The School of Feedback Guitar Blog

I have been touting the five-minutes-of-practice idea for some time now. Personally, I think it was and still is a great way to learn guitar. Since my primary focus as a teacher is how to learn guitar from scratch, I have found scores of people who have responded to it fantastically. The thought entered my head not too long ago to apply it to other parts of my life to see if it was as effective as I thought it was. It is.

The theory behind five minutes of practice each day is one based on how to ignore the idea of mastery, and love the mystery of guitar. Simply, I feel that guitar is a comprehensive study. Just like many pursuits, guitar has a lot to offer as far as creative enjoyment, intellectual stimulation, and fun. The more someone learns, the higher the chance they will love it. Spacing out the learning and practice of the instrument so that one becomes eventually quite smitten with playing is a good idea. It's less about learning stuff as fast as possible, and more to do with building the enjoyment of the instrument so that "practice" becomes a labor of true love. I applied this theory to two areas of my life that I felt I wanted to learn more about: Graphic design on the web, and drawing. I will share my experiences applying the five minutes of practice idea to graphic design in this post.

Graphic Design on Websites

Since 2003 or so, I have been involved with creating websites. The number of websites that I have worked on slowly creeped over into double digits as I grew more and more fascinated with it. The trick with websites for me was how to deliver the information in ways where the message was clear and the site looked gorgeous. I felt, close to a year ago, that although I was doing fairly well my websites were not improving. Back then, I read someplace that a website is 90% delivery of information via text. Bingo. That's what I could do to improve. I had a lot of research to do (and that hasn't changed). The study of typography for me is a bottomless subject. How on earth could I learn it better without sacrificing my time and energy? After all, I teach close to 30 students per week, I want to perform more, and I want to create music. Five minutes.

I started by structuring a routine each day where I read a simple two pages of the classic book on typography by Robert Bringhurst, "The Elements of Typographic Style." Every day, before I even turn on my phone, I read two pages of this book, and also a section or two on the other books I have bought that talk about good typography. I have been doing this for close to a half of a year. While I am far from mastering it, I look forward each day to reading these books. I have started to apply it to my web design, including The School of Feedback Guitar's website, my personal website for electronically distributing my music www.diehipsterdie.com, my personal site for sharing one song every week on Monday songmonday.diehipsterdie.com, and it even spilled over into professional web design. I love working with type as an amateur, and I am constantly tweaking these sites. I enjoy making the sites more and more readable, and I love the challenge of tweaking web-safe to look very readable, depending upon the audience of course.

Basically I created a routine for each and every day to research this area, and I stuck to it. Now, I feel far more competent at it, and am having a blast learning more. I can spend hours tweaking the typography on websites that I work on today, where as before I had less inclination to do so. I feel my sites have grown to be more more professional, and bonus that the design has a longer shelf-life. Can this apply to guitar? You bet. Finding a simple five minutes to pick up the guitar has a beautiful effect: It helps a person develop the love of it gradually. The assertion to practice an hour a day, also, has a way of deflating that love. I can only imagine what kind of situation I'd be in if I studied typography for an hour a day...

"Oh my god, I totally suck at graphic design."

I want to be good to myself, and I don't want another reason to be frustrated. I wish the same for any person who is a newcomer to guitar. In the next blog post, I'll talk about some experiences that I have had learning to draw.

One of my first teachers, Jason Werkema, had an awesome way of learning how to play a classical guitar piece with the right amount of tension. Simply, he would try to play so light that he would buzz each note. This is a brilliant strategy. It worked great to ease tension, and he played his pieces quite flawlessly. Since he was aiming to sound bad and buzzy in the pursuit of the right amount of tension (in practice of course), he also managed to import the visual piece of the song. When a guitarist eases up, the emphasis is tremendously visual.

Guitar is an appealing instrument to the eyes, as far as I am concerned. Why else would we be so enamoured with how cool people look when they play it? The techniques of learning to play a difficult piece with the eyes could be just as good as with the ears. The funny thing is that by aiming for it to sound bad, we gain an appreciation of how our fingers look as we play.

Try this out: Find a song or piece of music that has a passage that is a little bit more difficult than what you are ready for. Then, tune your guitar in an awful, random, tuning. Finally, aim to buzz each note. I mean it: Every single note should sound buzzy and out of tune. Since it will sound bad, you'll be forced to look at the sight-lines of where your fingers are more than hear the result. If you can stand playing your music this way, the look and feel of how your fingers do the work will be fascinating. Perhaps when you tune your guitar back to normal and play it, you'll find that your ability to play the difficult passage has been enhanced.

Voila. Looks good, sounds good, more fun. Two great tastes that taste great together (Thanks to Mike S. for hipping me to The Bad Plus covering Radiohead's Karma Police, with pretty much the same words).

The experience of playing guitar is different for each person who picks it up. There is no blanket advice out there that will withstand a thorough query as to what is best for one's own body. This is part of the reason I like playing and teaching guitar. There is always room for learning something more in my own playing, and it is a trip to help someone narrow down exactly what it feels like to play guitar in a way that works for them. Part of this work involves eliminating the wrong kind of tension and focusing on an easier way of playing.

The end goal of "good technique," in my opinion, is one in which the person playing guitar has only the right amount of tension needed to complete the task, and no more. Notice that I didn't say that the end goal was to be completely relaxed. The common, but possibly false, assumption is that we need to be 100% relaxed in order to play. My question for the folks who are after such a thing is: Is it really good to have no tension in your body at all? If that's the case, consider that without the right amount of tension, our fingers cannot possibly grip the strings. Without the right amount of tension, we'd be spaghetti on the floor. Without the right amount of tension, our hearts will not beat. Without the right amount of tension, we'd be dead.

Consider the following possibilities. First, many people figure out that playing guitar isn't very easy when their shoulder lifts upwards as they switch chords. Once eliminated, less energy goes into the shoulder, and more energy is conserved for harder chord progressions. A second example would be tension in area of the jaw/mouth. By learning to eliminate this tension, we could have more energy conserved and ready to be dispatched to play a difficult passage. I've noticed this in my own playing, and I have noticed this is a cross-genre technical issue!

The point is how to eliminate what is unnecessary, and conserve the energy for better pursuits, i.e. having fun. Guitar is not totally an out-of-body experience, but I have found that finding the best balance of tension in our bodies as we play is well worth the effort. Besides, I am pretty sure we are all looking to have more fun playing music anyway.