How contradictory advice messes with your head

If there’s one thing guaranteed to make you feel insecure about your guitar playing, it’s being confronted with wildly contradictory advice from killer guitar players whom you respect and and admire. Nowhere is this contradiction more striking than in the baffling variety of “Guitar Practice Secrets of the Stars” featured in contemporary performance-oriented guitar magazines. The vast discrepancy between the various approaches may be interesting to consider, but it also helps keep guitarists in a constant state of insecurity, thinking that “a better way” is lurking just out of reach. So they keep buying mags to find the secret path to guitar excellence — which I doubt the guitar mags are complaining about!

When it comes to putting in practice hours, you can roughly categorize the guitar gods into to three main schools of thought. Allow me to illustrate:

How much to practice? Three schools of thought

Low maintenance: In the low-maintenance, go-with-the-flow school you have Yngwie Malmsteen, who has repeatedly gone on record stating that he never practices. This immediately raises the question, “Well then, WTF counts as practice?” We can basically throw out the idea that “never practicing” is not an effective way to continually improve your guitar skills. All guitarists of any notable skill — including Mr. Malmsteen — have certainly spent some time engaging in activities that can reasonably be considered “practice.”

High maintenance: In the high-maintenance, play-till-your-fingers-bleed (and then some) school, you have Steve Vai, who recommends that players who are “intensely driven…to accomplish brilliant and historical acts on the instrument by discovering their unique abilities and talents” practice 10 hours a day (Guitar World, April 2004).

Advocates of grueling practice routines love to use words like dedication, intensity, drive, virtuosity, etc. The subtext is that if you aspire to be truly great, you must put in ungodly amounts of hours on your instrument — therein lies the dedication of the “true artists,” which separates them from the unwashed masses of wannabes who “don’t have what it takes.” Fair enough.

Sensible moderation: Steve Lukather, whom many (with good reason!) consider a true “guitarists’ guitarist,” advocates what I’d call the sensible, moderation-in-all-things school. He recounts striving to practice regularly about two hours a day, saying (in effect) that anyone who claims to practice a ridiculous amount of hours a day is either:

1. full of crap,
2. wasting time, or at worst
3. on the express train to burnout central, with stops in tendinitis city.

This sensible approach seems most likely to lead to success and continual progress for most guitarists. I have serious reservations about putting in extended hours of focused practice à la Steve Vai’s 30-hour guitar workout. Even truly stunning classical virtuosos (Itzhak Perlman, anyone?) don’t buy into the idea of marathon practice sessions. The key is regular, quality practice, not mere quantity. You’re not going to make much progress if practicing becomes a tedious chore — or if you have given yourself tendinitis.

Making sense of the senseless

With role models espousing such widely contradictory approaches, it’s no wonder that many guitarists spend so much time second-guessing themselves and searching for the perfect practice routine that will make the clouds part, angels sing, and provide a religious experience of instant guitar-skills gratification.

There is no perfect routine
Constantly judging yourself by what guitar heroes X, Y and Z do is the path to discouragement and despair. Rather than perpetually chasing someone else’s secrets, doesn’t it seem more fruitful to spend an hour or so defining your own personal goals as a guitarist, then devising your own “Secrets to effective practice” routine? Creating your own best routine can hardly be rocket science; you probably can’t go wrong with a routine that

• fits easily into your schedule (so you’ll actually do it),
• feels rewarding and enjoyable (so you’ll KEEP doing it),
• leads to steady, gradual progress in line with you outlined goals, and
• can be easily revised to adapt to your growth and development as a guitarist.

Next time you open a guitar mag, remember that they are profit-oriented just like any other commercial venture, and that their primary goal is to sell you more issues. Keeping you feeling insecure about yourself while at the same time offering you a (temporary) solution is a great way to keep you coming back from month to month. Guitar mags provide lots of useful information, particularly for beginning and intermediate players, but it’s a good idea to use your critical thinking skills when evaluating the practice routines that they present. (And of course, do the same with the anything I tell you!)

Finally, don’t worry about how much somebody else practices, or how long they’ve been playing, or any of the other things that boil down to comparing your own level of achievement to theirs to see how you measure up. Learning to evaluate yourself by your own standards rather than those embodied by other players or dictated by so-called experts could be a massively liberating experience for you. It sure has been for me!

But then, as if it were a reflex, your inner voice begins hurling an incessant barrage of criticism and doubt:

• Is this idea really any good?
• It sounds a bit like [insert song here]…is it too derivative?
• Crap! I can’t be derivative…..Must! Be! ORIGINAL!
• Anyway, it’s just a little riff — how will I ever write all the other parts for the rest of the song?
• Oh man, and now I’ll have to program some drums — EWWW! It always takes me forever to get the drums right.
• And you know, it’s nowhere near as good as [insert favorite epic masterpiece of musical brilliance]. I’ll never write a song even close to as good as THAT.
• Even if I do get this song finished, will anyone even like it enough to listen more than once?
• How am I going to react to the inevitable criticisms?
• I don’t know…people probably won’t like it. I know it shouldn’t matter, but…
• Heck, even if people say they like it, they’re probably just being polite….

*sigh*

After a few minutes of this self-inflicted abuse, you feel so overwhelmed by obstacles and doubt that you decide your riff isn’t good enough to warrant investing all that effort. You abandon the idea of crafting it into a new song, and go back to aimlessly noodling the same old licks while surfing the net hoping for “inspiration.” But any enjoyment you might have had is spoiled by a nagging feeling that you really SHOULD be doing something more productive…

Does this sound familiar to you? What the heck is this and why does it happen?

Your creativity, your inner muse, has been bitch-slapped into submission by your critical inner voice, robbing you of the opportunity to create something of real value — a new song. Widdly, bedroom “Youtube shredders” are as common as mullets at a Nascar event; but guitarists who write songs, complete projects, and consistently get their creative work out the door are far fewer. You know this. But why is it so hard to squelch your inner critic and just DO something?

The curse of perfectionism

It could be that — even if you are far from “perfect” — you are a perfectionist. You desperately want to feel creative and inspired, but your creativity is as good as paralyzed by the pressure and demands you put on yourself.

I’m intimately familiar with the tyranny of perfectionism. In fact, when it comes to producing creative output, the multi-headed hydra of perfectionism, self-doubt, and knee-jerk self-criticism is my worst enemy.

Fortunately, now that I recognize the enemy for what it is, I’m on a mission to kick its whiny butt. But that means effecting a dramatic change in habitual thought patterns that have had decades to entrench themselves — you could even say I’ve practiced them to perfection! I don’t expect changing to be easy, but “more of the same” just ain’t gonna cut it this time. (It rarely does.)

In the coming weeks I’ll be writing here about what I learn and the methods I use to make negativity and perfectionism my bitches, in the hope that others can benefit (and because the accountability of announcing goals publicly is an industrial-strength motivator). But don’t worry — I’ll be focusing on tools and knowledge you can try for yourself rather than subjecting you to reams of self-absorbed “navel contemplation.”

And I promise, there won’t ever, EVER be any New-Age BS about learning to nurture your inner child.

One theme that runs through much of what I’ve been reading is the importance of metacognition (basically, thinking about thinking) and visualization for attaining peak musical performance. So when I embarked on my slow practice experiment, I paid close attention to my thoughts and feelings to see what I could learn. Here are some of my observations about the mental challenges of slow practice.

Impatience
It’s easy to get impatient and be tempted to increase speed too quickly. Sticking to my strict program of one minute’s perfection, one click at a time took heroic effort. Knowing that it paid off, however, should make it easier next time.

Negativity
There is much research indicating that directing negative thoughts towards ourselves is a great way to commit self-sabotage, and that we can gain much from engaging in positive self-talk and visualization. This may sound a bit too new-agey and wishy-washy for some, but research has shown that our thoughts and mindset can make a huge difference in how we approach tasks and whether or not we succeed.

It’s easy to lapse into negative thinking when practicing slowly, e.g., “I’m only playing at 80 bpm — I’ll NEVER reach 180!” I had to repeatedly turn my thoughts in a positive direction, imagining what it would be like when I could play faster, telling myself that it was possible with practice and that perseverance and patience were the only way to get there. It made a huge difference, and was a big part of why I was able to fight off the temptation to try to increase speed too soon.

Concentration and breaks
One of the main benefits of slow practice is that you can concentrate hard on various micro-aspects of your technique. But it can be tough to maintain concentration during an extended practice session. Apparently, classical musicians often take frequent short breaks during their extended practice sessions. I tried this approach, and found that taking a 5–10 minute break when my concentration was flagging was really helpful.

The importance of privacy
One of my greatest mental barriers to getting quality practice is my fear of annoying others with my endless repetition of scales, arpeggios and other technical exercises. I have found that the ONLY way for me to do any extended practice is to ensure that I have complete privacy so that nobody will hear me. Even if the others in my surroundings repeatedly assure me that they don’t mind hearing me practice, it still bothers ME. I just can’t relax if somebody is listening.

My first slow practice sessions took place when I was home alone. I remember thinking several times that I could never have practiced like that if someone had been listening. I would have been preoccupied with worries about bugging them with my widdling and clicking metronome.

If you also feel inhibited by people listening to you practice, you owe it to yourself to arrange a private space for yourself where you can tap, alternate pick or sweep to your heart’s content without feeling as if you are annoying others.

Thumbs up for metacognition
This short experiment has convinced me that it is useful to reflect on how you are thinking and feeling when practicing and playing. My guess is that it’s also beneficial to reflect on your thoughts ABOUT practicing in general, particularly if you tend to procrastinate about getting regular practice. Procrastination has been a big problem for me for a long time, and I know that tons of people share this wretched affliction. So as I learn to overcome it I’ll be sharing what I learn here.