.

If, for example, I play something wrong fifteen times in a row, what will happen the sixteenth time?Will I play it perfectly?No, absolutely not.Something about our approach is causing us to fail so many times in a row.If we do something incorrect more than 4-5 times we should stop immediately and examine what is wrong in our effort.99% of the time the issue is trying to do something at too high of a tempo.In life, it is doing something within too small of a time frame.

The first step we should take when we realize that we are attempting to play something at too high of a tempo is to reduce our tempo by 50%.Most students, not mine of course, attempt to play as fast as they can and without a metronome.Fiction you say?Hardly.

How do I know this?Have I ever asked you to play what you worked on during our week apart and you did not ask me to turn the metronome on?Yeah, that’s right, sad face now.

Here’s a news flash for some of you: Humans are unable to be aware of the passage of time without a system of marking it.Think: Watches, Clocks, Calendars, Seasons, and etcetera.This is why we have these things.We don’t know what time it is.

(It’s 12:18 AM, What does AM and PM mean anyway?)

Still don’t believe me.Here is another example: One hour of math; one hour of TV or Playstation (Xbox, Wii, whatever.)Which hour is faster?

Neither.Each hour is 60 minutes in length.Of course you knew that, but to us it doesn’t feel that way.

The point is that no matter how difficult something is to do, if we allow ourselves to work as slowly as necessary we can play absolutely anything well.The reason we start with easier things and progress to the more difficult is because we want to play anything well and soon.Even I do this.See point four of ‘Practice vs. Rehearsal I’.

We must play things within our reach in regard to our current level of skill.This is related to point one in the above definition of practice.‘Know what you are doing’.Not only do we need to know what we are doing, but also what we are currently capable of, so that we don’t make ourselves crazy trying to play something too far beyond our reach.

I will write in more detail about point one in the next installment.

Until then, thanks for reading and have a great week.

-Justin

http://guitarlessonslynchburg.com/