missclarktree
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Post by missclarktree on Mar 28, 2016 8:52:25 GMT
After a couple of weeks feeling extremely downhearted and discouraged, I came across the following. I realise his style won't be everyone's cup of tea, but he summarised exactly how I'd been feeling, and now I don't feel like that any more. I can see a way forward again, as if I'd had counselling.
So if anyone else needs counselling/therapy, I hope this will help.
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Post by creamburmese on Mar 28, 2016 15:48:15 GMT
Thanks for posting this and I'm really glad it helped you regain enthusiasm.... I too have been feeling dispirited the last few weeks - although how much of that is lack of sunshine is hard to tell! For me it was a combination of glacial progress on a piece I'm learning and a total complete and abject failure to master a series trills - the 2 main things I am working on at the moment. I'm not sure this video helped me that much, though it did remind me that going away and doing something else, either musically or not, is the best approach when you are beating yourself over the head and getting nowhere. I recently read that allowing the brain to consolidate is necessary, even when repeating the same passage you are learning (ie wait a few seconds before repeating). Anyway this weekend I sat myself down and tried to reevaluate after I had considered and rejected various negative options (such as give up orchestra, find a new teacher etc ). First I assessed the thought that I was not learning anything new - I've only had 2 new pieces since December and can only sort of play one of them. Admittedly this is not much progress for 3 months, but then It occurred to me that I have also learned 5 new orchestra pieces representing nearly an hour of music in the same time frame. So that doesn't look so bad after all. Then I considered that despite weeks of specific practice I still couldn't do the *** trills or fret some particularly gnarly passages. However there was progress on other fronts - I've been playing above the 12th fret, doing artificial harmonics and some interesting barre chords so maybe there's hope Despite this my alarm bells started going off because playing was beginning to feel like work - so I dug out a simple jazzy piece I had really liked the sound of but which my teacher dismissed. I worked on that for a bit and I can nearly play the whole first page already. Halleluja! A sense of accomplishment! Maybe it's good to step out of the fast lane for a while... I'm not sure the video guy is correct about classical guitarists though - the ones I know can do a pretty nifty job of improvising if they choose - but the issue is what drives them. Me I'm on the side of the fence that says I want to be able to play wonderful music written by talented composers, rather than try to come up with something myself - though this is probably influenced by the fact that I don't have an original musical thought in my head. Maybe that's why different guitarists go in different directions in the first place ....
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missclarktree
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Post by missclarktree on Mar 28, 2016 16:52:10 GMT
creamburmese I'm glad you're enjoying your "jazzy" piece, and I do think it's vital for us to do whatever we can to boost morale. If all we do is keep trying and failing to make progress it's just too discouraging. Are you enjoying the guitar orchestra? Does it give you a bit of encouragement? I was on a real downer over the weekend, thinking that I used to play simple pieces badly, now I play slightly more complicated pieces badly. I've never posted a tune on here that hasn't got mistakes and hesitations in it, no matter how hard I've tried to get it right. In fact, the harder I try, the worse it gets. I'm definitely one of the classical players (or learners!) that he talks about. I can't play anything unless it's written down, can't improvise, can't compose, dodn't know any chords, don't know how to play with other people, etc. I realised how little I knew when my nearly-3-year-old grandson asked me to play "Wheels on the Bus" and I didn't know where to begin - just looked at him blankly. I'm taking Mr 'LickNRiff's' advice to spend shorter periods of time practising a variety of tunes. I'm working on two flamenco tunes, one classical and one song with strummed chords, possibly varying it a bit and picking out the odd melody note instead of singing. I hope to broaden out a bit, and to stop worrying about progress. I'm glad you said you want to play wonderful music by talented composers. The idea that we 'should' be able to compose is another potential source of pressure and feelings of inadequacy. It might be good to aspire to arranging (eventually) rather than composing. I hope you wake up one morning and find you can play ***trills, as he says should happen.
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ocarolan
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Post by ocarolan on Mar 28, 2016 17:22:40 GMT
........................ I was on a real downer over the weekend, thinking that I used to play simple pieces badly, now I play slightly more complicated pieces badly.................. That's progress then innit Alison?! (Provided that you don't still play the simple pieces quite so badly anyway!) The thing about learning a musical instrument is that it's like climbing an endless staircase. You never get to the top; it's an effort to climb each stair; there's always another huge step that looks just like all the others right in front of you which occupies all your attention. It can be good to look behind you now and again in order to realise how many steps you have actually climbed since starting at the bottom... Keith
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Post by creamburmese on Mar 28, 2016 18:19:10 GMT
It can be good to look behind you now and again in order to realise how many steps you have actually climbed since starting at the bottom... Keith Good point. Though I probably can't play the pieces I was playing a year ago unless I've been playing them in the interim... I guess a year ago I wouldn't have considered the jazzy piece to be "easy" though... maybe my memory is playing tricks on me. I still can't look at notes on a page and tell if it's going to be a struggle or straightforward - unless the notes are particularly dense that is - and then I know I'm in trouble I think I should go back to recording stuff on the iphone so I can see if it sounds any better - however there is always the sneaking suspicion that it won't! Alison you are your own worst critic. If you don't point out the mistakes, I wouldn't even notice them LOL!
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Post by creamburmese on Mar 28, 2016 18:33:53 GMT
In answer to the question Alison - guitar orchestra is a love-hate relationship. I like the camaraderie and the fact that it's a chance to get together with friends and make music. I like being part of the final product when we can actually more or less play it together. Rehearsals with our Australian-born conductor are a hoot! And I like the sense of accomplishment and being able to perform (it's the only time I play in front of other people cos I'm safely hidden in the midst of a dozen others ). I appreciate being forced to do things I wouldn't otherwise - like trills, for instance However I don't like the serious work involved in learning the pieces so I can play them while looking at the music at the same time, I hate putting in all that work and not having anything (something I can personally play) to show for it at the end, and the fact that it takes away from me learning my own pieces. And finally I think the musical choices of our conductor suck - he has a fondness for new works and musically speaking in some of them it's hard to tell the right notes from the wrong ones!
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missclarktree
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Post by missclarktree on Mar 28, 2016 18:34:02 GMT
It can be good to look behind you now and again in order to realise how many steps you have actually climbed since starting at the bottom... Keith I think I should go back to recording stuff on the iphone so I can see if it sounds any better - however there is always the sneaking suspicion that it won't! Alison you are your own worst critic. If you don't point out the mistakes, I wouldn't even notice them LOL! Keith ocarolan, perhaps it might be an idea to re-do a couple of my earliest recordings to prove to myself that I'm further up the staircase than I was a year or two ago. Julie creamburmese, that sounds like a good idea. I'm sure you will hear a difference - you've posted some lovely tunes on here that you played really nicely.
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Post by vikingblues on Mar 29, 2016 7:50:58 GMT
I'm glad the downhearted feeling has been eased Alison. In that sense, however much we may disagree with some of the points made in the video it has obviously proved useful. I do feel that there is far too much emphasis in musical teaching on goal setting - in fact too much of this in all sorts of teaching. While agreeing that goals can be useful as targets all too often they end up as the be all and end all. This I feel is hugely damaging to the confidence and enthusiasm when things don't go so well. I am a devout believer in Michael "Hawkeye" Herman's maxim - to enjoy the journey and don't think so much about the destination. It's a good point because having reached a destination what do we have - another goal and another destination to fret about! The creation of music should be a wonderful journey. The video touched upon listening to your own playing - I would add to that my feeling that there are two ways of listening to music we play. As a passive listener or as a creative player - I'll call the latter being an active listener. I found them to be very different ways of listening, and I did not get the beginnings of being an active listener until doing some fairly intensive ear training and improvisation work. Reaching the stage that I could start to hear notes I wanted to play in my head and being able to play them on the fly as I thought about them unlocked some strange door and allowed me to actively listen. It made a huge difference to my playing and creativity. I'm not sure I can describe the way it changes the listening process - I just recall it as a bit of a seismic shift. A real danger for me in repeatedly practising what I find impossible is that all that is doing is building up muscle memory to make those mistakes time after time. I also feel that too little emphasis is placed on visualisation in teaching music. A useful tool even right down to basics - playing a series of chords and visualising the changes before they happen can help a great deal. I do find that if I can't do a particular exercise then correct visualisation can be helpful. I recall from my golfing days (long ago) how important visualisation was - plotting the trajectory of the ball in your mind causing the muscles to do what they did last time that decent shot happened. Compared to thinking "I mustn't slice this ball into the sea" and then watching that slice happen because that's what your brain was telling your muscles to do. Doing regular recordings can be a good way to monitor progress - you do forget how awful things were once compared to now and concrete evidence of this from an old recording can be a nice boost. Above all it's probably best to remind ourselves that this making music on guitar should be fun. I think there's enough things in life we have to do that aren't fun without having to add our musical hobby to that list. Mark
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Post by earthbalm on Mar 29, 2016 8:16:00 GMT
I'm glad the downhearted feeling has been eased Alison. In that sense, however much we may disagree with some of the points made in the video it has obviously proved useful. I do feel that there is far too much emphasis in musical teaching on goal setting - in fact too much of this in all sorts of teaching. While agreeing that goals can be useful as targets all too often they end up as the be all and end all. This I feel is hugely damaging to the confidence and enthusiasm when things don't go so well. I am a devout believer in Michael "Hawkeye" Herman's maxim - to enjoy the journey and don't think so much about the destination. It's a good point because having reached a destination what do we have - another goal and another destination to fret about! The creation of music should be a wonderful journey. The video touched upon listening to your own playing - I would add to that my feeling that there are two ways of listening to music we play. As a passive listener or as a creative player - I'll call the latter being an active listener. I found them to be very different ways of listening, and I did not get the beginnings of being an active listener until doing some fairly intensive ear training and improvisation work. Reaching the stage that I could start to hear notes I wanted to play in my head and being able to play them on the fly as I thought about them unlocked some strange door and allowed me to actively listen. It made a huge difference to my playing and creativity. I'm not sure I can describe the way it changes the listening process - I just recall it as a bit of a seismic shift. A real danger for me in repeatedly practising what I find impossible is that all that is doing is building up muscle memory to make those mistakes time after time. I also feel that too little emphasis is placed on visualisation in teaching music. A useful tool even right down to basics - playing a series of chords and visualising the changes before they happen can help a great deal. I do find that if I can't do a particular exercise then correct visualisation can be helpful. I recall from my golfing days (long ago) how important visualisation was - plotting the trajectory of the ball in your mind causing the muscles to do what they did last time that decent shot happened. Compared to thinking "I mustn't slice this ball into the sea" and then watching that slice happen because that's what your brain was telling your muscles to do. Doing regular recordings can be a good way to monitor progress - you do forget how awful things were once compared to now and concrete evidence of this from an old recording can be a nice boost. Above all it's probably best to remind ourselves that this making music on guitar should be fun. I think there's enough things in life we have to do that aren't fun without having to add our musical hobby to that list. Mark In primary school, we are always goal chasing. My argument is that this presupposes a single pathway through learning which we all know is nonsense, most people's learning is non linear, non continuous and dependant on many things outside of the actual task you're engaged in. I've known many children understand mathematical concepts graded level five before understanding something graded level four. I like the idea of enjoying the journey, living in the now. Thanks for all of the posts. I'll continue to keep my beady little eye on tis thread.
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missclarktree
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Post by missclarktree on Mar 29, 2016 16:42:48 GMT
vikingblues and earthbalm, you're absolutely right about enjoying the journey. I seem to have forgotten that, temporarily, on account of trying to record a long tune, repeating the same mistakes and adding new ones every time. It won't happen again!
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