Tag Archives: motivation

Some Observations On Inertia And A Cool Online App For Getting Things Done

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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”

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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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  1. 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”.
  2. Deal with problems individually.  Many problems are multi-tiered so break them down into individual components to make them easier to manage.
  3. 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).
  4. Have milestones and a deadline.  Know what you’re going to complete by when.
  5. 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).
  6. 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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“When You Come To A Fork In The Road Take It”

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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

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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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The Power Of Inertia Or Know Your Flow

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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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2011: How Not To Repeat The Mistakes Of The Past Or Nothing Ever Got Done With An Excuse

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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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Testing Your Vocabulary Or Practicing Part VI

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In the last post on practicing, I focused a great deal on the importance of listening in general and I’d like to focus and frame that importance a little more this time.

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Before I move on, you may want to read my previous posts on practicing.  If you have missed those posts, you can find them here: part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 and part 5.

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It’s important to realize that scales, arpeggios or any other kind of melodic or harmonic device is only a tool in the service of making music – and is not music in and of itself.

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One way to get to making music with these devices is to learn other people’s music and phrasing, either by transcribing or learning by ear.

As a guitar teacher, I occasionally to run into students who are resistant to this idea as they only want to learn “their music”.

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Learning other people’s music is learning your music because it’s part of a process in developing your voice.

The point of music is to communicate and to communicate with people you must have something to say.  This is done not only with vocabulary, but with a familiarity of language that comes from constant exposure and interaction.

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When you learn other people’s music, or licks or chord progressions you learn vocabulary.  You learn phrases that work their way into your being and begin to form your aesthetic.  When you talk about “your writing style” for something you’re writing – do you make up all of the words you are going to use?  In reality, you use words that you’ve used before.  You use phrases that you’ve seen other people use that have now become part of “your writing style”.

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If you’ve ever been around a child that’s learning to verbalize their thoughts – you’ve heard a lot of sounds coming out that are not recognizable as words (much less sentences).  It can be a real struggle to determine what it is that the child is attempting to do (or perhaps wants).  If you were to isolate that child at a certain point of development and refuse to interact verbally, the child would eventually develop his or her own language – but it would be completely inaccessible to you.  You would be unable to communicate verbally with the child and have to do things visually to convey ideas.

I’ve heard some singer/songwriter music that was done with this mindset.  The lyrics represent things that are so personal that it is impossible to gain any meaning from them without an intimate knowledge of the person.  Harmonically (because the performers use sounds that “are theirs” and nothing more),  the approach is severely limited and the chord progressions tend to all sound the same.  If you’ve ever had this experience you may find that you tend to tune out after a song or two as I do.

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Learning vocabulary

When learning vocabulary, there are several steps (this is a profoundly oversimplified list):

  1. Exposure (or more likely multiple exposures) to a word (usually in a context)
  2. Use of the word
  3. Integration of the word into conversation/writing etc.

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This means that there is a lot of word use to get to the point of integration.  In musical terms, you may have to shed a lick or phrase a lot not only from a technical standpoint (use of the phrase), but also to have it be “available” when you’re improvising (integration).  And this is a real test of your vocabulary.

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You might think you have something down – but no matter how much you shed something,

if you can’t access it when you’re improvising – it’s not fully integrated into your playing.

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It’s important to realize that integrating vocabulary is a conscious decision.  It isn’t passive at all.  Just because I hear a sound – doesn’t mean I know what it is or how to react to it. This is the real difference between hearing and listening.

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Hearing is biological, listening is mental.

You can get a lot from working with transcription software (like transcribe) and using it as a phrase trainer (i.e. taking an advanced technical or shred lick and slowing it down to such a slow speed that it becomes playable).

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Don’t be afraid of working on complex solos or phrases!

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All you have to do is:

slow it down and

break it into small components that you can play and

try to increase the speed a little every day.

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In this way you’re actually getting more complex patterns under your fingers and gaining some refined ideas to draw upon.  By working in this manner, you can develop phrases so that you have something that you can use at a variety of tempos. Having ideas that work in a number of contexts  makes it easier to integrate into your playing..

If this is an area of interest, you may also want to read this post on music as language.  You can also find some posts that may help with practice/motivation stating with one on focus here, a thought on music theory in performance here, or the importance of deadlines here.

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I hope this helps!  Thanks for dropping by!

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If you like this post you may also like:

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PRACTICE MAKES BETTER AKA PRACTICING PART I

PROPER POSTURE IS REQUIRED FOR PROPER PERFORMANCE – PRACTICING PART II

TENSION AND THE SODA CAN OR PRACTICING PART III

DEFINITIONS AND DOCUMENTS OR PRACTICING PART IV

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PRACTICE WHAT YOU PLAY OR PRACTICING PART V

TESTING YOUR VOCABULARY OR PRACTICING PART VI

POSSESSION IS 9/10S OF THE LAW BUT PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING OR PRACTICING PART VII

Some Useful Online Practice Tools

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FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON

MELVILLE, MADNESS AND PRACTICING – OR FINDING THE DEEPER LESSON PART 2

INSPIRATION VS. INTIMIDATION

What’s wrong with playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” for a world speed record?

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“The limits of my language are the limits of my world”

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If you want to be a great guitarist you should try to develop and nurture passion for other art or music that has nothing to do with guitar and adapt or assimilate those things in your playing.

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Story Time

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Please allow me to share a story with you.  This is a true story, but the names have been removed to protect the guilty.

Once upon a time, there was a doe-eyed child trapped in a 17 year old body who left his small town of 2,000 people and went to a big city to study guitar.  The institution of learning he went to study guitar at was a very big place with several thousand musicians.  At the absolute minimum it was completely overwhelming for him as an experience.  He went to the school knowing his ass was going to get kicked – but not knowing that saying his ass would get kicked would be more like telling the parachuter mid jump when his/her chute wouldn’t open he/she might break a bone from the fall when they “bounced” (yes “bounced” is the technical term for this occurrence and yes, it happens often enough that a term needed to be developed).

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It kind of broke him.

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In addition to the culture shock of being in a city, rather than a place he described as “Deliverence with snow”, he found the school had a real focus on Jazz and anything non-Jazz was looked upon with complete derision.  He was bombarded with fellow students and faculty telling him the music he liked – the music that was a part of his soul –  was trash and he was wasting his time with it because Jazz was the only music that mattered.  So he did what anyone from a small working class town would do, he became a walking middle finger to anything Jazz because he thought that it was the only way he could defend his identity.  The moment that door was shut was the moment his undergrad experience was doomed.

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Now to be fair, the blame for this was 50-50.  He had no understanding of Jazz as a style.  

Where he grew up in upstate NY, Classic Rock radio and top 40 was the staple and those were his primary means of musical exploration.  But the problem was the curriculum was based around an academic buy-in for Jazz pedagogy, so if you knew nothing about it stylistically – there was no easy way in.  It was just simply rammed down your throat and you either swallowed or spat it out.

In his lesson – a weekly 1/2 hour slot – he and his teacher went over a series of proficiency requirements that were necessary to pass the final exam.  The student asked questions about why he needed this material and how he could utilize the material in the rock and metal music he was playing –  but he was just told these were tools he needed to play Jazz.  And given what we’ve said about his (now visceral) reaction to Jazz you can imagine how well this was received.

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His second semester he found another teacher and this teacher was more understanding about what he was trying to do and who shared a lot of his interests.  The two of them started delving into Japanese modes and other concepts and he actually got excited about what he was doing.   The student asked his new teacher if they could just keep going in this direction instead of focusing on rote memorizations of reharmonized chord-solo renditions of tunes that he didn’t need solo renditions.  The teacher said to talk with the chair of the department and get his approval.

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The chair of the department was newly appointed, had a lot of work to do and was not happy with the prospect of meeting with this student.  The student explained he had a very specific direction that he wanted to go in his playing, that this direction didn’t coincide with the narrow parameters of the proficiencies and then asked the chair if there was any way that he could be accommodated.  The chair informed him that wasn’t what they did at the school.  The purpose of the school (according to the chair) was to have students master that particular school’s style and then when the student got out he or she would have the rest of their carer to develop their own style.

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The student said that while he realized he was only a student – the logic of the argument evaded him.  Actually, in the interest of honest reporting and to exclude any pretense of articulation what he said was,

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“Look I know I don’t know anything – but that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.  There’s only 12 notes – that’s the substance.  Everything else is style.  What is the point of having 800 people all walking out of here and all sounding exactly the same?  Isn’t my style the only thing that’s going to make me different from every other guitarist out there?”

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The student was then told that was the way it was and he could either take it or leave it.  

The student thanked the chair for his time, walked over to another office and submitted a change of major form.

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Music is a language.  If you learn it as a language – immersing yourself in it, learning vocabulary, speaking it to others as often as possible – you will gain fluidity in it.

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I want to discus vocabulary for a moment and then discuss the issue of style.  One way to think of licks is as musical vocabulary.  As a musician, you learn a bunch of licks so you can communicate with other musicians.  It’s similar to going on any trip or travel.  You might not speak a foreign language – but you should at least learn how to say a few words or phrases to try to get you by.

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If you only learn licks from one source –

it will be difficult to not sound like that source.

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If I go to a show and see a guitar player I can tell you usually in a song or two who he’s listened to.  If it’s only guitar players I probably won’t make it to song #3.  Going back to the language analogy, if you grow up in New Jersey and everyone you know and speak with is from New Jersey – you’re going to have to work hard to get a Texas accent sounding authentic, much less an Irish or Spanish one.  Do you have to learn other accents?  No.  No one is forcing you to do so but it’s important to realize that…

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all of your experiences influence how you communicate with other people.

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Hence the Wittgenstein quote in the article.  For those of you who remember Orwell’s “1984” – there was the idea of newspeak,  the language that kept getting smaller each year for the purposes of eradicating thoughtcrime.  The less you experience in the world, the less you are able to express.  This is why 13 year old children writing love songs do not have the lyrical content to truly plumb the depths of the soul, even though they are often supremely confident that they do.

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If your experiences influence how you speak with other people then it stands to reason they can effect how you play with other people.  If, for example, four guys in a room have only listed to, played and learned “Smoke on the water” – they’re not going to write “Giant Steps” on their own any time soon.  They’re going to play “Smoke on the water” and if they do write something new, it will probably have a lot of similarities to “Smoke on the water”.  (Traveler’s advisory – do not party with these guys.)

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Adaptation and the hidden agenda

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This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t learn other people’s licks.  It’s vital that you do – because you have to develop vocabulary, but I highly recommend you vary your sources.  If you play guitar, try learning music played on other stringed instruments like violin, or from non-string performances like vocal lines.  My rhythm playing is rhythmically informed by things like drum rudiments, flamenco foot work and rhythmic phonetics.  My single line playing is rooted in rock, but there’s various Hindustani, Balkan, Arabic and Koto references that are specific to things I do.

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Almost every gig I’ve ever played I got because I put energy into learning things that weren’t guitaristic and adapting them.  You’ll never confuse my guitar with a Kayagum – but if I play a note with a sharp bend and crazy vibrato it doesn’t sound like a guitar lick either.  It crosses a boundary and becomes something new.  And here is the hidden agenda.

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When it becomes new, it becomes yours and things that are yours have extra value.

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In addition to this, try cultivating artistic influences from things that are not guitar related.  

The painter Francis Bacon probably influenced me at least as much as Hendrix and his works are a model for me in expressing motion and fluidity through art.  I’m passionate about books and films and I try to adapt anything worthwhile in those experiences into my playing.

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Acquiring tastes

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A funny thing happened to that student after he got out of school.  He started playing with a lot of other players who had opened their minds instead of closing them and those people hipped him to a lot of music – including Ornette Coleman and Ornette was making some of the most wonderful music he had ever heard.  The student found that when it wasn’t being force fed to him as the only viable form of musical expression that there were a lot of great artists and great music being made in the genre and years later (with a little maturity and perspective behind him) he became a fan and started adopting a number of ideas and approaches from the style into his playing.

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The important thing is to find things that you are passionate about and explore, adapt and/or assimilate them to the fullest level you can.

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The limits of your musical language are the limits of your style.

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As always thanks for reading!

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Seeing the forest instead of the tree

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This is a re-post of an entry I made in response to a post on Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog.  The specific entry that I was responding to regarded building a career as an artist.  That post can be found here.  It gave some advice to people who wanted to be artists and included the following bolded points:

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  1. You cannot do art if you are starving.
  2. Art emanating from a black hole is a choice.
  3. Real artists will make art no matter what.
  4. You do not need to quit your day job.
  5. You are not a better artist if you can do it full time.

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The bullet points don’t really do the post justice.  I think Penelope had a lot of good reasoning behind what she posted and I’d recommend that you check it out.  As you might imagine, there was a lot of controversy in the comments following her post with some people were very supportive and some were very resistant.

This post is ultimately about focus and about working through short and long terms goals and setting priorities.

Currently, I don’t perform music as a full-time gig because the music that I want to play traditionally does not make a lot of money and music is too important to me to play in situations I don’t want to play in ONLY for money.  If the right gig came along – or the right circumstances allowed me to do what I do on guitar full-time – then I would certainly do so.  I’m sure that I can position myself into that place ultimately but, in the meantime, there are other things that I’m not willing to compromise on in regards to my music or my life (like healthcare which would be impossible to swing on a $50/night gig) in the short-term.

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By being a little selective in gigs and playing situations – I can bring a lot more to the table when I play.  By being selective in lessons, I can fully engage myself in helping someone rather than just trying to herd as many people through as possible just to make rent.


I’ve edited the post to fit the context of this blog better but have kept the majority of the content intact.

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Re: How to build a career as an artist

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“I’m not sure what the median age of the reader of this specific post is. Outside of regular readers,  I would guess that the primary readers are a). people who are out of undergrad , working a day job and are here because someone forwarded a link of encouragement or b). people who have artistic pasts (and presents) and balance that with another income. This post is more for those of you who are recently out of college and facing both massive debt and doubt – because I’ve been there myself.

This will probably be a long post, but I am putting it here because this is information that would have helped me immensely after school and perhaps it will help you.

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Kafka and Ives


In balancing art and non-artistic work, there are many historical precedents with a fomous one being Franz Kafka – who balanced his writing with working in an insurance company. (Kafka would also read bits of “The Trial” at parties and laugh uncontrollably, so you can take that and some of the biggest daddy issues ever committed to print and ask how well that’s truly balanced.  To be fair, this was more of a question of Kafka’s balance as a person and not his balance of white collar and white knuckle work.)

In music, the specific example that is often given of this balance is the American composer Charles Ives.  Ives lived in musical obscurity at the beginning of the 20th century and wrote some of the most challenging music imaginable. While little of it was played in his lifetime, Ives would go on to become one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.  Aside from his musical work, he was also the vice president of an insurance agency and continued to write and work for much of his life. Add the fact that very few people recognized the genius of his work and that much of his music was never played during his lifetime and you have a classic story of artistic struggle.  

This is typically heralded as an example of how to balance art and non-art work.  That is until you read any one of his biographies and get to the part of his life where one night he came down the stairs of his home crying and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’  For the last 20 years of his life, he never wrote another note of music.

While this (the Brazen Careerist) post has some really solid advice, the one thing that is inferred, but not said explicitly, is that art takes time. There are technical skills required to create any kind of art – and the maintenance and advancement of those skills takes concentrated and focused time. The core question at work here seems to be, ‘What are my priorities?’

I’ll insert a temporary diversion here: one thing to consider in an arts education – formal or informal – is that many artists focus on the ‘how’ of their art but not the ‘why’. The importance of this issue can not be overstated.

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If you have a solid understanding of why you do the things you do, then the question of how will be more easily resolved.


As an example of priorities, if you find that you’re spending more time at the bar with friends then you are working on your art – your priorities are telling you something. For some people, this is merely an issue of time management. But for others, their priorities are out of whack with their perception of reality.

If your concept of why you create art is clear, then a day job is nothing more than a vehicle for income while you work on your art and the challenge is in utilizing the elements of the day job that work for you.

I will use a personal example. A while back, I was several years out of my undergrad school and playing a GB (General Business – like a cover band) gig. You see, the thing about making money playing music is that most of the gigs that pay are gigs like this one. While you will run in circles with people who can’t play their way out of a paper bag, you will also find extraordinary musicians with major credentials playing at the same crappy bar as you because – it’s a paying gig.

So in this story –  I was playing cheesy music I loathed in a strange trio (the person who got me the gig said, ‘some of their tunes are dangerously close to grooving’) in some dive restaurant in the middle of nowhere for people who didn’t care.  At this point in my life, I was completely despondent.  I was working a day job for benefits and to pay off my school loan, and doing this gig on weekends to keep my chops up and I just felt awful.  It suddenly occurred to me, ‘Wait a minute. Why do I feel this way?  The whole reason I started playing music was because it felt good, and now every time I pick up my instrument I just feel bad.  I don’t EVER want to feel this way when I play music.’

And so I quit. I figured that I would work hard, pay off my school debt and do something else with my life.

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But the things in life that are important to you stay inside of you, even in their absence.


It took a while, but I started realizing that it was the loss of my connection to my instrument that caused me such pain . I couldn’t quit music – because music had become an integral part of who I was.  I couldn’t get rid of music any more than I could get rid of my skin.

So I kept my job.  And then got one that paid better.  I played in a lot of local bands that paid nothing, but because I had a day job IT DIDN’T MATTER that it paid nothing.  I played the music, because I enjoyed the music.  In looking at the club scene in Boston and weighing my options, I decided that, for me, the best balance would be teaching music in a college environment. Teaching was something that I did well. It allowed me to give back to beginning musicians and it would give me the flexibility to pursue my music on my own terms. To do this, I needed a master’s degree. I worked hard and got a scholarship to a well regarded school on the opposite coast of where I lived.  I got my degree,  got another gig and another day job to pay bills and now am working towards that goal. Was going to grad school in my 30’s an easy thing to do? Not at all.  It was a culture shock and a calculated gamble.  But it was necessary for what I wanted to do in the long run.

Some people (on the post replies) have suggested that going to grad school is a waste of money and time.  So I can’t say, ‘don’t waste your money on grad school’.  Even though I had a scholarship and was working – I still had to take out loans to cover the difference.  My advice is if you DO go to grad school have a VERY clear idea of what it is you want to do with that degree.  Also have a very clear idea of what the expenses behind school mean to you in the short and long-term as well.

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Many of the paying opportunities that come to an artist will require doing things that you might not want to do. If you understand the WHY of what you do, those issues will be easier for you to resolve.


I’m married so also realize that my priorities are different from what they were 20 years ago. If someone came up to me at 17 and said, ‘Hey we have a rock band and we’re going on tour. We have no idea about money or food or where we’ll sleep but you will be able to play in front of people every night for the next couple of months.’ there’s no question I would have gone (this happened at 25 and I was promised some money but the result was actually the same).

But once you start working with issues like rent and bills – money becomes an issue.  Once you start waking up on strange people’s floors to the house pet eating its own vomit several inches away from your face – accommodations start to become more of an issue.

One final observation along this issue of why:

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It’s important to realize that some people are artists and some are artisans.


To me, an artisan is a person with a high technical skill set who enjoys the physical activity associated with that skill. For example, my mom is a tolle painter. She would be perfectly happy to paint the same items over and over again – because she enjoys the act of painting. As a musician friend of mine once said, “I don’t care what I play – I just want to play the guitar.”

An artist by contrast is someone who enjoys the physical activity associated with creation. To the artist, painting the same flower over and over is an anathema to their existence. The WHY of their art is based in discovery.

And it’s important to know which one of these you are.  In recognizing what you want to do – you can make decisions that support those goals.

I don’t know if this helps any of you. I have strong feelings about this because I’ve been able to do both for a while and am finally moving towards being able to synthesize the two.

If you can walk away from this post with only one piece of advice – try this one: Life is a marathon and not a 50 yard dash. There will be times that you want to give up, times that is goes easy and times of incredible difficulty – but know that if you have the long-term goals in sight – that will be what keeps you going.  If you go into a marathon with a 50 yard dash mentality you’re going to crack at the first real hardship.  As Bukowski once said, ‘Endurance is more important than the truth.’

Good luck.  Expect to be your own critic and your own cheering section.”

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Be aware when your perception is myopic and never give up.


As it says in the Hagakure, “7 times down – 8 times up”.

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I hope this helps!

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Focus, music and the marathon mentality

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One thing that I try to emphasize with students (or anyone that’s willing to listen) is that achieving anything worthwhile typically requires dedication and commitment.  In pacing terms, musical proficiency isn’t a 50 yard dash – it’s a marathon.  It something that requires a lot of training and an understanding of pacing.  

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If you go full bore and don’t pace yourself properly you’ll burn yourself out before you reach your goals.  

Not reaching your goals is also a possibility if you don’t push yourself hard enough.

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Keeping an end goal in sight can be a difficult thing to maintain.  This will be a general theme that will thread its way through a series of short articles that will get posted here regarding the general topic of practicing.  In my own life, tackling 2000 pages of manuscript and trying to wrestle them in a series of books is both invigorating and overwhelming.

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One site that has posted a lot of really good observations about maintaining goals and focus is Mike Torres’ refocuser site (http://www.refocuser.com).  There are some really salient points there and for a more immediate resource in goal setting you may want to head over to his 12 goals site (http://www.12goals.com). Some good general information that can be directly applied to getting things done on the guitar (or maybe in other areas of your life as well).

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Thanks for reading!

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