audiotthoughts on music

in yesterday’s entry i said there were two ways of dealing with practiced-a-lot-but-still-no-jawdropping-syndrome. that could be misunderstood – to make it clearer: those are not two different ways, those are two things you need to know about – two parts of the same way. the first one was messing around as i wrote yesterday. the second one is what today’s post is about. i’m sorry if that confused you, maybe i’ll learn english someday…

so let’s think back, you practiced and practiced at home to finally get your jawdropping scene during rehearsals (or even on stage) but you screw it up, it just doesn’t work the way you practiced, dammit. but why?

what we often underestimate is the fact that we’re dealing with completely different situations here. our brain, however, doesn’t only save the lick you practiced (hopefully :-) ) but also your surroundings, as well as your mood etc. so you practiced at home, relaxed and alone in your room under somewhat perfect conditions. and you finally got it right. now rehearsals are a lot different, there’s not only you but also other people. chances are, the sound’s a lot different and maybe the band plays it 10 beats faster than the recording you practiced with or whatever…. and i’m not even talking about a live or studio situation. it’s just plain stupid to come up with something right before a gig, nobody will notice that one killerlick but everyone will notice if you fail with it – and you will.

so, how to avoid this? well, by messing around as part of practice you can cover different sounds, tempos, situations to be better prepared for whatever comes up. but there is another thing that can help you in that manner. and that is to create a practice situation that is as similar as possible to the situation you practice for. for example if you will stand during playing, than stand up during practice. sounds silly? maybe – but as i said, the brain saves your surroundings. everything looks a bit different if your eyes are at another height, you might hold your guitar a little different etc. and that all adds up. so when it’s getting serious, you’re not only a little nervous as usual but also feeling some discomfort because of the strange situation. i know people who practice in their stageclothes, because it helps them and that’s fine. if it’s about a cover song, don’t practice along to an original recording, use a tape of your own band instead. and so forth. try to get as close to the upcoming situation as possible.

and one more thing: don’t try to be a hero. making up something right before a studio recording or a live gig, playing it 10 times until you get it right once and then go out there/hit the red button just won’t work. it’s better to let go of it this time and really prepare it for the next gig, so you can be sure it will work. and that’s when the dropping jaws come in…

although i’m pretty sure i mentioned this already, probably even more than once, it belongs in this series – so here’s the appropriate entry :-)

it’s about messing around……badass style. and it’s something every artist i look up to does in some way. i once read about an experiment (long ago, so i don’t know anymore who did it – scientists probably :-) ). if memory serves correctly, it was about piano. people could win one piano lesson and the ‘winners’ were divided into two groups. the people of the first one got a standard lesson and afterwards they were told to pratice exactly what they learned in exactly the same way over and over again. the other group was told (after the lesson) to ‘play’ with it. they should play it slow, fast, soft, loud, with different sounds (if they had a keyboard) etc. anything they could think of. in a nutshell, they were told to mess around.

three things happened: first, the people of the second group learned more. second, they were rated better by independent teachers. and third, they had much more fun, were a lot more motivated and wanted to continue with the lessons, so this incidently became kind of a marketing strategy :-)

in other words, our brain likes to explore all aspects of something in order to ‘get it’, the more the better. imagine a kid with a ball. do you think the kid would learn more about the ball and related physics by reading a book on that matter or by simply go out and play? see? and again there’s that other point: messing around is just so much more fun – but let’s save that for a different entry…

so messing around with something lets you learn it better, faster, more efficiently and more complete. but there’s another advantage as well. if you play an instrument, maybe even in a band, you might know this situation. you practice something like a solo or a lick you want to add to a certain song, you practice it a lot until you’re sure to see some jawdropping during the next rehearsals. but what really happens is, you completely screw it up. the reason for that is, it’s a different situation. sitting at home and practicing is a lot different than a band rehearsal, a recording situation or live. and that’s almost a guarantee to fail.

there are two ways to get through this, though. one of them will be covered in another post and the other is: mess around! by practicing it each and every way you can think of, improvise with and around it and having just fun, you’ll get used to it, it becomes more familiar and you’ll shed light on every aspect. and that will help you using it in a variety of situations….

so go ahead, mess it up!

ok, i just created a new category for the learning basics posts. there’s five of them already and there will be more, so it seemed appropriate to put them all together…

so small beats large, eh? didn’t i talk about that already? well, this time it’s more like short beats long and i’m talking about periods of time. did you know that it’s impossible for us to really concentrate on something longer than a few minutes?  it’s true, although i don’t know the source of that information anymore. we think we could do something for hours and being focused the whole time but we can’t. by the way, this might be the reason that the ideal length for a song, which is played on radio, is somewhere around 3:00 minutes – keep that in mind when you record your next 70s-sound-alike-mammoth-intro…

anyway, learning is most effective if you do it for short periods of time – about 5 to 10 minutes and then take a break. there are two reasons for this: first, the above mentioned ‘concentration-span’. and the second reason: remember the puppeteer-and-datahighway-building-guys? those fellows are quite assiduous people. when you start learning, they start building – nothing fancy here but when you stop learning, they go on building for at least a few more minutes. ok, if you’re learning for five hours and then you win 5 more minutes, it’s nothing. but if one of your learning units is only 5 minutes and you still get a 5 minute bonus, that means – well, you do the math. depending on how long you need to dig in, learning periods of 10 minutes might be better, you need to check this out for yourself.

so go ahead and make up a plan by first breaking down the task into small pieces (that can be done in 5-10 minutes…), then do one at a time -  slowly and focused and after each of those periods give your brain a break, so the tiny workmates up there can finish up. you don’t need to doze off into standby mode, just do something else you don’t need to focus on. for example, you’re working for 7 minutes on that new arpeggio, playing it slowly and focused up and down the guitar neck. then, as a ‘break’, you crank up the amp and thresh your favorite punkriffs out to the universe. and after that mr. brain is ready to take another bite…

yep, i wanted to add a few words to the last entry of this series. first of all, the doing-it-very-slowly-thing is especially for learning new things. then, it’s not only about doing it slowly but also about doing it well aware and concentrated. so to avoid any misunderstandings, i wanted to clean that up. learning something new on a drumset is a great example because with this instrument, the moves you make are huge compared to a guitar for example. big moves mean you can easily see what exactly’s going on. maybe you want to hit the hihat with your right stick and then hit the lowest floortom afterwards. that’s quite a long way for poor mr. stick. now, if you practice this at normal playing tempo, chances are, your motion is far from perfect. you mostly concentrate on getting this done in time. doing it slomo, however, gives you nice visual feedback on what it is you’re doing. you will immediately see, if the motion is unbalanced, weird, wacky, whatever. and you will be able to correct that aka replace it with a nice round beautiful motion that will not only help you staying in time, but also look a lot better to bystanders :-) – it will sound better (trust me on that), feel better and your hands, arms, shoulders, back, neck will thank you. and one more thing: you will be able to play this a lot faster once you really figured it out and got rid of all wackyness.

of course this goes for any instrument, drums just happen to show it more clearly…

yeah, and i’m sticking to it. i know, i know, these times recommend speed – maybe above all. but learning doesn’t. so the next tip would be: do it sloooooooooowly!

i’d like to mention a picture i got from Vera F. Birkenbihl (yep, her again). imagine you trying to learn a task, like playing guitar for example. learning means new nerve tracts are being built in your brain. so you have a piece of music you want to learn. and now let’s take a look at your brain. there are the guys up there that build new nerve tracts and then there are the puppeteers, those who move your muscles. on the other hand you have only a limited amount of processing power (guys). what does that mean? right, the more puppeteers you need, the less guys are left to build those nerve tracts needed and vice versa. so the slower you play it, the less puppeteers you need, the more guys are available to build the new datahighways. makes sense? cool. this is of course in no way simplified or otherwise manipulated, it’s exactly what happens in your brain…

lots of people try to learn new things by doing it way too fast and repeating it over and over and over again. but this is not efficient at all. almost all the guys are busy playing the puppet (you) and that leaves almost nobody left to build the nerve tract, which is just another term for learning. learning = building new nerve tracts. maybe you know the feeling of practicing hours and hours and still don’t get the results you want. chances are, you made exactly that mistake. the next time, try doing it slooooooooowly – as slow as it gets. overdo this.

there’s one more advantage to this: if you play every single note slowly and well aware, you will play a lot more precise or cleaner, without unnecessary movements etc. and because you’re doing this while the builders are already at work, they include this too. you’re learning better technique as a bonus without any additional effort – how cool is that?

ha! to tie in with yesterday’s entry, here’s the next tip:

no.2 get the big picture.

you can’t tell which one comes first, because it depends. if there is a big picture available (like a song for instance), then you should of course concentrate on that before you break it down. in this case it’s best to provide your brain with an overview and then go from there. but there are situations when there just is no big picture (those are usually the ones where mr brain up there smoothly glides into standby-mode). scientists, for example, need to work with things and understand things without knowing what the end result will be or how it’s all connected. in a situation like that, you need to deal with what you have by using the breaking-it-down-technique, so you can then work on unveiling the big picture. this also happens with music. think drums: you can learn and practice rudiments to achieve certain skills like precision or speed and then later discover that other things, you never understood before, make use of exactly those rudiments… it’s impossible for you to get an overview of all rudiments including all possible uses for them in the first place. so you work on one at a time and then discover what you can do with them…

now, what’s the priority?

no surprise here, if it’s possible to get the big picture first, then by all means do so – it makes the following a lot easier. to give you an example: if you’re reading a book (apart from novels of course), it really helps to focus on the table of contents first. give your brain the chance to see what it will be dealing with, where the journey goes. that way, it will be prepared, open for things to come and a lot less stroppy…

never fight your own brain – it’s a fight you can’t win :-)

finally i’m back online, the provider solved the problem without (and now the funny part) even knowing what the actual problem was and (even better) how they solved it, yay. anyhoo, as long as it’s working again, i give a rat’s a$$ about how they did it…

well, i was thinking a lot about teaching and learning lately – as you can read here for instance – so i’m gonna give some learning tips that might be useful to you (at least i hope so…). please remember 1. that not everything works for everyone of course and 2. that you need to try it before you can say it does or doesn’t work. this is not about music exclusively, so check it out on other things you want to learn as well… i’m only giving one tip at a time to give you the chance of thinking about each one and checking it out. there’s plenty of ‘20-tips-on-how-to-entries’ in the blogs out there but i usually feel overwhelmed with them and just read them through instead of really working with what’s said there. and by the way, this one-tip-at-a-time-strategy is the first tip i’m giving you:

no.1 – the larch :-) anyone remembering that one?

seriously, the first basic tip is – whatever it is you want to learn, break it down into very small steps and do one at a time. if it’s about a guitar solo for example, depending on how complicated it is, you could even go down to single notes. most of the time, tough, it’s most useful to have small phrases of maybe one or two measures. once you’re able to do the first piece, learn the second one and then combine them with a focus on the crossover-section. for singers it’s usually lines (not what you think!), but also words or single notes are possible. don’t panic! you will get pretty good at this quickly, so the pieces become a bit larger, which saves you time. but no matter how good you become, the breaking-it-down-technique remains.

now, why does this work? it’s quite easy, because our brain likes things it can manage. if you overload it with a whole mass of input, it loses track of it and needs time and energy to sort things out first, to find a pattern, to make sense of it. learning things that don’t make sense to us is almost impossible, we might be able to repeat it so many times that we can recite it, but we’ll forget it again soon or just won’t be able to put it to use (instead of just blindly reciting). so if we don’t understand what we’re trying to learn, it’s only wasted time and effort. but to make sense of it, it needs to be divided into small pieces of input, so our brain has the chance to figure it out. as soon as you know/understand what it’s really about, it’s just mechanics from there.

don’t confuse this with getting the big picture, which i will talk about in the next entry…