answering the big question: how to become a better musician

[st.bede]

here are some of my thoughts, that I wrote in a different thread but I think that it could be helpful for some others (or not, everyone is in their own place):

I used to get so frustrated with my playing, that once I threw my tele on the floor and jumped on it....

if you practice you will get better, there a bunch of ways to do but, I have found that one really good way is to pick up the guitar first thing in the morning (only things you should do before is pee and get a cup of coffee) and also pick it up right before you go to bed...

how long you play is not as important as just picking it up...the other thing is very important you do a little of the mechanics when you pick it, be it scales, chords, theory....

also I have spent hours and hours playing my electric not plugged in....even when I was just watching TV I would pick it up and run through stuff I knew extremely well, such as, scales and technique.

one thing to keep in mind, is that a lot of learning is two steps forward and one step back. But you always improve as long as you keep doing it.

feelings about anything from the least important thing to you to the most important thing always waiver but hard work always pays off.

if you stay focused on your love of music that will help motivate you...also other things could motivate you from goods things to bad things....good=love of music, bad=I am no good I must practice...try to always increase the good motivators and try to change the bad ones into good ones.....for example: the perviously stated bad one could change into: I am better then before because I practiced, even hero x (EC) practiced his pentatonic, and many other thoughts that are motivational and positive...

everyday, I realize that I can hear music better because of the work I put into music and that is the biggest gift because music is a powerful and beautiful art form and it has enriched my life to no end.

[TreeHugger]

Awesome post! I used to get frustrated with my playing too, and I still do. One day I just realized, "I'm not Stevie Ray Vaughan, I'm not Paul Gilbert, I'm not Brent Mason." I would get so frustrated because I couldn't pick up the things that they were playing. I'm not them, I'm ME! Everyone plays different and has a different style. Just because I can't play that Brent Mason lick doesn't mean that I'm not good, or not getting better.

One cool thing I've learned is that some of what you learn, and how you improve doesn't always come from guitar. I've learned so much just by listening to vocals. I was in the store the other day and they were playing Madonna, one of her early songs. Awesome vocals and melodies. I do with with a lot of different vocalists... learn their vocal lines on guitar. You get some amazing phrasing!

To pick up your guitar and sit in front of the tv is great. I love trying to learn the theme songs to different tv shows. It gets to be pretty easy after a while.

Turn on the radio or Yahoo Music, or some kind of music station online... just let it play and try to figure out each song as they come, no matter what it is. My ear got a lot better doing that every day for an hour or so.

[st.bede]

Originally Posted by TreeHugger

I'm ME! Everyone plays different and has a different style. Just because I can't play that Brent Mason lick doesn't mean that I'm not good, or not getting better.

thanks for you comments....

I believe that what is inside of me will create the technique that I need and that is what is truly important to be able to express and/or find my own voice.

I also believe that coming from your own center is much more important then playing like someone else, even when it is hard for other people to hear that center. For example I saw carlos santana's brother jorge at reggae on the river festive. The person I was with, said "I do not like him as much because he sounds like carlos with out as much fire." I realized that he was not hearing the differences in note choices. I heard a lot of subtleties that carlos doesn't play, sure less of the out in front intensity but more of a carefulness. Both players are great and what makes them both great is that they are different (even though they do share a lot of similarities). They are themselves.

again thank you

[Deftone]

Great post. I too like to play unplugged in front of the TV.

Something I'd like to add. This little travel Guitar has become my most useful practice tool:



To me, it's more than just a guitar I can bring with me when I travel and keep up my chops. It's the 1st gutar I grab when I want to play unplugged in front of the TV or outside or wherever. It's light and compact, yet it has a full size scale and it sounds awesome plugged in, so I never feel like I'm compromizing. I can wander around the house and play w/o the fear of running into something and damaging it or the guitar itself. There's no headstock to break off, and I really don't care about dinging or scratching it because it was so inexpensive.

Another bonus I've found, when I'm trying out different amps, pedals and cabs, it's so small it's not in my way when I'm leaning over or climbing in and around my amps. I can leave it hanging around my neck while I switch out cables and what not w/o the fear of damaging an expensive guitar or sticking a tuning peg through a speaker. It's the perfect "Equipment Test Guitar."

I really love the damn thing. It's minimalist useful perfection for me.

If you like Gibson tone, I highly reccomend the Traveler EG1 Mahogany.

[TreeHugger]

I've seen those, and I've thought about getting one. It might just be next on my list.

I think the most detrimental thing I've done to my playing is compare myself to other players, and not let my own style develop.

[Deftone]

I like the natural one even more:



Sorry for the thread hi-Jack, Bede...Back on track:

I think life should be all about setting and achieving goals. I still find learning a new riff a little mini challenge and I love the feeling when I finally nail it.

[huw]

You had me at

Originally Posted by st.bede

how long you play is not as important as just picking it up...

[River]

Originally Posted by Deftone

I think life should be all about setting and achieving goals. I still find learning a new riff a little mini challenge and I love the feeling when I finally nail it.

Yip. How do you (guys) keep track of the riffs you know? Do you even try, or just let them percolate back to the top when they feel like it?

Originally Posted by huw

You had me at

Yip. If I'm sitting in the house, there's a guitar within arm's reach.

[Deftone]

Originally Posted by River

Yip. How do you (guys) keep track of the riffs you know? Do you even try, or just let them percolate back to the top when they feel like it?

Good question. I don't try and it bugs me when I hear a riff I used to be able to play, but have since forgotten. I remember keeping a list a long time ago and I might even still have that list somewhere. I'm going to try keeping a list again, and run through it while practicing.

I know some have a strict practice regimen, e.g: warm up, finger & picking exercises, chords, scales, etc...This is the type of thing that works for me. I have to keep it organized.

[st.bede]

Originally Posted by River

Yip. How do you (guys) keep track of the riffs you know? Do you even try, or just let them percolate back to the top when they feel like it?


Yip. If I'm sitting in the house, there's a guitar within arm's reach.

you have to play something (that you have fully learned) at least every three weeks to keep it in your memory...a guitar god told me that and, I have found it to be true...

another thing is that, you have to play something more then when you think you have it nailed....that has also been true for me

in all honesty, my brain will start to tell me...hey you need to play x...and if I ignore that feeling then X disappears...right now my brain is saying I need to go over some extended arps and some suspended 9 chords, well to be honest also a lot of stuff...I have not really practiced in awhile...I just find myself thinking about it and I have a strange feeling like x is leaving on a trip and I will not see him again and I will miss x...as strange as this sounds that is true,,,

after have learned and forgotten so much I can recognize that feeling all to well

also, I really think about music a lot: my mind goes like this....sex. music, music, music, food, music, music, music, sex....music...take care of responsibilities...music, music...listen to me "you need to pay that traffic ticket" music, music, sex, food.....

I forgot to throw coffee in there and I do remind myself to think about others too....but I am truly haunted by music: for good and for bad.

[AngryHatter]

Funny but to me, it's like riding a bike.
You can go months or years and still remember the chord changes for 'Rock & Roll Hootchie Koo,' when needed.

My technique gets better the more I play, but I don't forget.

[huw]

Originally Posted by st.bede

...another thing is that, you have to play something more then when you think you have it nailed...

Dead right.

It isn't enough to practice until you get something right - you have to go on practicing until you can't get it wrong. Big difference. That's how to reach the musicality inside the notes.

[Nightrain]

Originally Posted by River

Yip. How do you (guys) keep track of the riffs you know? Do you even try, or just let them percolate back to the top when they feel like it?

Argh! I forget things I know so much. My father likes to hear me play, and I sit there trying to remember songs I can play other than the ones I've been doing over the last month.. I guess one of the good points is that when I remember one of em, it's something nice and fresh to play..

[LiveOak]

Great inspiring posts by all. We do what we love if we can, and if you love playing your guitar, then practice is just another excuse to play.

[River]

Originally Posted by Nightrain

Argh! I forget things I know so much. My father likes to hear me play, and I sit there trying to remember songs I can play other than the ones I've been doing over the last month.. I guess one of the good points is that when I remember one of em, it's something nice and fresh to play..

I'm a computer guy, but that's never really worked out for me in this respect. I picked up a pack of 3x5 cards over the weekend and am going to try to catalog and practice/go over anything I know once a week, whether it's just a riff or a whole song. Most problematic are the ones I wrote/made up myself. Those I'm going to record.

[Deftone]

Originally Posted by River

I'm a computer guy, but that's never really worked out for me in this respect. I picked up a pack of 3x5 cards over the weekend and am going to try to catalog and practice/go over anything I know once a week, whether it's just a riff or a whole song. Most problematic are the ones I wrote/made up myself. Those I'm going to record.

Great idea!

[Quill]

The memory issue is huge. A really good memory - or lack thereof - can be the difference between a dedicated hobbyist and a total pro. I think a strong memory is more important than "talent" - but it's my conviction that we all have great talent. It's really interesting - and sad - and here's one of those loops that I'm so afraid of - that one of the things that clinical depression attacks most ferociously is our memory.

I think we can work and work and work and never improve our musicianship, and we can even damage our musicianship by working ourselves into a state of confusion, becoming disorganised in our thinking or scattered - unless we are somehow able to get outside of ourselves. I think the best way to do that (while trying not to think that the only way to do that, because it's so very hard if you aren't in the right place at the right time) is to play with other players - and not just to jam, but to work on pieces with the idea of a performance in mind. Real-time, live, person-to-person, person-with-person playing. I try to believe that disciplined recording - which means, press record, press stop, with none of that "I'll just fix that little bit later" nonsense that computers make so easy - can be a way of performing that is good for your musicianship, but only in the moment you are doing it. If feel that if you don't get yourself into the state of mind where you can play to your peak potential in the moment, then stay there long enough to play at that potential all the way through the piece, and then, once it's done, accept it as it is and immediately walk away from it afterwards, then it becomes something else. As soon as it - I should say, you, or I - starts going in circles, it ceases to be about musicianship, as I imagine musicianship to be.

[River]

Originally Posted by Quill

<snip>I try to believe that disciplined recording - which means, press record, press stop, with none of that "I'll just fix that little bit later" nonsense that computers make so easy - can be a way of performing that is good for your musicianship, but only in the moment you are doing it.<snip>

Interesting you should mention that. I spent the entire weekend making a recording of myself playing along with Led Zeppelin for 2:30. I didn’t make it for public consumption, just trying to fulfill a life-long dream of playing a favorite song at full-tilt performance speed that I’m sure I’ll never get to play with a band. It was a very fulfilling exercise, and sounds great to me through my headphones – purposely out of balance so I can hear my playing, and I don’t know how to strip anything out of the original recording anyway.

Getting a whole good take in one pass, keeping up with John Bonham, is one hell of a challenge! I managed two for the chord/riff parts, but had to resort to over-dubbing the solo break. Broke my high E on the second phrase of it – scared the shit out of me!

I've got no one to play with in "real life" - that exercise made a great substitute for me.

[Jason]

Time and focus. Getting better, at its core, is nothing more than spending time doing something over and over again.

Your focus is paying attention to exactly where you're at, and making sure you're going somewhere with it... not getting distracted by all the toys and side projects involved with guitars. Spending four hours learning a song, or (preferably) writing a song, is quite a different thing than spending four hours playing with tones on your Pod (that's me ).

Those are the universal concepts that I think apply to all guitarists, time and focus. Everything else is optional, imo. Learning scales, crazy new chords, metronome practice... all of those are not necessarily KEY to every individual who plays guitar. If someone is focused on his own path, he'll know what he needs to do. Pay attention to what you're doing and what you want to do, and it's all very clear.

[Quill]

Yes ... all true. But I think there's a special, overarching skill essential to being a musician - to being a performer - that involves gathering all your resources into a particular moment, and doing something once to peak potential.

I worry about doing things over and over. I think too much repetition, or the "wrong" "kind" of repetition, whatever that might be, can degrade your "performance edge", whatever that might mean. Of course, repetition is a necessary part of any kind of training, but repetition alone does not get us there. But I'm just stating the obvious, and struggling with semantics unnecessarily. Of course, that much is understood.

River, I think the exercise you describe is valuable. It is kind of like what I had in mind.

[huw]

Originally Posted by River

...I spent the entire weekend making a recording of myself playing along with Led Zeppelin... I've got no one to play with in "real life"...

River - have you ever tried playing along to the John Bonham drum-only studio tracks?

The John Henry Bonham Files

These are drum tracks recorded at Polar Studios for In Through The Out Door - some of them you can tell what the final song might be, others were never used, so it's just you & Bonzo...

[River]

Wow, cool! Thanks, huw.

[Quill]

Originally Posted by Quill

I worry about doing things over and over.

(I'm also not at all sure about this.)

Please don't ask for the source, because I have this second-hand, and it's from a long time ago. But it hit me quite hard when I heard it, and it made such terrible and immediate sense to me - that kind of painful sense where, unfortunately, the question of veracity is perhaps overshadowed somewhat - that I made radical changes to my life. I'm just trying to remember the details as best I can - I know what is important for me to think about, and I'm putting this bit into this thread because it influences my answer to the question - not that I expect anyone to be hanging on, from, or, heaven forbid, on account of, my hopefully insignificant opinion.

A long-term, generational study was run, and perhaps is still running, on dementia and other diseases and degradations of the brain. Families were tracked who had a history of dementia or other related illnesses, and of particular interest were the kinds of things they did that either appeared to hold off the effects of the diseases or even bring them on.

The top three things that seemed to keep people well - that literally staved off the effects of the disease - were, in no order that I can remember, social dancing, that is, with a partner; playing a musical instrument; and reading.

In the top three of activities that hastened the onset of dementia was writing. I cannot remember the other two, because that is the one that got me where I lived.

The connection that I made between the three healthy activities was that all of them require that the person doing them get outside of their own mind - and in the case of dancing or playing an instrument, their own body - and connect with something outside of themselves. It seems to me that to do all three of these things, you have to somehow get out of your own imagination, or at least imagine something outside of yourself, and you have to do it with a certain rhythm (dancing and playing an instrument are obviously rhythmic, but who reads for pleasure who cannot read, not necessarily quickly, but at least steadily, in a way that lets the written language have its rhythm and cadence?)

To put it clearly: the activities that appeared to be preventative with respect to dementia all involve meeting someone else, in some way, in real time. Presence and temporality.

Now, there are many forms of writing. Writing a letter. And how many ways are there of writing a letter? Writing a story, a novel, a poem or a song. Writing a technical manual, or a business proposal. Writing a contract (some say that's the earliest form of writing, where writing comes from - I've always hoped that's not true). Writing a journal. Writing an essay. Writing a post in a thread in an online forum. All vastly different - but what are the commonalities? For me, the commonalities among almost all forms of writing - no matter how vividly I imagine the unique and private single reader or the varying audience, and no matter how dear the connection I want to make between my text (or perhaps, myself, but I know too much about writing to dare to hope for that) and that person or group - are the disciplined solitude that is required to write well and the sheer mass of time it takes to produce a piece of writing. It just seems to take forever - and it is that illusion of stepping outside of time to do it that is important to me and to my point here.

To put it similarly: the activity that is not preventative with respect to dementia, and may in fact encourage the formation of the disease, involves separation from others, and a state of mind that seems irrespective of time, to the point of being almost outside of time. Absence and atemporality.

I'm sorry I don't have the source, and I wish I could remember the other activities that were harmful - and remember, these activities were possibly harmful for people who already had a strong disposition for the disease, and were not determined to be harmful to people with no such disposition; but also remember, the healthy activities kept people with the same strong disposition well, deep into their old age.

Sit and practice alone, or play with others ... which is going to make you better? I hope what I think about it, and why, is obvious now, because I don't want to write any more about it!

[st.bede]

once again quill an incredible contribution to the discussion..thank you

[River]

Originally Posted by Quill

<snip>Sit and practice alone, or play with others ... which is going to make you better? I hope what I think about it, and why, is obvious now, because I don't want to write any more about it!

American Music Therapy Association
How can music therapy techniques be applied by healthy individuals? - Healthy individuals can use music for stress reduction via active music making, such as drumming, as well as passive listening for relaxation. Music is often a vital support for physical exercise. Music therapy assisted labor and delivery may also be included in this category since pregnancy is regarded as a normal part of women's life cycles.

I found a lot of information about music and dementia "out there" and skimmed some of it. Most of it relates to passive music therapy (listening), but there are some very interesting articles about the active form as well. If you remember where you read what you did, I'm very interested. I had never heard about the non-therapeutic effects of writing, and haven't found anything on that (yet).

Regards practicing alone or with others, the latter would stimulate more neurological pathways and thereby keep them active, with the potential to slow degeneration and perhaps even repair or re-establish lost connections. It's not an option for me - I can't even talk Riverette into a sing-along (well, if I'm trying to pick up riffs from XM radio, we do get that going occasionally).

I think "with others" is what I'm trying to substitute for with online collaboration, and why I've gotten real benefit from it. Also, why I got such a complete thrill recording "with" Zeppelin, and why I want others here to listen to and discuss my recordings - I sure don't do that for fame and fortune!

So, I agree it's good for the brain, even better "with others", and believe that the musician with the better brain will get more out of their music - even if he or she is not making the historic music of the classically tormented artist.

[Quill]

Yup - that sounds like the same kind of stuff I find on the subject, and I've looked several times. All passive - nothing about the action of playing an instrument. But I'll find it, somehow.

I think the work you demonstrated with the Led Zep recording is a great alternative to direct contact. Recording in that way, the recorder is simply your audience, not your opportunity to go around in circles editing stuff and going slowly crazy.

And online collaboration surely represents another possibility. In all honesty, I feel like I am at the edge of what I can imagine, when I step into digital workspaces. Maybe I am, and maybe I'm not. Regardless: in the face of digital technology, it sure does become important how you use the tools.

[River]

Originally Posted by Quill

<snip>Recording in that way, the recorder is simply your audience, not your opportunity to go around in circles editing stuff and going slowly crazy.<snip>

I'm with ya. "Slowly"? No. Immediately and directly.

[Deftone]

Originally Posted by huw

River - have you ever tried playing along to the John Bonham drum-only studio tracks?

The John Henry Bonham Files

These are drum tracks recorded at Polar Studios for In Through The Out Door - some of them you can tell what the final song might be, others were never used, so it's just you & Bonzo...

This is too cool. I can Jam with Bonham. Thanks dude!

[huw]

On one of the Zeppelin forums I participate in we had a "Bonzo Jam" thread about a year or so ago, where we'd all post up our tunes made on top of one the Bonham tracks.

This was mine:

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[Quill]

Huw, sounds great! Freaky, and incredible ...