The Art of Effective Practice (Part 3)

Ok,final two tips for effective practice. Here we go!

Practice tip 6:

Let the result be what it will be kind to yourself and accept your moving energy.

One of my favourite books about music is called the Advancing Guitarist by Mick Goodrick. It is kind of offbeat and forces you to engage with it in a way that pushes you be creative in your practice, but also demands a lot of deep study and hard work. In the book’s closing pages, Goodrick spends some time reflecting on the nature of playing music and how it evolves in one’s musical journey, with the quip, “A concert in Dayton on April 12, 1975 only happens once!”

So what he is he getting at here? He is saying that, even though you are working on your playing, spending a lifetime internalising it and understanding it, the result of this is that any output that comes from it just happens through this tiny window that is never again repeated. So there is not much point attach too much importance to these experiences after they have taken place.

Like you know the feeling right? Sometimes you play really well at a gig or on your own or whatever. Or you write some music that you know is amazing and it just flows so easily. And immediately you seem to attach yourself to this experience. But then that next time you play, you are shocked to find things are not coming as easily any more. You play differently and you can’t figure out why you seem to have gone backwards. What has happened? And it gets weirder, because so often it seems that you play better when you don’t care if you play well! And if you need to really play well sometimes this just messes with your mind, and it comes out terrible. And sometimes any note you play sounds absolutely perfect and exciting. But at other times it all sounds like all the stuff you always do and you don’t like it at all. Sometimes when you are composing it seems to take hours to get just a few notes. At other times music just seems to write itself. I used to find when I practiced a lot I would get kind of exhausted with music and never played well at at gigs because my mind just needed a break, such a frustration when you are starting out.

So what do you do with this situation? Just try and remember, play and compose where you are at, don’t worry, and just come to it each day. Some days in music you find everything is easy, some days it is hard. Sometimes we sound great, sometimes we don’t. And when you think about it, its incredible to have this amazingly sophisticated machinery in our minds that lets us create patterns with sound in time. And with something so amazing, it makes sense that it gets a little complex to manage at times. So stay cool and accept that it is about coming into a way of being, not arriving at a formula or result.

Practice tip 7:

Music does not make sense without other people. They are your process. That is how music works.

So this last one is not so much a practice tip. But maybe it is because, it about maintaining longevity in your attachment to music. I have studied music for around 40 years now, and it has always been a big part of my life. But I came to realise that it music is actually about something else entirely, it is this amazing way to move energy between people. It is a form of communication, beyond semantics and articulated meaning, where everything drops away and there is just connection.

For me, music is the form of communication between human beings and you need others to sustain it in your life. I have realised that music does not matter for me unless I have someone to share it with. It is a form of communication in which one does not have to worry about the specifics of information transfer, or of some kind of underlying utility, where there is no need to define boundaries between self and other, but just about connecting entities who are themselves in a constant state of change, where the boundaries of self and other cease to matter. And so in this sense, music is just other people.

And I guess that brings me full circle to how it is that music works. Time for you to go do some practice!