KoriSoron (me), Feedback Analysis (and You)

Posted on August 23, 2015 by GuitArchitecture

KoriSoron

Last year on this day, I wrote a post called Due Versus Do. The post talked about the need to put the work in and pay dues in building your craft and building an audience and outlined a plan for building a regional audience (If you’re playing live music – you might find it to be an interesting read). It’s also a good example of setting up a parameter for feedback analysis.

Feedback Analysis

I first read about this term in a book called Heart, Smarts, Goals And Luck which was a book that talked about self assessing those areas on a HSGL scale to determine where the reader’s strengths were as an entrepreneur. The quote below is from notes I made from the book – so I believe that it’s paraphrased from Peter Drucker.

Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. 9-12 months later compare expectations (with outcomes). Otherwise it’s too easy to rationalize a decision Ex Post Facto.

This is something I happened to be doing in goal setting – but was remiss in going back to see how well those things actually worked!

What This Means for You

Feedback analysis is a great way to look at how your goal setting is actually working. It’s not enough to just write down goals. In reviewing them you can also see what’s working, what’s not working and how to best steer your ship from here. It requires looking at what you did, warts and all, and coming up with an honest assessment.

As an example of this process using the web post from a year ago – how did KoriSoron do with feedback analysis? (again the initial post is linked here in case you’d like to compare Due Versus Do).

1 / 2. Open Mics (play in front of people) / play traditional non traditional venues. We didn’t explore this a lot. Largely because we put our focus on working on new material and playing new venues. It’s something I’ll probably explore solo to try to open some doors – but the yield of getting people from an open mic to a show was non-existant and the open mics didn’t yield gigs in and of themselves. It IS a good way to network (in a legitimate way like making friends instead of a slimy way of using people), but it requires showing up every week to do so. Typically it’s a 3 hour investment in an evening to play for 5-10 minutes but probably worth it if you’re trying to break into a new market / venue.

We played a number of different venues, and that coupled with the monthly gig at Arthur’s has been REALLY useful for us in terms of feedback for what works and what doesn’t work for the show.

For me, it’s interesting to see the yield of what I practice that I think will work versus what works in a live setting. No matter what methods I use, it always tells me something different and I can only get that information playing live.

3 /5 Developing Marketing material / Social Media / Get Visible and Record material. We made some strides here. Farzad pulled together a strong website and we did a lot via Facebook. We wrote a lot of new material and got Dean Mirabito to play percussion with us (which added a whole other dimension to what we do) and started digging deep to get into the nuances of the tunes to improve our performances and live shows. This also involved a lot of experiments with arrangements and live sound options and involved a lot of trial and error.

We also started recording every show (and using a standalone recorder for a live mixer as well) and that’s been great pre-production for going into the studio. But recording is the next thing that we’re targeting in a big way.

4. Network. This is something that needs improvement. Our tunes are very difficult to play and require a lot of practicing. It’s only now (a year later) that I’m starting to get a sense of what the tunes are and what our sound is enough to start going back out to shows in a consistent way. Everything is this business is based on what you can do and who knows what you can do. Again – I’m not into spammy networking, you have to have legitimate relationships with people – but if you don’t network you’re going to play in your room forever.

6. Build bigger. Here’s a GREAT strategy from Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck that encapsulates this –

Think Big – Start Small – (Scale Fast)

I put scale fast in parenthesis because in business you need to scale quickly. In art, you need to scale at the rate you can scale. You’re developing a foundation that you need to build on. To modify the suggestion strategy:

Think Big – Start Small – Output Constantly – Review – Revise – Repeat

I hope this helps!

As always, thanks for reading!

(and hope to see you at a KoriSoron show soon!)

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Some Lessons From A Boxing Match

Posted on August 2, 2015 by GuitArchitecture

Let’s start with the sweet science

My last post used a quote from boxing, and this post uses some lessons a friend of mine taught me about boxing. The reason for this is that, in my head, there are a number of parallels between sports and guitar playing, the biggest one being that both require a seemingly endless amount of training and preparation to be able to pull of a performance at the best of your ability in front of an audience.

As I write this, UFC champion “Rowdy” Ronda Rousey just took her 12 straight win to remain undefeated with a knock out in 34 seconds. This means that the sum total of her last three fights is under a minute. Her detractors say this doesn’t mean anything. They want to see her go the distance in a fight. I disagree with them. The fact that she can finish those fights so quickly says EVERYTHING about how much work and preparation she put into those fights.

I read Ronda’s biography and the thing that resonated with me (other than the endless grueling training – I thought back to a LOT of 12-hour days at Berklee while reading this) is how much she got up and kept going when she was knocked down in her life. When she was back in the states after getting a bronze in the Olympics for judo with no gainful employment she tended bar, worked at an animal shelter and worked as a gym receptionist while living in a car, and managed to get her head in the game and turn herself around from that situation to become the most dominant athlete (male or female IMHO) on the planet. (You have to have the mental and the physical skills to get to the top of your game.)

Back to the boxing

A good friend of mine (who just happens to be an unbelievable guitar player, musician, songwriter and guitar builder ) Chris Fitzpatrick, recently “celebrated” a milestone birthday in an unconventional way when he signed up to raise money by fighting in a Haymakers For Hope event. (Haymakers for Hope is an organization that sponsors fights to raise money for cancer research).

It is impossible to understand the physical and mental demands that are required to walk into (and out of) a boxing match if you’ve never stepped foot in a ring. Some people take a 1/2 hour boxing cardio class and think, “that’s not so hard – I could do 3 minute rounds” not understanding that it’s a whole other thing to try to throw punches when there’s another person there determined to knock you out. If you haven’t prepped, even if you can avoid getting hit – you’re likely not going to make it out of the first round.

(Some language NSFW. This excerpt is from the film Heckler, but I’d also recommend Raging Boll which shows more footage from this fight.)

My friend Fitz trained for months to get ready for his fight which required intensive diet and training, getting up at ungodly early hours and pushing his body to the absolute limit. This was more remarkable given that this fight is something sane people 20-30 years younger might do on a dare. He won the fight which you can see here.

While he was training, we talked a lot about the similarities between learning how to fight and learning how to play guitar. After the fight, there’s a whole post-fight period of introspection – kind of like a post gig introspection, and during that I asked him what lessons he learned. The lessons he learned are a great guide for guitar playing, or any other venture you want to engage in.

With that – here’s a short sweet list of lessons courtesy of Chris Fitzpatrick. Remember that the difference between thinking something and knowing something is that knowledge is experiential – so I hope you’ll learn these hard fought lessons of knowledge easier than Fitz had to learn them! (Also, make sure to check out his Strange County Drifters project and keep an eye out for some forthcoming FnH guitars!)

Lessons:

Don’t be outworked.

Practice for perfection, understanding that perfection is a just a goal, not to be used as a judgement of success or failure.

Push through your limits, you will be amazed at what you discover about yourself and what you can do.

Your comfort zone is a place to rest, not a place to live.

There will always be someone better, Always. learn from them.

Ego is the most dangerous barrier to achievement.

Your mind is so incredibly powerful that it can override your physical being. We all live this everyday and don’t even realize it. Use it.

No one cares except for you. Don’t bother trying to make others care. Care for yourself.

Breathe and relax.

All of these apply to everything, but my discipline is music and guitar.

To which I would add the famous Samurai maxim, “Seven times down – Eight times up.”

There are real limits in life. If you haven’t ever done a bench press (and never done a similar physical activity) you’re not going to pop a heavy weight off your chest on a bench your first time- but that doesn’t mean that you won’t ever be able to do it.

You don’t know what you can’t do today until you try.
You don’t know what you can’t do tomorrow when you put the work in today.
You don’t know what you can’t do a year from now when you put the work in everyday.

A limit you have today doesn’t necessarily have to be a life long limit if it’s something you can change with consistent, focused work.

I hope this helps! Thanks again to Chris Fitzpatrick for sharing!

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Make Sure You Have Your Bionoculars If You Want To Visualize Something

Posted on March 23, 2015 by GuitArchitecture

Hi Everyone!

For some reason, a number of feeds have been popping up in my viewer that talk about the importance of visualization. I believe in visualization – it’s going to be much harder to get to a specific destination without a goal in mind – but I also think there are two very important aspects to visualization that often get overlooked.

1. Skill set

It’s important to have an end goal but it doesn’t matter that you can see something on the horizon if you don’t have the tools at your disposal to get there.

That’s not to say that it’s hopeless, or that you can never develop the tools that you need. You absolutely can develop your skills and realizing that (AND ACTUALLY WORKING ON developing those skills/tools in a consistent and incremental manner) is a critical part of that process but I have heard a number of people talk about actuating change in some bizarre adaptation of “The Secret” where they honestly believe that if they can just visualize whatever their goal is in a clear way that it will then manifest itself.

In my experience, this is not the case in playing guitar.

Playing guitar in a live setting (or engaging in any endeavor that requires having to perform in a high pressure situation) always involves a balance between mastering the mental game and mastering the physical one. I’m a big proponent of overcoming the mental obstacles that hold many players back from reaching their potential, but that has to be balanced with having the physical foundation to support what’s going on mentally.

2. Visualizing the smaller steps

It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to be a great guitarist.” but the critical thing after that realization is to answer the question of, “What do I need to do to actually become a great guitarist?”

To reach any goal, it helps to visualizing it but you then also have to visualize the steps to reach that goal, take action on them and adjust your trajectory accordingly. The process itself is actually very simple but maintaining it is a whole other thing entirely!

This is just a friendly reminder. And with that, I’m back to the wood shed!

I hope this helps!

As always, thanks for reading.

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Passion Vs. Obsession

Posted on March 8, 2015 by GuitArchitecture

Bobby Fischer’s Chess Game Vs. The Cuban Missile Crisis

There is an apocryphal chess story involving Bobby Fischer that I find myself reflecting on often.

As the story goes, in 1962 a number of high ranking American chess players had gathered to strategize and practice for an upcoming international chess tournament. This happened to be during what would later be know as “The Cuban Missile Crisis”, and everyone on hand was sitting around watching the events unfold on television and talking about what the possible outcomes would be. Many people thought that we were going to have a nuclear war and, in retrospect, we came very close to having that happen.

Everyone, that is, except Bobby Fischer who was looking at a chess board and getting increasingly annoyed until he couldn’t stand it anymore and finally yelled out, “Can anyone tell me what this has to do with chess?”

Obsession vs. Passion

By their nature of practicing the same things over and over again, many guitar players are obsessive about all aspects of what they do. Non-guitarists will often laugh as players get into endless arguments about who the better player is, or the better guitar or the better amp or any other aspect of minutiae that is lost on non players.

When you start off playing guitar – you have to have some element of this going for you because the discipline it takes to get calluses, much less get the finger strength to play the dreaded first position F Major partial barre chord, is not something that comes natural to some people.

For myself, I engaged in everything that I did at 100%. When I was at Berklee, like many players I knew at the time – iit was difficult to find me without a guitar in my hand but if you did – it was when I was looking for new music, reading a book, watching a film or going to the gym – all in service of making me a better player. For example, I went to the gym to increase my stamina and try to look better on stage. And there wasn’t a plan – beyond a general desire to become a “professional guitarist” – it was just a series of events and occurrences that came about from having poor impulse control (“Go to a film? Sure! Let’s go!”) and following things through to some kind of end that either came from boredom (aka the goldfish mentality – “I’m tired of working on this – OH THAT’S a cool Lick!”) or actual completion.

As my life after my undergrad went from months to years to decades after I stopped going there, a strange mid-life crisis came about.

Stage one was, “You’re not going to be a rock star.” That was okay, because I knew this early on and I also had no desire to be a rock star. I always wanted to be in a band rather than a solo artist and when I imagined what I wanted to do ideally – it was playing in something like Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds where they could play theater level shows anywhere in the world and make a comfortable living.

This was less of an issue for me than it was for other people. In other words, as the years went on and I got better as a player and a teacher the people around me (who really cared about me but didn’t understand what I was doing), started pushing the whole, “So since this music thing isn’t making you any money perhaps its time to move on and do something else.” See the rock star thing wasn’t interesting to me, but being able to devote myself to something I loved was interesting to me.

Stage two was, “You’re not getting any younger and the music business isn’t getting any better.”

The first step of this involved taking a series of gigs that I didn’t like just to keep playing guitar and feel that I could call myself a professional musician. This was basically letting the judgmental nonsense of other players I knew infect my head and drill down into my feelings of self identity. This lead down a very dark path that took me a long time to understand what was going on and to swing out of.

The second step was just seeing all of the traditional paths that I knew worked vanishing in front of me. In hindsight, not a bad thing but that was pretty scary writing on the wall for a while.

So everything was an end to a goal. I’d take a day job to pay bills and do whatever I had to try to advance myself at the same time.

But a lot suffered because of it. Because of this self added pressure – I was always wrapping my head around what the next step would be. Everything was goal and task driven which was great for goals and tasks but not so great for everything else.

And life is mostly everything else.

I’d go on vacation and get really tense because I wasn’t getting anything done. I’d watch TV and run scales because at least I was “doing something”. It was crazy making and while it was supposed to be self-empowering it just became self defeating because no matter what was done – there was always more to do. Literally everything became, “What does this have to do with guitar?”

And I burned myself out. With so many things fighting for attention and fighting for mental bandwidth the circuits just fried. And getting back up on that horse and engaging again was BRUTAL.

Doing anything at a high level requires some level of passion in either the thing being done or in the person doing it. Obsession is a common side effect of diving full in to something but – trust me here – in paraphrasing Socrates, the obsessed life is not worth living. Not if it’s at the extent of something else. You’ll either burn out everyone around you, burn out yourself or both.

Bobby Fischer was a brilliant chess player but there’s nothing else in his life you want to model yourself on. Be passionate and be engaged but keep an eye out for your Cuban Missile Crisis freak out as well.

I hope this helps!

A Lesson On The Lightbulb Moment From Andy Kaufman

Posted on January 31, 2015 by GuitArchitecture

What the heck does Gilbert Godfried have to do with playing guitar?

As many of you know, a key interest of mine involves exploring things that interest me and then adapting them to things that I do.

(I talk about how critical I think this is to developing an individual voice in this article (linked here) which manages to reference Ludwig Wittgenstein and my awkward exit from the guitar major program at my undergraduate institution all in same article.)

One thing I’ve been listening to every week has been the “Gilbert Godfried Amazing Colossal Podcast” (you can find it on iTunes or here). Be forewarned while it is generally NSFW (the Danny Thomas stories alone are not suitable for any location outside of Gomorrah) – Gilbert and co-host Frank Santopadre’s encyclopedic knowledge of the golden age of television and film is endlessly fascinating and (to me at least) endlessly entertaining.

Recently the show featured Bob Zmuda, the comedian who started comic relief, was a writer for (and co-conspirator with) Andy Kaufman and often subbed for Andy as one of Andy’s most despised charaters – Tony Clifton. On the show Zmuda talked a lot about the early days with Andy and revealed this story which sparked the fire for this blog post.

It appears that Andy was attending a two year college (“Grahm Junior in Boston – it’s not there anymore and it was the only one he could get into”) and was smitten with another student at the school. She was in a bind and, having had another act back out at the last minute, asked Andy if he’d ever done stand up. “Sure”, he said, “When I was like 11”. (Andy had been performing since he was 9 years old.) She asked him to do it and at first he was resistant to the idea because he didn’t want to do the same set that he did as a kid. Finally, he relented and was shocked that the audience loved the set. It was the light bulb moment for Kaufman and Zmuda went so far to say, “Without that (moment) – you never would have had Andy Kaufman.”

So what’s the lesson here?

I think there are several.

1. He had guts. Not having been at the event, I can’t speak with certainty, but I think that it worked for Andy because he did everything all in and completely earnestly. I think that Andy Kaufman was one of the few people who could pull off making an audience buy into the idea of an adult doing an infantile act without it being creepy. What was great was that he had the guts to be willing to take a risk and look foolish but had the sincerity to (somehow pull it off).

2. He saw opportunity. It takes a person of vision to see beyond an audience reaction and see opportunity. I think where he succeeded artistically was in recognizing how to leverage his delivery with material and ultimately create a completely unique voice artistically.

3. He took it all the way. I think Andy’s genius was in taking his ideas and pushing the boundary of them to the point of breaking. Just as important, every when he did break it he continued on and rolled with the punches.

You never know when or where a light bulb moment is going to come from but it’s never going to happen if you don’t step out of your comfort zone and leave yourself open to experience something new.

It’s like the Tom Robbins quote,

“I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn’t, but she always knows where I’ll be.”

(The podcast also features a story about the lengths Jim Carey went to to get the Kaufman role in Man in the Moon which is pretty much a master class in what it takes to be competitive at that level in Hollywood (or anywhere).)

That’s it for now! As always, thanks for reading!

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Doing Something Versus Getting Something Done

Posted on January 23, 2015 by GuitArchitecture

Has this happened to you?

One thing I run into with students very often is a common sense that while they’re playing a lot or have played for years that their playing never got any better. Perhaps some of you have come across the same thing.

Generally they’ve confused doing something with getting something done.

Here’s the difference:

Buying a gym membership is doing something.

Going to the gym and getting a good work out accomplished is getting something done.

A golf story:

I’ve only been to a golf course once and I didn’t like it so feel free to take the following observations with a grain of salt.

One thing I noticed on the course was that most players weren’t very good. (I’m being kind in my description here – awful would be a more appropriate term for what I saw.) We’re talking about players that couldn’t approach par – but – and this was the part that was shocking to me – some of these guys had been playing for 20-30 years!

It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but eventually I figured out that they were following Einstein’s model of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. For example, let’s say one player learned a basic stroke from another player. Well, what had happened was this player never examined what they were doing. He simply learned the stroke and then repeated it over and over with the assumption that since the stroke must be “right” that it was simply a matter of mastering it. So he went out and hit thousands of balls for hours on end over the course of years using the same poor stroke over and over again and then wondered why he wasn’t getting any better. A lot of these guys there talked about new clubs and more expensive gear – but the issue wasn’t the gear – it was poor muscle memory that came about from ingraining a bad practice model!

There are a number of things that separate professional and amateur players – but here’s a big one that I’ve noticed in a lot of pro (and pro level) players that isn’t intuitive:

Pro players don’t tend to operate on some of the assumptions that amatuer players have.

For example – Many times when I’m teaching a lesson to a beginning or intermediate player who wants to get into lead playing I’ll bring up the major scale and nine times out of ten, they’re completely dismissive and say, “Oh I already know that.” and proceed to play it in one octave in position. I’ll start taking the student through the paces of the scale, “just humor me…” and within 5 minutes or so most of them realize that they don’t know the scale as well as they thought they did.

“The tyranny of the shoulds”

One related lesson I had to teach myself involved getting rid of the “shoulds” in my thinking. Should is an amateur concept. “I’ve been playing arpeggios for the last day, I should be able to play this other form ( even though I haven’t practiced it before) because it’s also an arpeggio – and I know those!” “I can play sextuplets at 120 so I should be able to play this sextuplet at the same speed.” Pro players move away from should and focus on can.

Can I play this?
If not, why not?
What do I have to do to play it better?

Pro players examine WHY something isn’t working and then address it.

The dojo story

I saw a Karate demonstration once. While the young guys were showing off the flashiest moves they had, the master was in back doing Kata – which (in a reprehensible over simplification) are the basic starting points for the style. in other words, fundamentals.

Guess what happened to the flashy kids in the demonstration? Strewn all over the place.

Everything you do on guitar is based on cumulative development. The better you can execute basic techniques, the better you’ll be able to adapt to new techniques as they’re thrown at you.

That means really being present in practicing. Really focusing on hand tension, timing and tone and using the “Do – Observe – Correct” model to make sure you’re practicing it the right way. Pro players do what it takes to make things better. Sometimes that’s practicing something at a VERY rudimentary level to make sure that it’s fundamentally sound before trying to get it up to tempo. In other words, they’re willing to humble themselves and do some (often) unglamorous work that other people aren’t willing to do.

A lot of players who play guitar have been playing the same tunes the same ways for the last 30 years and then never wonder why they don’t get better. If you’re one of those people, don’t assume that a new guitar will make it better. It might be as simple as taking a lesson and getting a handle on what you’re doing wrong and developing a proper methodology and practice schedule to get something done towards achieving your playing goals. It may require getting out of a comfort zone – but that’s where the rewards are!.

That’s it for now! I hope this helps and as always, thanks for reading!

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Practice The Way You Want To Play

Posted on January 18, 2015 by GuitArchitecture

Recently I had a Skype lesson with someone who wanted to learn more about practicing and while we talked about a lot of different elements of things to work on I forgot to mention one critical thing (that may be a good reminder for you):

When you’re practicing you should practice material the way you ultimately want to play it.

(Be forewarned – this simple sentence requires some context.)

When I was living in small apartments I was really mindful of other people and not disturbing them and made sure that when I practiced that I was really quiet.

Guess what happened when I went to play live? You couldn’t hear me or make out a single thing I was playing.

You can’t practice something in a passive or lethargic way and expect to play it aggressively /dynamically / with conviction / in a way that creates a moment in a live context.

This is one reason I recommend that people work on specific licks or approaches for short periods of time as a big part of practice is examining nuance and attention to detail.

Here’s (one way) how I approach something new I need to learn in a practice session.

1. Figure out what I’m playing (and why I’m working on it)

Even before I go to a metronome, I make sure I understand what I’m playing. If I’m going to add it to my musical vocabulary – I need to understand how it fits in a context. Examples of this would be:

“Ah..it’s a pentatonic based lick”
“It’s an arpeggio pattern based on harmonic minor chords”
“It’s a scale I’m not familiar with” (Then I need to learn that as well).

The why is generally, “it sounds cool.” but usually it’s tied to a specific song, solo or approach for something I’m going to play in front of people or record.

2. Figure out where to put all my fingers

Again, still no sign of a metronome yet! Here I’m looking at the fretboard shapes involved and make sure that I understand what I need to do physically to perform it. Recently, I was working on a descending scalar pattern for an original tune and realized that the fingering I was using was really difficult and didn’t sound that great. Even playing it at the slowest possible tempo, it was difficult to get the articulation I wanted. After about 5 minutes of running options, I discovered a string skipping shape that made it much easier t play and (more importantly) sounded better.

Included in this step is also addressing what the fingers of the picking or tapping hand need to do.

3. Understand the phrasing

Usually I’ll try to sing along with the line to help internalize it. I’m not a vocalist. You’ll never hear me on American idol. I don’t do it because it sounds good, I do it so I can really internalize the rhythms and the phrasing. Tapping my foot helps a lot with that as well…..

I heard a guitarist of some renown play recently and I was shocked at just how bad the phrasing on his tunes was. Every note was played in the right order but it just didn’t sound musical at all.

4. Set a metronome marking

There are a couple of ways I’ll do this but in general I’ll find the fastest tempo I can perform the idea following the 3 T’s (Tone, Timing and hand tension and by “perform” I mean playing it totally in the pocket and every note jumping out at the listener.) and then move it up a few metronome markings until it starts to fall apart.

One place where I think some people get hung up on this is (on the physical side of practicing) equating playing with conviction = playing aggressively = playing with excessive tension. As the saying goes,

“Tension is trying to be where I think I should be”
“Relaxed is being where I am”

Take your time getting to this step if you need to! I might be practicing the idea for a couple of sessions before I even get to the point where I can play it in time. I work on playing the phrase with conviction and intent and then worry about tempo. Playing all the notes on the guitar quickly doesn’t mean much if you can’t move listeners when doing so.

Eventually, you’ll get to the point where your overall level comes up and you can start playing things closer to the tempo you hear it.

5. Do. Observe. Correct (if necessary).

That’s the crux of it right there. Not getting emotional about what you’re doing or getting hung up on where you should be – just performing it. Observing what worked. Correct if necessary. If I can play something 3-5 times without a mistake – I’ll generally bump up the metronome a few markings and try it again.

(Make sure to check out The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life by Thomas M. Sterner for more on this. I had another descriptive but I liked his description of “Do Observe Correct” so much that I use it in my own teaching now)

6. Keep track of what I’m doing and work on it daily

This is an old topic for me but daily focused work makes the difference. Writing it down let’s you see what kind of progress you’re making.

As a shortcut think of it this way (I stole this from a book that is definitely worth reading – The Champion’s Mind: How Great Athletes Think, Train, and Thrive by Jim Afremo)

You want to practice like you’re the number 2 player in the world and have something to prove. Practice with grit and drive and instead of being totally focused on the end goal – try to be engaged in the process of what you’re doing.

Having said that, when you play or perform – you want to do so like the #1 players in the world. Those players play with no tension. Their hands are lose and relaxed and they’re focused but not over-focused.

If you practice in an engaged manner you’re more likely to perform in an engaged manner and that’s a good thing.

There’s a lot more to practice than what I’ve outlined here (If you check the blueprints page you’ll see a lot of material specifically related to guitar practicing) – but I really think that the steps I outlined offer a reasonable starting point and (perhaps more importantly) can be applied to any skill set you want to achieve.

That’s it for now! I hope this helps and as always thanks for reading!

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Loking Forward To 2015 : How Not To Repeat The Mistakes Of The Past (Or Nothing Ever Got Done With An Excuse)

Posted on December 23, 2014 by GuitArchitecture

It’s that time of year again…

(This is a repost of something I wrote for the end of 2009. The dates and information have been updated, and this has become one of the few yearly repost traditions I indulge in.)

At the end of every year, I typically take the last week between Christmas and New Years to wind down and center. It not only helps me take stock of what worked and didn’t work for me in in the year but also helps me make sure I’m on track for what I want to get done moving forward. As George Santayana said,

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

As 2014 draws to a close, I think back to many conversations I had with people when this post was first written at the end of 2009. At that time, it seemed like everyone I talked to said the same thing, “2009 was such a bad year. 2010 has to be better. It just has to.”

Now it seems I’m listening to the same sentiment with the same people about 2014 and the coming 2015. And in some ways they have a valid point. Listening to their recollections, 2014 certainly offered some of these people a tough blow – but regardless of their circumstances, I believe that, unless they experience a windfall of good fortune, I will hear the same sentiments echoed at the end of 2014. There’s a reason for this:

“If you always do what you’ve always done – you’ll always get what you always got” – anon

While I fully appreciate the merits of planning and goal setting – life will throw you any number of curveballs that may make a meticulously laid out plan get derailed.

A good plan has to be countered with an ability to improvise (as need be) to make sure that even if your mode of transportation is disabled, that you are still on the path to achieve your goals.

“Improvisation as a practice is the focus of an idea through an imposed restriction.  This restriction could either be self-imposed or could be imposed upon the improviser through other means.

Improvisation as it relates to common experience can be seen in the example of the car that stops running in the middle of a trip.  A person experienced in auto repair may attempt to pop the hood of the car to see if they can ascertain how to repair the vehicle.  Or they may try to flag down help.  Or they may try to use a cell phone to contact a garage.  The point being that within the context of a vehicle malfunction, different actions are improvised based on the improviser’s facility with both the situation at hand and the tools at their disposal.

….life is essentially an improvisation.  As individuals we come into each day not exactly knowing what will happen.  We know that there is an eventual end, but we don’t know when or how it will end.  But we continue to improvise, because it is in both the active improvisation (the present), the skill set and knowledge of that improvisation (the past) and in the philosophical/worldview/goals guiding our improvisational choices (the future) that we create meaning.”

If you approach life’s problems with the same mindset you’ve always had

-and your new year’s resolutions run contrary to that mindset –

your resolutions are doomed.

I say this as a seasoned graduate of the school of hard knocks and as a person who found that while success feels a lot better – ultimately failure is a much more thorough teacher.

2014 had some great ups and downs for me and now there are a number of life and playing upgrades I’m going to put into practice in 2015 to address the things that didn’t work for me. For those of you who are interested in making a real change the new year – here’s what worked for me going into 2014 that I plan on using this year as well:

Know the big picture.

If you have a goal – know why you have the goal. As Victor Frankl once said, “He who has a why can endure almost any how.“

Take stock of what you have done and identify what needs to change.

Have you done things that work towards that goal? If so, what have you really done? What worked? What didn’t work? And what parameters can you put in place to make it work better?

What decisions did you make that set you back and how could you alter those decisions in the future?

Sometimes honesty is brutal but this isn’t about beating yourself up. It’s about taking a realistic stock of what worked and what didn’t work for you in the year, reinforcing that things that work for you and discarding what didn’t work for you.

Revolution not resolution

People typically make resolutions because they recognize a need for change in their life.

Personally, change hasn’t been about making a momentary decision as a knee jerk reaction to something (which usually lasts as long as the time it took to make that decision).

The long-lasting changes in my life have come from making lifestyle changes, setting priorities and working within those changes. Change is not a temporary compromise to a current observation but is instead a revolt against habitual modes of thinking and operation.

Positive habits

Making something a daily positive habit (like brushing your teeth) makes it easier to maintain over the long haul. (See my post about the value of rituals for more on this.)

“Don’t make excuses – make it right” – Al Little

People make excuses for things all the time. No one cares about excuses because nothing ever got done with an excuse. People (typically) only care about results.

There will undoubtably be moments that you relapse into older habits. Instead of making excuses for why it happened – just acknowledge it and move past it. When you fall off the bike, it’s not about sitting down and nursing your scrapes. It’s about getting back up on the bike again. As it says in The Hagakure, “Seven times down – eight times up”

There’s strength in numbers

Try to surround yourself with supportive people.

Not enabling people who will make changes more difficult for you.
Not negative or judgmental people who will scoff at your desire for change

Like minded people who have goals and are motivated.

Talk to the friends and family who will give honest and supportive feedback. Here’s another important tip – don’t burn those people out with your goals. The people around you have their own lives, so if every conversation becomes about you and your goals, you’re going to see less and less of those people!

In addition to (or in some cases in lieu of) that support, you may want to look into some free online accountability sites like Idonethis.com (post on this here) or Wunderlist.com which maintains a private calendar to help observe progress.

Commit to One Change

It’s easy to get hung up and overwhelmed with the specifics of a long term goal. Try making one lifestyle change and commit to seeing that through. (Again, you can read my post about the value of rituals for more on this.)

Be motivated to do more but be grateful for what you have

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who took a moment to come here and read my writing. I hope this helps you in some way shape or form and I hope that 2015 is your best year yet.

-SC

The Guitar Hero Has Left The Building

Posted on December 11, 2014 by GuitArchitecture

Hear My Train A Comin’

As I write this, a Jimi Hendrix documentary is playing in the background. That got me thinking about the traditional guitar hero and realizing that we’re not going to see one again.

Regardless of what anyone thinks of Hendrix as a player, for me there can be no argument that you basically have electric guitar before Hendrix and electric guitar after Hendrix. Just like you essentially have Flamenco guitar before and after Paco De Lucia or classical guitar before and after Segovia. These are the players who pushed the envelope and ended up building a foundation that everyone built on in one way or another.

After that, you have guitar heros who became major influencers. For example Page, Beck, Clapton, and Townsend in the 60’s. Ritchie Blackmore, Steve Howe, Frank Zappa, Johnny Ramone and Steve Jones and Holdsworth in the 70’s. Eddie Van Halen brought hod rod guitar to the forefront and Yngwie Malmsteen brought the whole Neo-Classical and technical guitar trend to the forefront. Or household guitar names like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Satriani or Steve Vai.

But I don’t think you’re every going to see anyone like that again.

I don’t think you’re going to see a major guitar figure again for a number of reasons and I’ll do my best to document some of them here.

1. The landscape for popular music is different (and the same). I realized this when I played in a live hip hop band years ago. In the rock clubs, people were REALLY into the idea that a guitar/bass/drum trio with rappers could create a lot of those sounds, but at the rap shows – that didn’t matter to anyone. It didn’t matter whether a DJ was spinning a disc or whether that sound was coming from the floor, it was all about the flow over top of it. To be sure, there are still some diehard fans of certain genres (like metal or jazz) where technical ability is really respected, but for the most part, casual listeners of music don’t particularly care much about what is making the sound they’re hearing and they’re more concerned with how what they’re hearing makes them feel. In that respect, it’s the same as it ever was but I think that…

2. The tools have taken away the appreciation of the skill set. For a long time, the only way to make a guitar sound good was to play it well. But now it’s easy to edit a near infinite number of performances into a useable take that doesn’t sound bad on your laptop. A trained ear will generally know a live take from one that’s all edited together but even casual listeners understand the ability to edit something and in the back of their head it creates a little suspicion of a skill.

But when you see someone get up and move a crowd with a performance, then you realize what a skill set really is. It’s one thing to see a table on a showroom floor that’s been computer routed and bolted together – but when you see a master craftsman build a table by hand it’s a radically different thing.

4. The relationship is different. When I got the Fixx’ Reach The Beach album I wore it thin with playback. When I was learning the Rainbow in The Dark solo from a Dio album I listened to that track over and over until I could play along with the solo. At that time you couldn’t listen to anything at any time so you could only listen to what you had on hand or what was playing on the radio. It forced you to listen to things in a different (and deeper way). Musicians still do this. They still listen to tracks over and over again to learn a song or a solo, but the casual listener doesn’t develop the same relationship with the artist or the material.

5. The demographic aged out. This is related to #4. There’s a reason you still see Joe Satriani or Eddie Van Halen or Vernon Reid on guitar magazine covers – the median age of people who read them is probably 40 or 45. It’s people who grew up on guitar based music in the 60s/70’s or 80s. They’re also the ones who are more likely to want to read a magazine instead of a digital version and more likely than not they’re reading it for the gear ads to address their G.A.S.

6 and 7. The traffic is different and the mechanisms to promote those artists is different. I think these are really big factors. It was just easier to get press and get attention before mp3s. Yngwie Malmsteen went from being in a Mike Varney Spotlight column to recording with Steeler and Alcatrazz and releasing his own (best selling) instrumental album within a year or so. Now, anyone can release an album – but getting Guitar Player to write about it i(or getting anyone to pay attention to it) is a whole different thing. The major labels did a lot of things bass ackwards but they certainly knew how to let people know when new releases were coming out and how to build a buzz. It was also a limited means of distribution and so when unlimited distribution came about though the web. they really didn’t know what to do. (and largely still don’t).

So what you get now is you tube artists as opposed to old school artists.

You get Rodrigo y Gabriella instead of Al DiMeola and Paco DeLucia.
You get Joe Bonamossa instead of Stevie Ray Vaughan.
You get a stable of CandyRat guitarists instead of Michael Hedges.
You get a million people playing a million notes and none of them really grab you.

Having said all that, I don’t think the end of the singular guitar hero an entirely bad thing.

People forget that in the heyday of ’80’s guitar that there was a lot of crap with the cream. There were a number of people who were basically trying to go as fast and as loud as they could to try to be the next big thing and it never came and it just broke so many of those people who were never heard from again.

So there will never be another Hendrix. Big Deal. We already had Hendrix and he was awesome. And guitar after him has largely been a really great thing. More people are making more music and doing things that were never dreamed of before. Financially it’s a difficult road, but artistically – we are so lucky to be living, and playing and experiencing things right now. I don’t know what the future holds – but we need to realize that playing really well is less about playing every note “perfectly” and more about making a real connection to fans.

Kurt Cobain wasn’t a great guitar player – but there’s a reason people still learn his guitar parts – they dig the tunes they’re in.

Now let’s get Miroslav Tadic – for my money the best guitarist on the planet right now – on the cover of all the guitar magazines – selling out all of his albums and making a bid to prove me wrong.

Reconnecting by De-connecting

Posted on October 26, 2014 by GuitArchitecture

Back in the saddle again….

I’ve been off guitarchitecture for a while. I posted a new podcast on guitagrip.com, and have taken on a few other projects (I’m the musical director/foley jockey for a new production at Siena College that starts in a few weeks, picked up new students, worked on some consultations for other projects, booked some new korisoron shows, worked with ZT amps for some videos we’ll be doing to promote their awesome acoustic amps and related material). But more importantly related to my absence here, I’ve noticed some severe attention deficit for my interactions with various things.

In addition to trying to be mindful of the fact that multiple options typically leads to overwhelm and inactivity rather than making better choices – I still found myself struggling with finding time to work out or read a book. These two activities in particular also happen to be things that are very grounding for me.

So clearly something wasn’t working. In analyzing my actions, I realized that much of my day was spent working under the illusion of being proactive (checking e-mail repeatedly for example) with being reactive (now forcing myself to react to an email with an immediate urgency for something that wasn’t even an issue a minute earlier).

It’s the illusion of getting something done in a timely manner, but it sabotages short and long term goals.

Physician Heal Thyself

In a recent lesson, I gave a student the same advice that I needed for myself, namely to find the things that trigger a flow state and adapt that to practicing.

By a flow state, I mean events that you can loose yourself in without being aware of time passing. This might mean playing, or reading or working on your car. It’s whatever event you can fully immerse yourself in.

For me, that’s reading, and then that’s guitar playing. As a kid, I would read books constantly not being aware of what time had passed. Guitar playing came a lot later and had a lot of extra baggage associated with it that had to be overcome to be in a flow state. (such as editing and analyzing what you’re playing as you play it – even having worked on that a lot I still find myself falling into that mode once in a while).

So I got back into reading books. Physical books picked up from the library. Serious reading where skimming was avoided (I found myself skimming sections to get to the next part and then coming back and re-reading things in a deeper way) and every word that was on the page came into the internal narrative of what I was reading. When I lived in Boston, it was easy because it took at least 30 minutes each way to get anywhere by train, so I always brought a book with me and read it on the train. But now that I drive everywhere, it’s taken a while to get back into the habit of REALLY reading something of substance (just like it’s taken a while to get back into the habit of walking places when you find yourself driving everywhere).

It’s easy to be dismissive of this. After all to read a two to three sentence synopsis of a much deeper topic is easier, faster and easier to act on yes?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is, it’s completely missing the point.

The Filter bubble

I was thinking a lot about Eli Pariser’s filter bubble book. In a filter bubble, uncommon data is eliminated so that the more common data rises to the top of the searches. So when you do a google search for something, you’re only skimming the surface of the data out there. This is great when you want to find specific data (like a water table for a county for a specific year), but not so great when you’re looking for specific topics.

Years ago, my friend Randy saw a Charles Manson shirt and commented that people used faces like Manson and Hitler to be provocative because they weren’t well informed enough to find more relevant contemporary people. They went with what was easy or immediately accessible.

So a filter bubble is like handing someone a 6-string guitar with only 2 strings and saying, “ok here’s a guitar. Now go play “smoke on the water.” You can play the main riff of the tune on 2 strings, but without the rest of the strings on the guitar you’re missing out on a lot. In my case, it’s engaging in reading as a process to come to a deeper understanding of something, rather than developing a “hack” shortcut.

The synopsis approach in action

The reality of the above mentioned two to three-sentence synopsis for most people is some variation of this process:

1. Read the synopsis.

2. Do an internal litmus test to see if it seems plausible.

3. Google the term to see if there’s a common consensus on the topic.

4. If it’s determined to be correct, then it’s added to the list of things that they learned today, filed it into memory and then transmitted to other people as knowledge.

In other words, it’s very rarely acted upon. This is what happens when you are reacting to data all the time. You get overwhelmed and can’t really internalize things.

Another YouTube Rant

It seems like every day someone is sending me some new YouTube link to some playalong or performance. You want to know why there are SO MANY videos of technical guitar videos on YouTube?

Because (in the scheme of things) it’s not that hard to do.

You could train a monkey to play the version of “flight of the bumblebee” that so many guitarists post (btw – I blame a Guitar Player transcription/lesson of Jennifer Batten for this version being in existence because that seems to be the one everyone is referencing for fingerings). It’s not about music, it’s about getting a few specific techniques under your belt to meet a specific goal. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a limited end unto itself.

I pretty much stopped watching YouTube guitar videos because:

A: I saw the filter bubble in action. So many of the videos I saw were clearly guys who had watched the same video, or learned the same tune.

B: I have my own thing to work on, so unless it’s really special, I really don’t care what other guitarists are doing.

So, I don’t care about shred videos on YouTube. I don’t care that an 8 year old can play “Scarified” not all that well at near the recorded tempo. What DO I care about then?

This in contrast is a lot harder:

This is making music. This is what happens when a master musician becomes a shaman and invokes the spirit behind the song. It’s about being completely in the moment. It’s about having something to say and speaking it directly to other people.

It’s being in the flow and taking other people with you.

It’s about being in the present. Not checking your email every 15 minutes to see if you’re missing something.

It’s about the duende moment. The moment the hair stands up on your arms and you feel more alive than before.

That doesn’t happen online. That doesn’t happen in a text. That happens with people in a room sharing an honest naked moment.

Creating that moment starts with you, the performer being in the moment and bringing people there.

Being in the moment is something that has to be practiced. Now, possibly more than ever.

That’s why I started working on things that fell into my flow state more often. The more I enter flow, the more easily I can enter in in other areas of my life. The more I can bring that when I perform. The more I can create something beyond the veneer of flash and get to touching people in a real way.

So, that’s where I’m at. A work in progress moving towards reconciling an analog past with a digital present and doing it (for now) increasingly offline.

As always, thanks for reading! I hope this helps you in some way!