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Don’t Be Afraid Of the Work
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Category Archives: Motivational
Some Observations On Inertia And A Cool Online App For Getting Things Done
A routine can be a powerful thing in productivity. It helps instil a sense of inertia and, as I’ve talked about in posts like this, or this one , keeping the ball rolling is usually a lot easier than initially getting it to roll. The counter-intuitive reality behind doing things is that:
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Activity leads to other activity. It creates its own inertia.
Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.
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The counter-intuitive part of this is when you’re sitting on a sofa and think, “I’m really tired. I just have to rest for a second and mentally gear myself up for this”. Inertia is working at keeping you sitting on the couch. If there’s a TV on or an internet connection – it’s working double time.
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The reality is that just getting up and doing the thing actually takes less energy that expending the energy debating with yourself about whether or not you have the tools or the energy to do something.
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The caveat is that this assumes we’re talking about moderate activity. If you’ve just run a marathon, I’m not advocating staying on your feet if you need to rest. I’m talking about procrastination versus physical exhaustion.
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Procrastination is an energy suck
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Completing projects is invigorating. It’s that energy that comes from getting something done and thinking, “All right – what’s next?” It takes way more mental energy to keep putting something off than to just deal with it.
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Here are some tips that may be helpful:
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- Have goals. If you don’t know what you’re trying to do – you’re not likely to figure out the how.
- If you have something you’re procrastinating – try to tackle small parts of if consistently. You’re going to get more mileage out of small daily improvements than trying to cram something into a marathon session.
- Monitor progress. This goes along with goal setting but it’s important to check back and see how you’re progressing.
- Be accountable but pragmatic. Either to yourself or other people, to get things done, it’s important to be held to your goals. Along with monitoring progress, being pragmatic (rather than judgemental) about your progress will help as well. If things aren’t progressing they way you’d like – beating yourself up isn’t going to help the process. By monitoring things you can see what works and what doesn’t work and adjust as necessary.
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I Done This
Neither a typo or an obscure pop reference, I want to thank my friend Daren Burns for bringing this to my attention. I done this.com is a cool free online productivity tool that combines some of the tips that I’ve mentioned above, Here’s a quote from the web page:
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“iDoneThis is an email-based productivity log. This evening, you’ll receive your first email from us asking, “What’d you get done today?” Just respond to our email and we record what you wrote into your calendar. Use your progress from yesterday to motivate you today.”
By helping to monitor progress and helping keep consistency and accountability, this could be something to help get the ball rolling for you. If you have something you’ve been putting off doing (like practicing) try it for a week and see what happens.
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I hope this helps! Thanks for reading.
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On “It is what it is”
I had a moment to catch up on some things this weekend, and returned a call from a friend of mine at CalArts. We had a very nice conversation catching up and discussing Higher Education funding, trends, pedagogy and the like and she was kind enough to tell me this:
“You know, in a conversation we had once – you gave me some advice and told me that, ‘it is what it is’. I thought about that a lot – and about how you’ve brought it up a number of times in our conversations – and it’s something I find myself coming back to as a mantra when I’m facing something difficult.”
She had asked me about where that mindset came from, and I’m sure it’s rooted in growing up in a working class small town in upstate New York. Compared to many people around me I had it relatively easy. My parents both worked hard – my dad taught middle school and my mom worked in a factory – and they owned the house we lived in. (A note: Despite a lot of nonsense talk generated in the media earlier in the year, as people living on an educator’s salary, we did not live high on the hog. We burned wood for fuel (that we cut stacked and dried on our own), did all our own repairs and (for a while) raised animals for food. The two-story house I grew up in with a garage and a 2 story workshop on a 1/2 acre of land sold for well under 40k if that tells you anything about the economics of the region.)
Other people I knew had it really hard. Farmers (and often their children) who worked from dawn to dusk with spouses working additional odd jobs just to make ends meet. We had “valley runners” – a term of no endearment reserved for families who would relocate multiple times a year to stay one step ahead of the law. I’d always see the kids in my classes; they’d show up for a couple of months and then be gone to the next county. When I’d see them months, or years later, they had always changed for the worse. They picked up a number of skills they needed to survive when you’re always on the run (typically manipulation, but sometimes cons or petty theft), that were depressing enough for an adult to have to rely on to get by – much less a child.
Mainly though, I knew a lot of good people who worked hard and were often presented with really difficult situations. And the response to those situations was to work through it. I can’t count the number of times that I heard variations of, “No use crying about it – let’s get to work.”
For those of you who resonate with this sentiment, and have never read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, it might be worth a moment of your time. One point Aurelius’ (and other Stoics like Epictetus) bring up repeatedly is the value of seeing things for what they are. That often means removing the emotional issues associated with the matters at hand and trying to deal with them objectively. (Albert Ellis made an entire career out of this method of inquiry with his REBT (Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy) approach).
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Getting emotional about certain things (particularly difficult things) only adds to their difficultly.
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In my world view, some things are simply facts andviewing those things as such makes it easier to see them for what they are.
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For example:
2+2=4.
How do you feel about that? (or do you feel anything?)
It’s difficult to get emotionally invested in it because it’s merely a fact.
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Now here’s the idea applied: where a student might hear, “You’re going to have to put a lot of time in to getting those sweep arpeggios down the way you want.” I hear “2+2=4”. There’s no emotional involvement and so there’s less to get tripped up on.
There are a million reasons to procrastinate, and generally only one or two to get something done. If you’re facing something really daunting there’s a several part process I can share to help make it manageable.
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Getting it done
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- Know why you need to do what you’re doing. As Viktor Frankl once said, “He who has a why can bear almost any how”.
- Deal with problems individually. Many problems are multi-tiered so break them down into individual components to make them easier to manage.
- See the problem for what it is. Gain a scope of what it is you are trying to do and prioritize what has to happen to complete it. (For example: If you’re trying to get better at sight-reading – you’re going to have to work on it a lot over a longer period of time. If you’re trying to get two bars of a solo down – it will probably be a much shorter over-all time investment).
- Have milestones and a deadline. Know what you’re going to complete by when.
- Prioritize and address what you can. Don’t get hung up on big steps here, this stage is all about the specifics of each step (i.e. the grunt work).
- Reassess and return. As milestones are reached verify your progress and start again.
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I remember reading a David Lee Roth interview where he was talking about how having a drive was the only thing that was going to get you through endless vocal practicing in your bedroom.
There’s nothing glamorous in the work that goes into doing anything well, but it’s necessary to acquire the skills needed to do those things.
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In other words, it is what it is.
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Thanks for reading.
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What’s wrong with playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” for a world speed record?
A lot actually, because if speed is the only tool at your disposal you’re not going to be a working craftsman (or craftswoman) for very long.
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Guitar-squid, (a cool user-generated content guitar site I really like and recommend you check out), recently posted a link to a you-tube clip of of John Taylor trying to break a speed record by playing along with a sequence of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the bumblebee at 600 bpm ( 11:48/12:26 in the video – note: I think the math here is suspect – it may be 600 bpm if he’s counting it as 1/8th notes – but it sounds like 1/16ths at 250 bpm/300 bpm to me).
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For sheer technical precision you can also see this attempt by Tiago Della Vega at the same song here at a much cleaner 320 bpm. (7:38 or so)
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The Guitar-Squid post was asking the question of whether or not the performance was real or faked. The real question however should probably be, other than the players themselves, does anyone care?
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Flight of The Bumblebee
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I’m not going to bag on either of these players because I respect the work that went into both renditions, but I am going to use this approach as a springboard for:
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Why I think trying to set Guinness World Records for speed is a musical dead-end.
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- It’s not emotionally moving. It’s hard for me to think of a worse piece of music to devote time developing than a solo guitar rendition of the main “melody” of Flight of the bumblebee. It’s not a particularly memorable melody and other than the initial exposure of – wow that’s fast – it doesn’t leave you with anything.
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One reason these particular arrangements aren’t moving is because there’s nothing to contrast the velocity of notes against besides a number of earlier renditions of the same arrangement. Let me use another analogy. Say you take a commercial flight somewhere and have a window seat. Soon you get to cruising height and look out above the peaceful clouds and it feels very calm. You’re actually moving at over 500 mph but since there’s nothing to contrast it against, it just seems like a “normal speed”. If, however, you were to fly at that speed about 20 feet off the ground you’d probably die of fear – because when you saw how fast you were moving past other vehicles and identifiable landmarks, you would understand just how fast you’re going. When you play quickly, it’s only quick compared to the slowest note you’re playing. Otherwise, you’re just playing a lot of notes and it’s perceived as cruising speed by the audience.
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- It’s not musical. Perhaps you disagree, and this would be why Flight of the Bumblebee is the number 1 song on your Itunes playlist. 😉 Other than musicians, practically no one listens to renditions of this song because (particularly as a solo guitar arrangement) – it just isn’t a strong piece of music.
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In contrast to this, Hendrix’s solo on All along the Watchtower is something I could sing start to finish right now. Paco De Lucia can play a million notes with every one of them will leaving you breathless – and I’m sure that he could care less about how fast he could play Flight of The Bumblebee. In these examples, both players left me with something even after I stopped listening to the recording, because there’s real expression behind it. It’s hard to be play a lot of notes with meaning, but it can be done and when it happens – it’s done by people who are playing a lot of notes to get somewhere very specific rather than just to impress you. I’d point to the best moments of Yngwie or Scotty Anderson as one starting point and Shawn Lane, Allan Holdsworth or Guthrie Gowan as three guys on the more extreme end of the spectrum of note density who have something to say.
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I’m not going to put all the fault on Rimsky-Korsakov either because the fault lies more in this particular arrangement and the parts people are leaving out as much as it is what they’re playing. Below is a piano rendition by Maxim. While it’s nowhere near the velocity of either of the guitar versions above, playing the harmonic component at the same time makes for a more nuanced (i.e. to my ears – enjoyable ) rendition.
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- As a career, it’s not sustainable and it’s not going to get you a gig. This is a little misleading. You probably can get a gig from this. If you make a world record attempt at something like this and you have a news worthy hook (like being particularly young for the child prodigy angle, or physically impaired in some way for the overcoming obstacles angle (yes – this sounds particularly harsh – but believe me, the healthy middle class 22-year-old trying for the record will have great difficulty getting air time)), you might be contacted to do a version for your regional morning show. You’ll get to the studio at some inhumanly early hour and (in a best case scenario) get enough time to run the piece and answer some questions. You’ll be replaced the next day by the local pie baker with an award-winning recipe or the local author with a new parenting book out.
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If you do get gigs from it, they’ll be clinic type gigs where you play this and (just like the end of the first video) you’ll just getting people demanding that you play it faster. Not “better” – just faster. Because all this arrangement has going for it is velocity, and just like your news story will get bumped by other local news, your speed playing will get bumped by a cool extreme sports video or another video of someone wiping out trying to do a stunt.
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I’ve mentioned some elements of this here and here as well, but being known as a really good guitar player who has the ability to chop out when you need to will serve your career in a much greater capacity than being known as the player with just a lot of chops.
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Please note:
I’m not bagging on having chops or trying to develop them (and to do so would be completely hypocritical in my case). As a musician, you have to have enough ability to express yourself on your instrument and that requires technique. But technique only exists to help serve the song and the musical moment. Technique for its own sake is a musical dead-end.
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Bonus quiz:
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Give yourself a B+ if you can name either of the names of the two guys playing the guitar videos above without looking them up. If you can name either one two days from now without looking it up give yourself an A+.
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Be the person people hit the rewind button for.
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Marty Friedman once talked about how a really great solo is the one that you’d stop the recording for and rewind to hear again.
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We remember things that touch us. We remember things that move us in some way. We share those things with other people. People that get excited about the things you do, are more likely to see you perform or seek you out and if you can move them at a show, you’ll see them again. That’s how you build an audience – one rabid fan at a time. If you touch people as a musician, you’ll be able to sustain an audience (and a career) a lot longer than someone who merely impresses them.
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Thanks for reading!
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ps – if you like this you may also like:
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VISUALIZING VIDEO GAME LICKS OR AN INTRO TO SYMMETRICAL 12 TONE GUITAR PATTERNS
MAS MODELING!! POD FARM, POD HD, SCUFFHAM AMPS AND A WHOLE TONE LICK
MELVILLE, MADNESS AND PRACTICING – OR FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON PART 2
FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON
INSPIRATION VS. INTIMIDATION
KEEPING YOUR EGO OUT OF THE SONG’S WAY
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SURVIVING THE GIG
A Lesson In Improvisation And Jargon From A Cooking Show
WARMING UP: FINGER EXERCISES, THE 3 T’S AND THE NECESSITY OF MISTAKES
BUILDING BLOCKS – OR MORE EXAMINATIONS OF A LAPTOP GUITAR SETUP
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A QUICK LICK – AND A RIG DU JOUR UPDATE FROM HO CHI MINH CITY
“THE LIMITS OF MY LANGUAGE ARE THE LIMITS OF MY WORLD”
A BRIEF THOUGHT ABOUT MUSIC THEORY
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Books:
LESSONS
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Practicing:
MELVILLE, MADNESS AND PRACTICING – OR FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON PART 2
Some Useful Online Practice Tools
POSSESSION IS 9/10S OF THE LAW BUT PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING OR PRACTICING PART VII
TESTING YOUR VOCABULARY OR PRACTICING PART VI
PRACTICE WHAT YOU PLAY OR PRACTICING PART V
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DEFINITIONS AND DOCUMENTS OR PRACTICING PART IV
TENSION AND THE SODA CAN OR PRACTICING PART III
PROPER POSTURE IS REQUIRED FOR PROPER PERFORMANCE – PRACTICING PART II
PRACTICE MAKES BETTER AKA PRACTICING PART I
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“When You Come To A Fork In The Road Take It”
A number of the motivational posts I’ve posted here center around a few key concepts:
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- Having a clear vision of what you want to do (goals)
- Aligning perception with reality (having an honest assessment of what needs to happen to reach those goals)
- Daily work on those goals
- Limiting distractions, and obstacles in the way
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The reason I come back to these posts to the extent that I do (and why I address it with myself as much as I can), is because it’s incredibly important to make the most of your time and enjoy it because time is all you’ve got. All the talent, skill, strength, brains or money in the world won’t stop you from dying eventually. Since all those things (talent, skill, strength, brains and money ) are acquired over time, in the end all you have is your time and how you’ve used it.
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Life is short and the only thing of value. Don’t waste it away.
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We live in the most technologically advanced era the world the world has ever seen, but despite (and/or because of) that technology we also live increasingly isolated existences. As a society, we often equate texting with talking and surfing the web to connecting with someone (or something).
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All we’re really doing is staring at a TV with an infinite number of channels and typing.
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There’s only limited interaction and a one way transmission of data. It’s addicting, comfortable and seductive and brings about the complacency and relaxation everyone looks for at one time or another. I’m not saying you shouldn’t relax, but I am saying that being sedentary in anything you do carries it’s own inertia (physical and psychological). The more you turn off your brain, the more likely you are to turn off your brain – even when you don’t want to.
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My father’s grandfather worked coal for the railroad every day of his teenage and adult life. It was long hours of backbreaking labor and by all accounts, he was an incredibly powerful man. When he retired, he decided that he was going to retire from everything. He sat in his favorite chair and went from someone who was active and engaged to someone with very minimal physical exertion and no real goals for the future other than not working. He died a couple of years later. I can’t prove that they’re related, by in my mind they are. By my dad’s account, he basically just decided to stopped living.
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“When You Come To A Fork In The Road – Take It”
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And this brings me back to meaningful living and navigating the overwhelming number of options available to us. Indecision is a natural byproduct of being overwhelmed. While I’m all for making an informed decision before taking action, if you spend too much time informing yourself, you won’t have any inertia to carry out what you initially wanted to do. The unexamined life may not be worth living – but the over-examined isn’t either.
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In any battle with indecision, at a certain point you have to punt. If you get overwhelmed with options, pick one and run with it until you have to switch to another. If you have a good grasp of what it is that you want to do, you’ll make changes in direction as you require to get back on track.
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It’s less important what thing you do first as long as you do something.
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Thanks for reading.
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Circumnavigating The Wall You Just Hit
It’s easy to get so caught up in the how, or the technical process of what you’re doing, that you forget the why.
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Every once in a while someone will send me a You Tube clip of some wunderkind playing a million notes and I often think, “Wow it’s impressive to spend so much time getting that down. I wonder how they’re going to use that when they’re playing Brown Eyed Girl at the local bar?” The answer, of course, is that they’re not going to play that or maybe even any song. The point of the video generally isn’t to develop something interesting in a larger musical context (like a song) but instead to promote their efforts by performing something technically difficult to get people impressed.
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I don’t fault players for this, they’re simply trying to make a connection and that’s the point of music in general. Sometimes that means playing a million notes and sometimes that happens in the silences of the music you’re playing. It’s an easy path to go down because making a connection is really hard. In addition to a lot of work, it requires experience, sincerity and no small amount of guts to leave yourself exposed. In contrast, sitting down with a metronome and getting a lick up to a quick tempo is substantially easier and the result is quantifiable. Even if people aren’t impressed, you’ll know that you got it up to speed and take some comfort in advancing your technical ability.
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But the flash of something fast will fade quickly, and what’s left is the content of what’s being said and the sincerity behind it.
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I like video game licks in certain contexts, but they’re probably not going to work on a ballad very well (even if it is a fusion track 😉 ). If you’re saying a lot of words without much meaning it’s not going to have a lot of impact.
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I’ve had gigs where everything involving making a connection turns off on the stage and while it’s not a defining moment in human history, for someone who’s being used to being connected to music it’s a pretty awful feeling. I’d even argue that this was the case for 90% of the gigs I’ve played in LA. There can be any number of reasons for this. There might be technical issues that completely pull you out of your mindset. The audience might not be there to make a connection. Things may not be jelling with the band. But most importantly, it may be your disconnect, and it’s the most important, because it’s the only performance factor that you really have control over.
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Those of you familiar with the Aesop’s fable regarding the fox and the lion will probably remember the final adage, “Familiarity Breeds Contempt “. You can put so much time into the same thing on guitar that it loses all musical meaning. The bad news is it’s probably not going to gain additional meaning on the bandstand. In all likelihood you’re going to disconnect from it further.
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The more you work with specific things the easier it is to auto pilot your way through them, and the less likely you’ll be able to connect with it. Taking that a step further, it’s going to be hard to connect to audiences if you’re disconnected from your own playing. It’s more common than you might think, and a lot of musicians go through small (or large) periods where they “weren’t feeling it”. They hit a wall.
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By it’s nature, any wall is usually made of pretty hard material so meeting it head on and trying going through it is not the best approach. I can tell you from personal experience that taking the approach of saying, “suck it up” isn’t going to get your groove back. Playing through it is exactly what you probably shouldn’t be doing because it’s just going to distance you further from the actual music when you play. It’s like when a relationship is on the rocks and you’re convinced that spending more time together will make it better when the time you spend now is stinted and awkward. The better approach in both cases is to step back and get some perspective…to go over the wall if you will…
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One man’s recommendation for dealing with the wall
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If you’re facing this right now, here are some strategies that may help.
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- Acknowledge that you’ve hit a wall. You can’t fix something you don’t recognize as a problem.
- Once you acknowledge that you’ve hit a wall, realize that while it might be big and imposing, it’s still only a wall.
- If the wall you’ve hit is from playing in general, take a break from playing for a couple of days. Spend that time trying to connect with friends or family. What you do isn’t really as important as the fact that you’re engaged and connected while you do it.
- Learn some new songs. Learn things that are very non guitaristic like vocal melodies or horn lines. Take those ideas and write something new with them.
- Go back and listen to music that inspired you. Try to find out what it was that inspired you about the music. Don’t over think or over analyze it, just try to connect with it.
- Get out of your comfort zone. Listen to music from other cultures. Read a book by an unfamiliar (but recommended author). Play with different musicians. Take a short trip somewhere you’ve never been with a friend and see some new surroundings. When I was in Phoenix, I checked out the Musical Instrument Museum and had my head turned around in a dozen different directions both by the instruments and the multimedia presentations of field recordings. I left that place with a lot of new musical ideas buzzing around my head.
- Practice playing in front of other people. Learn a new song and play it at an open mic. Make notes of when you’re connecting and when other people are connecting and make mental notes of how they’re doing it.
- When you come back to practicing, take a measured breath before you begin playing. Mark the fact that you’re about to start something to get into the zone.
- Try being mindful of what you’re practicing. Set limits on time and only practice one thing as long as you can be engaged in practicing it.
- When you play a solo – try only playing what you can sing.
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There are a lot of other things you can try, but the real goal here is to get re-engaged and bring that to your playing. As corny as it may sound, playing is an expression of who you are and where you’ve been. If you don’t have anything to say in your playing, it may be time to live a little more so you’ll have a story to tell next time you sit down…For me, it was about realizing what was wrong, taking ownership of that and moving past it to get back to making music instead of just sound again.
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Good luck to you and thanks for reading!
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Two Steps Back Or Setbacks In Project Management
Recently, I had a substantial graphics setback in one of the GuitArchitecture books that will delay publication by at least 2 months. This is the latest in a series of obstacles that have come about from starting this project, and I thought it might be beneficial to talk about the books in a little more depth and also to talk a little about dealing with setbacks in project management.
When I was at CalArts, I was a TA for Miroslav Tadic. This meant that in addition to grad studies, I was teaching 10 hours a week (all in ½ hour lessons and about an hour of built in lesson prep time). At Berklee, lessons were a fairly straightforward affair – each term had proficiencies and you had to prepare the material you needed for each proficiency over the course of the term. At CalArts, there were no proficiencies per se. Lessons were centered on student interest and what I started seeing as a commonality among guitar majors was an interest in modes, scales, chords and their applications.
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Understanding the fingerboard
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When I first learned these things – I used CAGED shapes – which really didn’t make a lot of sense to me. What was instilled in me by my teachers during this time was the concept of – you don’t have to understand it – you just have to play it. This also did not make a lot of sense to me.
I realized later on that what my teachers were trying to instill (at least what I hope my teachers were trying to instill) was the concept that you don’t have to understand it – you just have to hear it and get it under your fingers so you can play it. Having said that, if the fingering you have to work with doesn’t make any sense – you’re not going to be able to assimilate or utilize it easily.
While CAGED allows people to connect chords and scale shapes it doesn’t adapt well outside of the major scale. My method breaks all scales into modular shapes that cover the fingerboard in an intuitive way. Instead of twenty-one positional fingerings to cover major, melodic minor and harmonic minor – GuitArchitecture uses seven core fingerings to cover all of these scales. This approach allows players to break out of performance ruts and substantially reduces the need for memorization required to play scales.
In other words, it gets the notes under your fingers faster and in a way that makes sense.
The people who studied with me seemed to get a lot out this approach. When I took a pedagogy class with Susie Allen at CalArts, it made sense to take the material I codified and make a presentation out of it. I pulled 120 pages together pretty quickly and then had the idea that maybe there was a book hidden in these lesson materials that I generated.
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Forming the clay
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The approach that I use is very straight forward, but where I saw students getting hung up was in the application of the scales (i.e. breaking out of the stock forms and making music). I realized a number of method books had been done – but the majority of these books presented a scale with a 2 sentence explanation and then had 40 licks using the scale. If these happen to be licks from your favorite player, this may work for you – but it’s going to be hard to get people to practice licks for the sake of learning them in the scale.
I decided to go in a different direction from a standard lick book, and create something that would be a combination of instruction and reference. I wanted to create a book that you could get ideas from really quickly to make music – but would have enough depth to be something that readers could go back to over and over again. The first area I decided to tackle in-depth would be the issue of sequences. Here’s lesson 1 in project management:
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Build off of past experiences (or go with what you know)
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I had never seen any book that took a systematic approach to generating melodic sequences so I decided to work out the permutations to generate all possible unique melodic sequences.
When I wrote my Symmetrical 12 tone book, I used this same process to generate all of the possible 12 tone rows that could be created using symmetrical divisions of the octave (whole tone scale (6 divisions), augmented chord (3 divisions), diminished chord (4 divisions), and tritone (2 divisions). This was extremely helpful in knowing in advance what would be required in terms of mental discipline to generate these ideas. It was also a little daunting as material in the 12 tone book couldn’t be measured in hours or days – it took almost 2 ½ years of constant work from concept to cover. This brings up another important point in project management:
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Whenever possible start with the heavy lifting
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The reason for this is, as a project drags on – your endurance to complete the project will wear down exponentially to the point where even the slightest bumps in the road will have you questioning whether or not you can finish the project. You need to get whatever really ugly stuff (in terms of work) out of the way while you have the energy to do so. So I decided to start the process of generating all of the patterns and notating them.
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Beware of the rope swing
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You know those cute graphics of kids grabbing a piece of rope hanging from a tree and swinging into a lake? The story I know about a kid who did this ended differently. In the story I know, the kid was unfamiliar with the lake, swung into the shallow trying to do a flip, landed the wrong way and broke his back. Unless something’s on fire or you’re chased by zombies you should always go into the water before just diving in so you know what you’re getting into. Even knowing that, it’s easy to get into a situation and then get overwhelmed by the enormity of it no matter how well prepared you think you are. This brings up another point.
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Be realistic about what you can do
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I could have sat down for a week or two straight and probably generated all of the graphics I needed, but there would have been thousands of errors – in something where the tolerance for errors is 0%. Knowing what kind of concentration was required I did no more than 2-3 hours of work in a single sitting. This meant it took a lot longer, but the review process was ultimately easier.
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Break up overwhelming things into small chunks
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How many of you have seen Bobcat Goldthwait’s Shakes The Clown? Truly worthy of the title of “the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown films”, the opening sequence is a fade in to an apartment in squalor. While a record skips in the background, a dog is trying to choke down a full slice of pizza. Project management is like this. If you try to do all things on all frontiers at once, you’re just a dog choking on a slice of pizza in Florence Henderson’s apartment in Shakes The Clown. The key is to have a strong overall view of the project. In doing so, you can identify what else needs to be addressed and work small on multiple fronts as you need to. While working on the graphics, I also started expanding on the modal application idea and applied this same approach to modal arpeggios, modal pentatonics and modal chord voicings (and harmony). In Frankensteining these together I realized that I had a problem but
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Contortion doesn’t hurt if you’re limber
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When I assembled all of these components – I had about 2,000 pages of material. This was prohibitively expensive to produce and (in that form) something no one would read (much less purchase). If I was dead set on releasing only one volume, I’d be in a lot of trouble – but working with the material I had and creating something new gave me more options.
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Projects have a tendency to run wild on their own – so plan on constantly monitoring their growth
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The good news was that I did have an overall view of what I was trying to achieve. In reviewing the material, I realized I could severely edit the material and expand some of these areas into five full books on their own:
- The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes
- The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Melodic Patterns
- The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Modal Arpeggios
- The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Modal Pentatonics and
- The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Chords and Major Modal Harmony.
In the meantime, there was a 6th book that I was developing, The GuitArchitect’s Positional Exploration. This book had started as a technical book, but I realized mid way through that the technical issues I wanted to address would be much better served by looking at a video. So I refocused what I had to make it into something useful.
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The main modes book would have to be one of the first ones released and I wanted to get the sequences book done at the same time but the Positional Exploration book was the closest one to being done. Working within those parameters, I decided to release these three books this year and then focus on releasing the remaining books at the rate of one a year until I get to the point that I no longer want to read another book much less write one.
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Be prepared to go a lot of it on your own
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People generally have an aversion to things without proven track records. When people see something new in terms of a project, they typically want to wait and see how it’s going to work out before they get on the bandwagon. Once it gets rolling and other people sing its praises, there’s no shortage of people who will want to lend a hand or be associated with it in some way, but in the beginning expect to spend a lot of money and/or a lot of time to get the skill sets you may be missing to complete your project. Along those lines:
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Be ready to make a lot of mistakes
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Do you know the story of Thomas Edison and the creation of the light bulb? Apparently Edison tried some 3,000 filaments in creating the light bulb. There was nothing glamorous about this work. It was just shoving a bunch of different things into a light bulb to see what worked the best.
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If you’re working on any project there will be multiple points that you are literally in the dark and will have to triage a solution.
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When I first came up with the book idea, I wasn’t sure what the layout was going to be and didn’t have the money for a graphic designer. I made some initial design decisions that, once I had enough material together to really get a sense of what the book was going to be, I realized really wouldn’t work. This required a lot of labor to fix so…
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Be ready to improvise because you can’t plan for everything
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Many solutions are wrong. Unless you’ve done the same project before – there will be countless things that go wrong. Solutions to problems will not always be obvious, easy or desirable. But if you’re flexible and have a strong conviction about what the project will be when it’s done – it will be easier to adapt solutions to the project (or vice versa).
In going though the review stages of the books I realized that there was an entire graphics section I missed. Even being as methodical and meticulous about it as possible, when working on something with this scope you’ll miss things. Fixing this will now set the book back at least 2 months and while it is immensely frustrating – it’s also manageable because I know the books are going to be done this year and along those lines:
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Have a deadline or know when you’re done
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Deadlines allow you to get things done. I’d write more about this but I’ve already written on it here.
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You really can’t do it alone
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I am really fortunate in that I had a number of people who were willing to take a look at what I had done and offer feedback. Some of that feedback resulted in me realizing just how much material had to be edited further and/or corrected.
Even with innumerable revisions and examinations – it’s really difficult to catch everything. Even if you can, it’s unlikely that you’ll be objective enough about the project at that point to see all of the angles that other people see when they examine what you’re doing. This might cause a lot of discomfort in realizing that something that you thought was mostly done actually had a ways to go, but in my case, having a stronger book makes it all worthwhile. And this leads to the final point:
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The difference between 99% and 100% isn’t always 1% – sometimes it’s 100%
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The paradox of most long term projects is that the closer you get to completing the project, the more every instinct in your body will tell you to bail out on it. By the time you get to getting the project to 99% it may take as much energy as you’ve put into the project up to that point to get that final 1%. In the end, the payoff is in the 1%.
I’m bummed about doing a lot of work I’ve already done all over again, but I’m really excited about these books. I don’t think there’s really anything like them and hopefully other people will feel the same way.
I hope this helps with your long term projects!
Thanks for reading.
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If you like this post you may also like:
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Books:
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The Power Of Inertia Or Know Your Flow
While inertia is a term that refers to Newton’s 1st law of motion, I’ve always thought about inertia outside of the realm of physics and applied it psychologically. I’ve taken some liberties with Newton’s definition, “Every body remains in a state of rest or uniform motion (constant velocity) unless it is acted upon by an external unbalanced force” and tried to view it as a factor in personal development/motivation.
I saw the new A&E show, Heavy last week and it was a blunt reminder of just how powerful inertia is in our lives.
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Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.
In watching the subjects of Heavy try to transform their bodies, I was immediately struck with how difficult it can be to get something moving. As one person was exhausted and covered in sweat just walking to the gym, the personal trainer commented that, “He’s at 600 lbs. That’s like a normal person trying to walk to the gym with a refrigerator strapped to their back.”
When I thought about that for a moment, I realized that if I had a fridge strapped to my back, it would only take a couple of steps before every synapse in my body said, “Forget this. This is dumb. Just sit down.” The fact that these people worked through that to get to their short-term goal, speaks both to how difficult it can be to work through inertia, and also to how we have the ability to break out of cycles in our heads.
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The flip side of inertia is that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion
So while putting something in action can be hard, maintaining it is a lot easier than stopping it and trying to start it up again. If you build positive habits it becomes easier to maintain them over time. I’m not saying that it goes on auto pilot. If you don’t like practicing scales and have built up a new practice regimen involving playing scales – you might have days you skip. The important things are
1. that when you’re doing it – you’re really doing it
2. if you fall of the wagon make sure to get back on
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Falling off the wagon is easy, but getting back on isn’t a big deal if you’ve done it before.
I remember taking with an alcoholic who fell off the wagon in the middle of a multi-day binge and he talked about falling off the wagon like it was a high-speed train. It’s an issue of perception – if you view a habit or an action as something you have to amp yourself up to do – it’s going to make it more difficult to instill.
If you view the wagon as something that you’re either on or off –it’s going to put a lot of additional pressure (and difficulty) for you to get back on.
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Going with the flow
If you’ve ever tried to walk up a really powerful stream, you know that it’s a lot easier to follow the current than it is to fight it. In terms of productivity – it’s important to know your flow. If you know what works for you and what you’re likely to do it’s easier to work things in around that.
I’ve often found that the biggest learning curve that I’ve had in maximizing productivity has been in learning what works for me. For example, by nature I’m not a very disciplined person and I find that if I leave myself to my unorganized devices I don’t often get much done.
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Coordinates or knowing where you are
Having said that – I do tend to be an organized person. So in being organized, I find that keeping a calendar (and a practice log) help keep me focused and in focusing helps keep me disciplined.
While I keep and maintain my calendar, every time I put it aside and say – “I don’t need that – I know what I’m doing” – a week goes by and I find that I may have only gotten a fraction of the things done that I wanted to.
In keeping a weekly calendar I see not only where I’ve been but also what I’ve been doing. If I don’t get to my short-term goals, it simply means I’ve fallen off the wagon and have to get back on. The more time’s I get back on – the less likely I am to fall off.
Because I know my behavioral tendencies, I can go with the flow of those tendencies rather than fighting against them. If you’re not a morning person, getting up at 5 am to the gym is going to be an uphill battle. If you tend to be focused mid day – working out on your lunch break might work better for you. In being organized I find that keeping a calendar (and a practice log) helps keep me focused, disciplined and getting things done.
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Sometimes the last one standing is the winner
All of this works off of the concept of short and long-term goals. There are times in life that you’ll have to hustle a breakneck 50-yard dash, but life itself is a marathon.
I don’t know how many of you have ever seen Another State Of Mind (a really great get in the van with the band style documentary featuring a then largely unknown Social Distortion).
Social Distortion was on Conan last night, and while I was watching it I thought about all of the critical accolades they’ve received since Another State of Mind and wondered if Mike Ness ever imagined that he would go from spray painting the band logo on a T-shirt to still being around 26 years later.
As a guitar culture, we’ve always put emphasis on the hot-shot guitar player. You can go on You Tube and see any one of ten thousand people playing their fast licks, and most of them will be posting videos of their snowboarding jumps 2 years from now while their guitar sits unplayed and gains dust.
Social Distortion has achieved the success they have largely by being the last one standing. Largely by being around and playing so long, they simply couldn’t be ignored anymore. I also suspect that over time they started amassing a better team (management, lawyers, agents, etc) that helped amplify that process. But they never would have attracted that team if they broke up for good in the 80’s or 90’s.
I’d known about my fret hand fly-away pinky issues for years, but it wasn’t until I studied with Miroslav Tadic and Jack Sanders , that I realized how much it was holding me back. Unlearning my habits and fixing that has been a really arduous 4-year process but I can say that my playing is already in a different place than it was 2 years ago – much less before I studied with Miro. If I just stuck with the old habits I had, I never would have been able to move forward – but in taking a huge step back in my playing – I’m able to move forward now.
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Thinking isn’t Knowing
The difference is I thought I knew what I was doing was right, but it wasn’t until I experienced how wrong it was, that I knew it would have to be fixed. While I tend to conceptualize (or think) things very quickly, but it takes a long time for me to know something. That’s my flow, and while it would have been great to fix my playing at the get-go, that wasn’t going to happen until I really knew what was wrong and what to do. To know something is to experience it – and experience takes time.
If you have a plan of where you ultimately want to go (and have some flexibility in getting there) you are well on your way. In the meantime, it’s important to know what works for you and establish practices that work with your nature instead of against it.
I hope this helps! Thanks for reading.
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A Lesson In Improvisation And Jargon From A Cooking Show
Improv lessons from a cooking contest show
If you’ve ever watched a cooking competition show – you’ve probably seen some real world improvisation.
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The Challenge
- Contestants have an imposed time limit
- They have an ingredient(s) they have to use
- There is a mandated outcome – something that has to be done
How is this not improvisation? You have a skill set that you need to employ to navigate a series of changes that may or may not be unfamiliar to you.
So how do they get through it?
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The Approach
- Emphasis on fundamentals. The chefs have the confidence to execute because they have the basic skill set to do what they need to do. They have a command of knife skills, cooking techniques and have a developed palate to work from. These are basic things – using a music analogy – there’s no obscure chord scale or advanced reharmonization happening here – just using the fundamentals as a basis to establish an area of comfort and familiarity from.
- Emphasis on repertoire. They have a number of other dishes that they’ve mastered to serve as a template for what they want to do. If you’ve cooked several thousand past dishes and someone says, “I need you to make me a pasta dish” you’re not going to freak out because it’s in a comfort zone. If you quote tunes in your solos or comping – you quote tunes that you know so well that you can adapt elements of them at will. Those trills you use on that klezmer tune you play every set – works their way into a phrase, etc.
- Adaptability and creativity. This is really a combination of the two points above. There’s a constant stream of plays on things, “This is my play on mac and cheese.” Previous dishes that are mastered are used as launching points for new innovations. From a guitar standpoint – maybe those string skips you developed to get that piano solo under your fingers you liked are now being used in a different context for your thrash solo.
- Being in the moment. They taste their food. They monitor multiple components and adapt as necessary. It may be the closest analogy to improvising a solo over a rhythm section for a tune you’re unfamiliar with. You listen to the drummer, and the bassist and whoever else is playing and while you create music that enhances that.
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What the unsuccessful chefs have taught me, is that an approach that works for one thing may not work for everything. “Oh I want to wow the judges, I’d better use Truffle oil.” which may or may not work in an ice cream. I heard an mp3 of Eddie Van Halen jamming w. Holdsworth once and it was grim – because he was just doing the Eddie thing over Holdsworth’s comping and it didn’t work at all. It sounded like the bleed through of two guys in adjoining practice rooms working on something different at the same time.
When you’re in some kind of timed artificial event (i.e. they’re forced to improvise) – this approach makes sense. When dealing with something unfamiliar you go with what you know. You pull out the well-worn licks that have worked their way into your vocabulary. That’s also when you find out just how well you know something.
It’s not just about learning licks to play over ii-v->I’s – improvisation is a mindset as well – if you look for it in sources outside of music – you will find things to adapt and bring into your musical improvisations. It brings something different to the table than someone who’s learned every Coltrane and Bird lick and nothing else.
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And now as an example of what not to do: A drinking game
I don’t drink – but if you do and you’re looking for a drinking game here it goes.
- Turn on the Food Network.
- Take a drink whenever someone says , “Big Flavors” or “Flavor Profile”
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You’ll probably be drunk in an hour. It is basically impossible to watch the Food network and not have someone talk about the merits of “Big Flavors” or on some dish’s flavor profile.
And what do these terms mean? Is there anyone out there trying to cook with small flavors? And “Flavor profile”? Really? How about just calling it “taste” instead?
The thing is, this jargon has been hijacked by foodies and now it’s difficult to watch anything regarding cooking and not hear those terms. My beef with jargon is that it should serve the function of simplifying a process through language and instead typically acts in an exclusionary manner.
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Music and jargon
When I did my undergraduate degree I had to take several classes that dealt with post tonal theory. As a starting point, what does “post tonal theory” mean to anyone other than a composer or an improviser? Can you imagine seeing a CD cover with a label on it that says, “Now with Post tonal Theory!”? In terms of accessibility to the layman, it goes radically downhill from there. Where some of the music created with this mindset is vibrant and exciting, the language and jargon around it explains what’s going on only to those in the know. It makes no attempt to make inroads to the causal listener, and statistically there are way more music listeners than post tonal theorists.
Music is a language and like any language if you break away the accessibility of it, you doom it to oblivion. In the 1950’s people still actively studied Latin – it was even taught in high school until it was pushed further and further into the realms of academia (I know Chronicle of Higher Education – Academe is the new preferred jargon – but academe is a poor shell of a word), and now is only taught in a increasingly fewer places. It transitioned from a vibrant language to a patchwork of quoted phrases thrown out as part tricks.
The same thing happened to post tonal music. Inside the hallowed halls of academia, there is a compositional indoctrination that occurs; a self-congratulatory high-five for music that is performed in student recitals to crowds of 10. The theoretical language that is posted to describe these works often reads like a combination of a repair manual for a 1950s radio delivered with the melodramatic sincerity of an adolescent journal. Taken on its own merits, it reads as intellectually aloof and emotionally underdeveloped and seems to be defensive before anything has even been sounded.
If the first thing people are exposed to is inaccessible, why would they take the effort to go on? True, academia tends to support projects and approaches that reinforce the need for academia (i.e. peer reviewed journal entries that are so topic and jargon specific that only other academics will bother to read and understand (read: scrutinize) them); but this doesn’t help make the music more accessible. It brings up the question of,
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Is it music if no one hears it?
Sure it can sit in a drawer or live on a cd. But if no one is listening to it being played is it music?
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Music requires a performer and an audience.
Like any conversation it requires a speaker and a listener, and the magic is neither in the speaking or the listening – but in the communication itself. If there’s no listener, there’s no communication, and no music. This doesn’t mean that quantity equates with quality (it’s not a contest about how many listeners you have) iit’s about being inclusive rather than exclusive.
Just a thought…
Thanks for reading.
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2011: How Not To Repeat The Mistakes Of The Past Or Nothing Ever Got Done With An Excuse
I had hoped to get a few more posts in before the end of the year, but decided instead to take the last week to wind down and center. I find that this helps me not only take stock of what worked and didn’t work for me in 2010 but make sure that I’m on track for what I want to get done in the new year. As George Santayana said,
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“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
As 2010 draws to a close, I think back to many conversations I had with people 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 2011. And in some ways they have a valid point. Listening to their circumstances, 2010 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 in 2012. There’s a reason for this:
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“If you always do what you’ve always done – you’ll always get what you always got” – anon
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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.
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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 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.”
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If you approach life’s problems with the same mindset you’ve always had – and your new year’s resolution runs contrary to that mindset – your resolutions are doomed.
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I say this as a seasoned graduate of the school of hard knocks. As a person who found that while success felt a lot better – failure was a much more thorough teacher.
2010 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 2011 to address the things that didn’t work for me. So for those of you who are interested in making a real change the new year – here’s what worked for me going into 2010:
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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.“
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Take stock of what you have done and identify what needs to change.
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Have you done things that work towards that goal? If so – what have you really done?
What worked? What didn’t work? and just as importantly why did or didn’t it work – and what parameters can you put in place to make it work better?
What decisions did you make that set you back? 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 and reinforcing that things that work for you.
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Revolution not resolution
People typically make resolutions because they recognize a need for change in their life. As I said before, if you approach life’s problems with the same mindset you’ve always had – and your new year’s resolution runs contrary to that mindset – your resolution is doomed. So for me – it really isn’t about making a momentary decision – the long-lasting changes in my life have come from making lifestyle changes, setting priorities and working within those changes. It’s a revolt against what was done before instead of a compromise in a current mode of operation.
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Positive habits
Making something a daily positive habit (like brushing your teeth) makes it easier to maintain over the long haul.
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“Don’t make excuses – make it right”
– Al Little
People make excuses for things all the time. No one cares about excuses. They only care about results. Nothing ever got done with an excuse. 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.
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Be motivated to do more – Be grateful for what you have
In one last 2010 observation – I’d like to thank everyone who took a moment to come here and read what I was doing. This month had almost twice the number of hits I had in November – and fifty times the number of hits I had this time last year. It’s going to get even bigger next year. So thank you all again. I hope that 2011 is your best year yet.
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