Well, Posterous.com has been great but I think it's time to move on. I am taking my blog back to this address: http://www.schooloffeedbackguitar.com/blog. If you're a fan of RSS feeds, please feel free to to click this lovely looking graphic below (this was one of the many good ones I found on Smashing Magazine's awesome website)
Thanks Posterous.com! It has been fun.
Note: There are critical problems with Plantetary at the time of publishing this blog post. The author has not yet uploaded any fixes to the bugs seen in the app.
----
If by chance you and I are friends on Twitter, you may have noticed some of my tweets about NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. I love seeing beautiful pictures from space. Sometimes, it looks like fiction, it's so real. It comes as no surprise that once a friend showed me the iPad app Planetary, I was all over it. Planetary, by Bloom Studio, is the best app I have ever seen for the organization of a music library.
Planetary's concept is simple. Your galaxy is your music collection. Stars in this galaxy are artists you like. Albums of that artist appear as planets, and the songs of that album appear as moons. The concept alone is good, but visually? This app is beautiful. The animation is beautiful too. There is a feature that allows the user to have slow animation of the camera view. It is gorgeous.
The author of the app also documented his creative process. I really got a kick out of reading it. I love how it basically started with an incredibly random idea:
This photo, taken by the Cassini probe, was the original inspiration for the Planetary app. We decided to model the iPad music library after a model of a solar system. Several solar systems in fact. Each star in our universe will be an artist in your music library. Each of these stars will be orbited by planets representing albums. Each planet will have a moon system with each moon representing a track.
The full text is a fascinating read. The result is that those of us who drop the money to have an iPad are lucky to have an amazing app for visualizing our music collections.
Download it here: http://itunes.apple.com/app/planetary/id432462305
Woman seated with Underwood typewriter, Library of Congress
When a beginner starts guitar, the best thing they can do is start by playing basic chords and learn how to strum. This is the vernacular of guitar, the most commonly spoken language. It is the language of pop songs.
What happens when a beginner outgrows the vernacular? Perhaps she would like to branch out and start playing melodies on the guitar. To me, this is playing lead guitar. Just like strumming and playing chords, playing lead guitar has hacks that really help the beginner to advance quickly. The Typwriter Method is the one of the best I've come across. First things first: pressure.
Each finger has a specific amount of pressure it must use to fret a note on the guitar. The pressure needed is magnified when more fingers are being used. More than one finger is needed to play chords, which means you need more pressure (it's worse for barre chords). This is not the case in lead guitar. In fact, when a finger is down that doesn't need to be down, it can make playing lead guitar more difficult.
Let's say that the melody you want to play has two notes, starting on your index finger. If your index finger lifts up en route to the second note, then you are maximizing your energy. If your index finger doesn't lift up, you are adding more pressure than needed:
I like to compare this to old time typewriters. The gears will get messed up if you accidentally use more than one key at one time. Same thing happens to guitarists. Use only what you need.
Mountains, from Karamatsu Mountain Lodge, by Tsuda. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Space. Retreat. Silence. No wonder why vacations are so… lovely.
I love to let go of things that get in the way of my creativity. It simply means I end up with more energy and time for stuff which is more important, and more pleasing, to me. I have a hunch, and I want to share it in the form of an experiment. Please bear with the teacher/nag side of me for just one blog post. At least consider the following creative lifestyle design challenge:Twyla Tharp does this whenever she's deep in the throes of a creative binge. Hugh MacLeod states that we might need fewer pillars. Either which way you slice it, getting rid of one distraction for one week helps you get a little bit of space.
Julia Cameron's excellent book The Artist's Way describes the result of reading deprevation, which can be substituted for any tool of choice for getting more space:Even at the safe remove of the written word, I can feel the shockwaves of antagonism about trying this tool. I will tell you that those who have most resisted it have come back the most smugly rewarded for having done it. The nasty bottom line is this: sooner or later, if you are not reading you will run out of work and be forced to play.
Does this design experiment seem a little out there for you? I understand. It's not for everyone. But if you need a push in this direction, here's some lines from a William Wordsworth poem to help the home team:
When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.
To me, the value of studying design history and designer biographies is that it is a reminder that all the designs that seem so fundamental (like Helvetica) were once just sketches in a sketchbook. Learning how things came into existence, and the creative processes behind them, helps you realize that you yourself have the possibility of doing the same thing. And at the same time, learning about the ideas and methods oif other designers is a sobering reminder of the amount of work and level of ambition that are actually needed to get there.
...and then later on:
You probably don't need to study Helvetica's history in order to use it successfully. But if you want to create tomorrow's Helvetica, it is probably a good idea if you do.
- Nille Svennson, Sweden Design, as seen in Emigre No. 65
Much thanks to David Hobizal for sending me this awesome quote.
Beersheba, inspection of Camel Corps by H.E. (i.e., His Excellency) Sir Harold McMichael. Seargent of Camel Corps mounted with line of camels in background, Library of Congress
Passion is a horse in a desert. Horses are not exactly prime transportation in that situation… eventually you'll be walking. A camel, however, is ideal for long desert treks. It can survive great duress and is well-suited to the harsh climate. If passion is to a horse, then good work and craftsmanship is to a camel.
Craftsmanship at first glance seems to be the silver bullet. If we work hard enough, sustainably enough, we can pull through most obstacles. It's true, but there are times in our pursuits when good craftsmanship, the camel in the analogy, can go against us and what we want to do.
If, for example, you tend to be a perfectionist, letting go of a project is kind of tough. There is always one more tweak, one more thing to finish up. Sometimes it's difficult to realize that there are diminishing returns if we go at it too long. Letting go, and being satisfied with the result is a wise energy saving move.
Another consideration is that passion is lightning fast and full of heat. My hunch is that passion needs less attention to detail, and more raw expression of the idea. Getting stuck in the details before even starting a project can be a bad thing. We could lose the heat that drove us to start in the first place. Getting mired in the nuts and bolts before jumping in might mean we miss out on something new. Passion requires a readiness to jump in. The water is cold at first.
My take is that craftsmanship is important to cultivate in any pursuit. As I get older, it really comes down to how much good work I do as opposed to how passionate I am about the work. But it also means being flexible enough to jump into passion when it arrives, and not being afraid to give craftsmanship the day off.
----
For those who are interested in how passion and craftsmanship could affect their guitar playing, check out my post on the differences between Jack White and Manuel Barrueco. Jack is to passion while Manuel is to craftsmanship. In addition, I wrote a blog post on the band The National. They take considerable pain to craft a song so it has what I like to call The Funnel Effect: the listener is magnetically pulled in, and has to finish the song.
For those interested in reading more about passion vs craftsmanship, I would suggest the Study Hacks blog. On it, Cal Newport writes often about how relying on passion, following your dreams, etc, is widely stated as the means to a successful career but rarely leads to one. Cal introduces his idea in his blog post The Career Craftsman Manifesto. Highly recommended.
I think that with music school and art school, or school in any form, there has to be some system of grading and measurement. The things they can teach you are quantifiable. While all that is good and has its place, at some point you have to learn all you can and then forget everything that you learned in order to actually start making music.
Right on. Learn all you can, forget most of it, start creating.
BTW, I just picked up St. Vincent's newest record, and yes, it's fantastic.
"You never breathe when you are thinking."
I have this face... a thinking face. I think so hard that I sit extremely still and my eyebrows furrow. And the news to me is that I don't breathe. Hmmm...
What about guitar? Do I hold my breath when I play guitar? Until recently, yes. Lead guitar, especially. I noticed that I would take a deep breath as I started to play, but sooner or later I would desperately need oxygen. I would breathe a shallow breath to kindof, sortof make up for it.
In the grand tradition of nerdiness, I ran an informal experiment on the effects of deep breathing on my guitar playing.
I started by breathing deeply while I practiced a passage that was hard for me to do. Here is the result: I noticed that I messed up every single time I took a big deep breath, as opposed to a shallow one. However, I noticed that the tension was gone when I breathed deeply. When I played without deep breathing, the enemy marched on... tension.
My hypothesis: Taking deep breaths destroys tension, and whatever technique was built on it. Therefore, playing and breathing deeply at the same time will change your relationship to the guitar profoundly.
Could it be that simple? Just take deep breaths? I think it is.
We can cling to tension that we don't need by holding onto our breaths and breathing shallowly as needed. But the brain needs oxygen. That much is obvious.
Yes, taking some deeper breaths means we will mess-up more than we like. What to do about this? Let the mistakes be. I have a strong hunch that they will absolutely work themselves out of the picture in time.
I love how he makes it look so easy.
Barbara Lynn is the only musician I have ever seen who plays upstrokes on the downbeats and uses a thumbpick for melodies in-between the strums. It's so completely unique, and still somehow is secondary to the soul she has in delivering her song. It reminds me of the anonymous Haitian guitarist who plays so differently, and yet perfectly.
The video is great for one final reason too: It is ample proof that there is no wrong way to play guitar. One's guitar-ability doesn't matter as much as the spark, the soul the person exhibits, the love the audience feels. Yeah!
Much thanks to Charles for hipping me to Barbara Lynn and for sending me this video.
Dave Wirth