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DOUBLE
TROUBLE
By Jamie Andreas (www.guitarprinciples.com)
There are some
aspects and levels of the teaching process for guitar that are very
subtle, very hard to convey in words. I think I would go so far as to
say they are impossible to convey in words. These understandings can
only be conveyed by direct experience. In like fashion, there are things
I must do with various students I work with, in order to get them past
their particular and present obstacles, that would be impossible to
do without face to face teaching. Sometimes it is a matter of needing
to touch someone's arm or hand in order to bring their attention to
some subtle sensation they are unable to recognize. Sometimes, it is
a matter of making certain judgments about what is going on; judgments
that can only be made over a period of time spent observing and analyzing
(this is why I often cannot answer with certainty when people write
about playing problems).
One of these situations came up recently with my student Jim who comes
in from Chicago. It was a situation I have dealt with many times, and
is not uncommon. It is a situation of confusion many students get into,
and, I have to confess, part of the reason they get into it is my teachings!
I am always emphasizing a careful working up of speed, and backing off
from discomfort, and yet there are critical points of development where
we must push ourselves into our discomfort!
Because I am always emphasizing "relaxation," and the need for the most
careful approach to working up speed, learning new techniques, and practice
in general, students will sometimes get really paranoid about practicing,
after learning from me that they are suffering from chronic body tension
due to years of rushed and tense movements! They get the idea that I
am telling them that ANY body sensation is bad, as though they are looking
for some state of complete numbness, thinking that is what I am recommending.
I am not. I am talking about achieving, in any playing situation, a
state of minimal effort through awareness and control. On the way to
achieving this state in playing, we sometimes must deal with quite a
bit of effort and discomfort in practice. The secret is in knowing how
to respond to the feelings of effort and discomfort, in knowing how
to "relax into the effort".
In the year Jim has been coming to see me, we have been undoing the
damage of his previous two years of lessons. Jim's left hand was very
undeveloped, no stretch and no strength. In addition, he is very prone
to bodily tension (jaw, face, as well as the usual, shoulders, arms,
etc.)., and was not using Rotating Attention fully enough during practice.
A lot of that tension has been locked in, and although Jim has become
aware of a good bit of it, we had hit a level of tension that was going
to require quite a bit of penetrating self observation to uncover. In
other words, this level of tension was really being labeled "normal
and inevitable" by Jim's brain. My job was to show him it might be "normal"
for him right now, but is not necessary, and is extremely debilitating.
In fact, it is just like wearing a strait jacket. The upper torso gets
completely involved in a constricting tightening of all muscles (usually
accompanied by constriction of the breath). Attention is withdrawn from
the body and this uncomfortable sensation, and the player manfully forces
his way ahead. Although Jim started making significant progress since
starting lessons about a year ago, Jim had plateaued for awhile, and
when working the left hand foundation exercises down the neck, he had
such a buildup of tension after about the 5th fret, that he was staying
away from the lower frets. He figured he would go to the lower frets
after he was completely comfortable with the higher frets.
Yes, that sounds logical, and is in complete accord with the general
thrust of my teaching, but the fact is, it was not the course to follow
here. We must bring in a new understanding and operate from its more
obscure logic. It is the concept of Double Trouble.
There are times when the best way to solve a difficult problem on the
guitar is to begin to work on a problem that is twice as difficult.
I first realized this when I was in my early playing years, but dealing
with some very difficult classical repertoire. The difficulty was holding
bars for long periods of time, while the fingers were required to do
long stretches and/or quick movements. I was having quite a difficult
time being able to do this. The bar was held at the 5th fret, and I
began practicing it down the neck, all the way to the 1st fret (where
it was almost impossible to do it). After a good deal of this practice,
I found that it was quite easy now to do it at the 5th fret.
The process went something like this: when I first tried that passage
at the 5th fret, I thought "man, this is hard". When I tried it at the
1st fret I thought "my God, this is impossible". Then, when I went back
to the 5th fret, I thought "hmmm, this ain't so bad!"
By making the difficulty even more difficult, by "doubling the trouble"
I found the original difficulty much easier! Now, it is important to
understand that this applies mostly to difficulties rooted in the requirement
for strength and stretch. It is much less applicable to matters of speed.
And MOST IMPORTANTLY, the tendency to withdraw attention from the body
and constrict the breath must be overcome by Intention and Attention
during this type of practice. If this is not done, this type of practice
will either yield little or no result, or actually be harmful. We must
do our utmost, at the point of highest stress, to "relax into the effort",
using rotating attention, posing, attention to breath, and all the other
tools taught in The Principles.
So, when you have a strength or stretch issue, you should devise an
intelligent routine that gives the hand/arm and body in general the
experience of a progressively increasing demand. The body must physically
experience this in order to adapt to the challenge. The big HOWEVER
is this: you MUST be paying attention to the whole body and your breathing
through the entire process. You CANNOT allow the "strait jacket" to
begin to tighten.
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I kept telling Jim that he needed to practice the walking exercises
down at the lower frets, that his hands needed the experience of that
effort and challenge in order to process and adapt to it. His left hand
ligaments are greatly in need of "stretching", and the only way to get
"stretched" is to "stretch"! I guess Jim didn't really believe me, because
he wasn't doing it ( I call this situation "who's the teacher here,
anyway!). Actually, the reason Jim wasn't doing what I wanted, wasn't
forcing himself into the more difficult positions on the neck, was because
he was NOT relaxing into the effort. He was tightening the strait jacket
as the demand increased.
Finally, at our last lesson, I forced him to do what I wanted, and severely
focused on the level of tension Jim was allowing to be present. Most
importantly, I pointed out to him that he was starting to get tense
just THINKING of playing the note. He was tensing before he started
to PLAY the note! I could see it as I watched him.
I told him, and I am telling everybody, you must RELAX IN YOUR APPROACH
TO THE NOTE. Do not TENSE in your approach to the note. Many of you
do, and you are not aware of it. It is a sure sign of the strait jacket
you wear when you play.
If you can overcome this, then, you can profitably employ the technique
of "Double Trouble" outlined above. Jim began to do this, as he worked
the left hand exercises down the neck. I was very happy to get this
e-mail from him recently.......
"Unbelievable! This is about all I can say about our last lesson.
I walked away a bit depressed that I had missed "the relaxing thing"
so much over the past year. I knew that I was playing with lots of tension,
but I kept telling myself that it would go away once my fingers had
more strength and flexibility. Well, now that I've been working on relaxing
over the last few weeks, I've realized that it's almost the exact opposite
in that my fingers can't gain the strength and flexibility that I want
until I learn to relax. It even took me until this morning to realize
why you always tell me that I have to release the tension after each
note or it will build up slowly but surely. I can't believe how hard
it is to play a major scale in first position and stay relaxed all the
way until the last note -- it takes real concentration and practice
to be able to do it no matter how slowly I go. So, I just want to say
thank you again for helping me break through yet another plateau in
my quest to be a musician. Playing without tension is like playing an
entirely new instrument -- it feels that different to me.
Also, I have to say that I left my last lesson thinking that I was not
going to follow your advice about working on the major scale pattern
in first position because I thought that I was not ready. I had decided
that I would try it on the 9th, 5th, and 1st frets on alternate days.
However, after working on it in the first position, I realized that
you were absolutely right in that I was ready to push my hand to develop
properly at this fret, and I did not need to work on the 9th and 5th
frets for now.
So, THANKS! for the gentle (!) push. You know that I tend to get conservative
in my approach to guitar -- so conservative that I sometimes think (in
my critical mind) that you'll get tired of teaching me because I'm learning
and progressing so slow. And, as you said in one of your essays, I have
to get rid of my critical mind sometimes in order to really PLAY. I
think about this often as I practice and train to be a great musician."
Jim
Yes, once the self imposed strait jacket comes off, playing feels entirely
different. I believe I said that in The Principles! Strength and stretch
develop gradually for players. And the fact is that many things feel
easier as the years go by not because we have gotten any stronger or
flexible, but simply because the overall level of body tension has decreased
while playing, and we have learned to maximize passive resources in
playing with greater skill (the use of the heavy arm, for instance,
maximizing the passive resource of weight, rather than using the active
resource of muscular effort).
The reason "double trouble" does not work for matters of speed (you
don't improve that scale played at 100 bpm by practicing it at 200 bpm!)
is because "speed" is dependent upon entirely different processes and
conditions than strength and stretch . Speed is the result of, the byproduct
of, precisely timed movements of the two sides of the body. This co-ordination
is built in exactly the opposite manner from "double trouble". We must
do super slow practice, then carefully work up our movements (the Basic
Practice Approach in The Principles) in order to develop speed. In other
words, the way to strengthen and improve 16th's at 100 is to strengthen
and improve your 16th's at 80.
Even so, there is a place for some slight degree of pushing ourselves
even in matters of speed, but not to as high a degree as we do for matters
of strength and stretch. It can be useful to have our muscles experience
the increased demand and subsequent tension of a higher speed, if, while
doing so, we can maintain that degree of awareness that allows us to
"relax into", at least to some extent, this increased demand, and the
feeling of tension it generates. But we don't want to spend a lot of
time doing this. It is more a test than a way to achieve a new ability
for speed. I will sometimes increase the speed, just to see where the
flaws are, make them show themselves in stark relief, then go back down
to slow speeds or no tempo to work on the imprecise movements. The careful
approach to and slightly beyond what I have called "the working speed",
with intense observation of the mechanics of what you are doing, gives
you valuable information that you then take down to the lower levels
of your practice, working with the seeds of what you saw manifested
at your playing limit.
I usually give this analogy to students who are afraid to push themselves:
you are building a car. You take it on the road to see how fast it can
go. It starts shaking at 30 mph. You stick your head out the window
to see what is going on. You see a rear tire about to fall off. Good,
now you know you have to tighten up that tire if you want to go over
30. So, you go back to the shop, put the car up on the lift, and tighten
the tire. Now, you take it back on the road, and it goes 45 mph before
it starts to shake, and now its the front tire. I think you get the
point. If you only stay down at 10 mph (even though we know that the
integrity of the cars functioning must be there at 10 mph as well),
you will simply never go faster than that.
So, I just hope that the next time Jim comes for a lesson, he doesn't
get a speeding ticket on the way here!
Copyright 2003 JamieAndreas.
Visit: www.guitarprinciples.com
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