The School of Feedback Guitar Blog

Wow. Unbelievable! Shout out to Charles for sending me this. Thank you! Keep them coming...

(This is one of those duh moments, the ones where I say to myself: "Man, that is so simple how could I have missed it?")

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In Austin, there is frisbee golf, ultimate frisbee, and I wouldn't be surprised if a food stand serves their fare on a frisbee. Austin is a great place for frisbee fun, just as much as it is a town of guitar enjoyment. Fortunately, there's a strong correlation between throwing a frisbee and strumming an acoustic guitar.

Everyone plays guitar in their own way, but it is difficult to play fast strums with a wrist that doesn't move. It's harder on the arm because more muscles are engaged including ones that do not need to be. Tension will quickly enter the arm, resulting in either a forced tone or muscle fatigue. No bueno in either case! However, the whip of the wrist a person needs to throw a frisbee and the rhythmic strums on an acoustic guitar are very similar to each other. Inertia is the key. When a person's wrist doesn't move, it's difficult to allow the whip of the wrist to fly upwards in an upstroke, and fall downwards on a downstroke. When it's looser, the arm moves less.

Now comes the advice: Whip the strumming hand like you would a frisbee when strumming. If that hurts your wrist, don't do it. Ignore! For most people this will feel awkward at first, but it has the potential for making a particularly difficult strumming rhythm a whole lot easier.

I like this question: "If you were banished to a desert island, what records would you bring?" One reason why I Iike this question is because it encapsulates a concept about music that most people normally miss: Music is an escape. The desert island question asks us quite simply what records we couldn't live without. These are the records that steady and center us. These are the records that we could theoretically use to escape the doldrums of living on a desert island, where we would apparently have no other entertainment.

It wouldn't be a surprise to me if someone had named Sgt. Pepper as a desert island record. The Beatles are well-known for many reasons. For lack of a less pithy explanation, they were able to help a lot of people forget about their troubles with their music. Playing guitar along to their music is like getting a transfusion of this escape. It's highly recommended! Similarly, playing the chords to a Rolling Stones' song on your own is far, far different than playing along with their recording. There is a push, a rush, a beauty to songs that we miss if we just played the chords and strummed at any pace we feel like. I am certainly not knocking anyone's desire to make a song more personal, don't get me wrong! Playing along with a record however is the best way to feel that escape, to feel why a song is awesome. Not surprising either that it's a fantastic way to get better at guitar.

My desert island picks? Well, I would have to say that Sigur Ros's Parenthesis album would most certainly make the cut.

"I have no desire to perform."

For the longest time, this quote had perplexed me. What did the person mean? That they just hadn't made up their mind? Were they confused about sharing their creativity? Did they fear they had nothing to share? Was it that they were just shy? I have tried to remain respectful of people's wishes on performance. I felt like it wasn't my call. Still, the nagging question: Is performance required to learn guitar? After reading Hillman Curtis's fantastic book, "MTIV: Process, Inspiration, and Practice for the New Media Designer," I feel that it's perfectly clear that performance is not a requirement for learning guitar.

Hillman Curtis explains that inspiration for his graphic design work comes from more than just other graphic designers:

In any given week, I'll visit a gallery, buy or borrow a few cds, see a couple of movies, and study my favorite movies on DVD. I'll read art history, film theory, fiction, and poetry. And, of course, I immerse myself constantly in design books and magazines. It's all part of my ongoing effort to draw from the work from others.

Like many of the people I work with, I do not want to have one of my favorite, inspiring, enjoyable, and creatively stimulating hobbies be ruined by the possibility of it going too far. I want to enjoy typography, and not edit fonts on my computer for hours on end. I want art and drawing to enrich my life, not my web presense (it's immense enough already; I share too much). I wanted Argentine Tango to make my body move around and express music, and I never had any aspirations to become the best tango dancer in the world. All of everything I choose to do inspires me and enriches me, and thus it spills over nicely into my creativity and pedagogy, aka the stuff I get paid to do. Thus, any hobby that I take up doesn't have to be taken to the extreme in order to be learned. It can simply inspire! Performance should be viewed the same way. If it's going to ruin the love of the hobby, then forget about it.

If the prospect of performing gets in the way of that beautiful infusion of inspiration, that bottom-less well of creativity, that timeless enjoyment of guitar, throw the idea out.