The School of Feedback Guitar Blog

I really like teaching. There is something about it that is very challenging, very intensely interesting, and makes me look really hard at how I am doing at it. I wish I could put it into words better, but I never really imagined that I would end up being this fascinated with the process of education. It seems that whenever I get to that point where I feel like I have exhausted all my possibilities to explore, another possibility pops right up. Sometimes, that's a common assumption on the part of career teachers. "What is there that is left to know? I've got it all, including tenure." It would seem however that getting used to the process of letting go of assumptions (as a teacher or student) could mean breakthroughs in thought. That's the good stuff, and it's one of the many reasons I still love to learn something new to this day.

People who are learning guitar could do well by challenging their own assumptions too. After all, the process of learning guitar seems to be slightly hindered by them, and it does us good to explore what it looks like to let go of them. The assumptions below are ones that I have seen in people I have worked with over the years. One of the most fruitful parts of my work is that I get to watch these assumptions fall away over time, mostly because I tend to challenge them. I bet you never met a nerd who is willing pick a good fight, eh? Just don't hit me, I'm fragile.

Everyone must perform in order to learn guitar.

Wrong. Nasty buzzer noise. Nope. Nada. Not the case at all. Not only is this completely wrong, I wonder how much this affects a person who is thinking of taking up guitar lessons. If a person wants to perform, naturally I would say that they have this intense desire to share something within themselves with an audience. The funny thing is however, less than 1% of all the people I have ever taught fall into this category! It's not like there is nothing to share. Everyone has something, everyone is creative. But what I imagine most people want out of guitar is for it to enrich their lives. Should we sacrafice a richer life just because we think we should perform? Absolutely not.

Everyone must practice, practice, and practice more.

Again, totally false. Discipline? Practice hard for an hour in the morning, afternoon, evening, and do not even allow the thought of stopping come into your head? Well, if it works for you then do it. I think it's more important to have fun. Sometimes having too much self-discipline can completely de-rail our efforts. If guitar is a fun hobby to learn, then why kill it with too much practice? We want to enjoy our hobbies, not hate them.

If I'm not good at guitar, I won't have any fun.

This is one of those "If I had a nickel" statements. I understand the motivation behind this, too. How could we possibly have fun if we aren't good at playing guitar? The answer lies simply in one statement: "My name is Dave Wirth, I have been playing guitar for close to twenty years, and there are still guitarists out there that can absolutely smoke me. Few of them, however, have as much fun as I do." No matter what skill level you are, you can have fun. Oh boy, you can have fun.

There is one final question to ask: If we didn't have these assumptions when we started guitar or any new pursuit, what would happen? My guess is that we would have a lot more fun. To me, if it's not fun it's not worth doing.

No matter the ability level of a guitarist, he/she tends to learn music similarly. It's not a groundbreaking idea that we all start off kind of clunky at first with something brand new, nor is it surprising if at some point we learn it and find our way. It's definitely not a new idea either that if we are persistent in following up on what we had learned in the first place, we'll master it one day. I wrote about this process once before, but mechanics, flow, and mastery are important enough stages of learning that they are worth a refresher.

Mechanics are exactly what they sound like. After we start learning, there is a period where it just doesn't quite work yet. There's a bit of struggle, a bit of rebellion to this part. However, the clumsiness will sooner or later drop away. At that point, we get a whiff of where we could go. That's the goal of mechanics in a nutshell: You get an irritatingly small taste of mastery.

Flow is, well, flowing. The hands start working together, the fingers are moving elegantly, the brain and the body are all one. This moment can be really fun. "At last! I am able to play this strumming pattern!" However, this is precarious and potentially short-lived. The thing that is dangerous about flow is that one can just as easily move backwards (to mechanics) or forwards (to mastery). Overall, it's a pretty pleasant experience.

There is no better word to describe the feeling of really having a skill other than mastery. Mastery means one doesn't think about how to apply a technique anymore. It becomes part of the guitarist's being and the skill is not going anywhere. I love to teach people strumming because it is very natural for every single one of us on this earth to feel rhythm. We could be 90 years old, pick up a guitar, and probably strum a rhythm. Mastery is ingraining a skill so deeply that we can count on it when we need it.

There is some really great news too: With more experience, this process gets faster. It just takes less time. The more we play and walk towards mastery with the concepts we are interested in exploring, the more available guitar gets overall.

(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.

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.

To me, there is no hard and fast rule as to where all guitarists should put their thumbs when fretting a chord. As far as I can tell, I have seen enough people play guitar in enough different ways to realize that any technique that doesn't hurt the guitarist's hands is good. The trick is figuring out what works best. The fun part of my job is the tweaking I get to do. Since every-one's hands are different, I get to approach each lesson in a fresh way. It keeps it fun.

The oft-repeated advice, "Keep your thumb on the back of the neck at all times," is good only for so many people, i.e. ones with the perfect length of thumb. Thumb lengths differs from person to person. The other issue is that the widths of guitar necks also differ. Therefore, this advice is not necessarily good for everyone. When the thumb stays static, the wrist wants to make up for any differences. When I say "carpal tunnel is not fun, and neither is tendinitis," please believe me. After about eighteen years of playing guitar, I know that the less bent my wrist is, the less chance of any injury. Sitting out is no fun, and I've done that twice.

The way out is to look closely at your wrist. Is it bent towards you when you play? Away from you? There's far more chance for an injury, in my opinion, if either is the case. If this is so, then take an even closer look at your thumb. If it stays static, then try lifting it up in-between chords and see if it feels any better. Doing this tends to release any locked-and-stressed-out sorts of technique in the wrist, and might enable you to play longer. Bonus, and bonus.

If I had to do music school all over again, I am pretty sure I would have done a better job at pacing myself. The trouble with being a musician is that there is such satisfaction in finishing what we are doing. If we finish playing, composing, or recording a highly satisfying song, chances are we'll still be feeling the high of it well into our week. Some of us will listen to or play the song over and over again. I have one good friend who writes so many good songs that he burns himself out on them before he has a chance to play them for other people! Music, perhaps unlike many other things in life, is a unique thing; There is always the need to just be a little bit further along than we were before. Something always brings us back to it.

For any new student taking guitar lessons with me, it still delights me to explain why five minutes is the perfect amount of time for practice at first. Any new pursuit that we are encountering is bound to have snags. It's not sunshine all the time. Practicing five minutes a day simply helps a person commit to learning it, leaving the guitar before it gets really frustrating, and coming back to it the next day. Think of it like a mutual fund; If you schedule your investments and stick to them, the fund can only grow. And then there's interest that pays you back in the long run. The interest received in the case of guitar is why we play. It's about access to many many more songs that we would like to play. It's joining a whole community of people who are just as dedicated to learning and playing. It's perhaps the feeling of creating your first song. Five minutes will pay off in the long run. It boggles my mind why people commit to something and then just walk away when the going gets a little rough. Over-practice, over-analysis? No. What is the right amount? What helps us the most in the long run?

Five minutes a day.

It's my humble opinion (believe it or not, I'm pretty humble) that once we arrive at a destination in guitar, another one pops up. There will always be something new to learn about the instrument. I hope that I never ever learn all of it. I want to spend my entire life playing guitar and learning something new about it. I believe that the best way to do this is simply to deal with how annoying it feels to just leave practice unfinished, and come back to it the next day.

Before reading this blog post, remember that it is not unusual to gravitate to one of these motivations a bit more than any others. This is not "black and white" so-to-speak. We all want to learn, have fun, feel creative, and connect with others. However, each of us has a bit more compelling of a reason to do it. The following is a summary of four of the most common motivations all of us, including me, have when we pick up the guitar and decide to learn it.

Fun and Enjoyment.

Enjoyment? That's probably the number one reason why people play it and want to learn it. If it looks fun and enjoyable, then why not?

Connection.

Connection. There are people out there who feel that the most important reason to play guitar is to connect with others. I am reminded of a colleague in grad school. Her mother always held her as a baby and played guitar at the same time. The result is that she formed a sort of association of connection with the instrument. For her, seeing a guitarist live meant she could feel that connection. Getting together and playing music with other people is a fantastic way to just hang out too. Musicians love to hang.

Creativity.

There are people out there who look to guitar as an avenue to create. The tell-tale signs? Time passing by and enjoyment of finding and exploring the capabilities of the guitar. Pushing the sound. Recording musical thoughts. The person who is obsessed with creating music just wants to find the ways that work for them with guitar, and educational tradition is playfully tossed out in the pursuit.

Intellectual Stimulation.

There are many people out there who love to learn. However, there are people who like to know the nuts and bolts of music and want to know what it's all about to a large extent. Learning guitar, for these people, is often guided with an intense curiosity with regards to music theory and/or scales. For these people, guitar is a lovely way to grow and expand their thinking abilities, and look cool at the same time when they play... of course!

I am rather fond of saying, "No one learns in a bubble." It's true. Many students march up to me in their first lesson and tell me that online guitar lessons were a complete waste of time. I won't blame them; There is no interaction with online lessons. Neither is there is any encouragement either. Playing music basically means learning from other people, people who can empathize with you and perhaps offer a suggestion or two. Playing music also means not limiting oneself to learning from one teacher, either.

The people I work with who have the most fun with guitar branch out and find other people to play music with. It's the jamming with others that is exciting about playing guitar. It's even more fun to play with a good drummer and a solid bassist. In six years of intense study, I played with countless musicians. Each one taught me something or at least inspired me to learn even more. Sometimes it was bad, sometimes beautiful, but always instructive. Also, the good news is that you don't have to buy lessons from everyone you play guitar with. Just play and pay attention!

But gingerly and begrudgingly I must also offer that learning guitar also means learning from more than one teacher, especially if the goal is to get a world-view that is incredibly wide. I had six teachers (see the list at the end of the post if you're curious), and each taught me something different, thus expanding my palette exponentially. I must say that as much as I do want to keep being a teacher for any one person, and be a complete teacher from scratch to mastery, it's better ultimately for a person to find many more sources of information. It's all about connecting the dots.

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I had six guitar teachers. They were:

1. Jason Werkema (Grand Rapids Guitar Quartet)
2. Chris Buzzelli (BGSU)
3. Dan Lippel (BGSU)
4. Jack Edward Smith (Rochester, NY area guitarist)
5. Bob Sneider (Eastman School of Music)
6. Nicholas Goluses (Eastman School of Music)

Hard chord progressions pop up from time to time. About the only thing we can count on is that they will show up, and that they will stretch our technical ability. Here are some things I do when a chord progression is giving me difficulty:

1. I will take the chord progression completely out of context and make it without any rhythm at all. The presence of rhythm on any chord progression adds a subtle stress on the player. "I better get this right or it will sound bad." Taking the progression out of context in this way helps tremendously. Bonus: You could watch TV while doing this.
2. Look in a mirror at your jaw. Do you notice any movement? If you do, there is probably tension there. To understand this point better, read this blog post.
3. The order of the fingers arriving to the new chord is the least looked at aspect of playing chord progressions. If you see your fingers not getting to the new chord all at the same time, then perhaps you need to take the chord further out of context and rhythm. Playing chords is often like hopping and skipping from one to the other. All the fingers need to land all at the same time.
4. Graceful Degradation of rhythm. If you are ready to add rhythm, make sure to allow yourself to go slow if you need to. If you aren't quite up to speed just yet, it's okay to go slower! Just make sure you aren't forcing it.

Enjoy!