Helpfiles: Finger tips
The notes on this page come mostly from email discussions about technique
and wider musical questions.
Contents:
1. Teacher or self taught?
2. Nail preparation
3. Practice time, practice strategies
4. Transcribing piano music
5. Stage Fright
6. Visualisation
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On having a teacher or being self taught
Firstly, we are all self-taught. It is not the individual outside of us
(if we
have a teacher) who makes our fingers do certain things in certain ways,
or
makes the connection between an artistic ideal and a present result; all
they
are doing is putting up a signpost, and numerous reminder signposts on the
way.
There has to be a part of the student that 'takes charge' and makes the
thing or
connection "happen". To that extent it does not matter if the
taking charge
element is within or without; however it is much more practical if it has
outside help, to observe what is going on and make comments and suggestions
that
the internal element does not have the time to make while playing is going
on.
This is why it is so useful to see oneself play on video, and several teachers
I
know make excellent use of this as an extension of their own suggestion-making.
Often it is not necessary to say anything after showing the student the
video,
they see and can internalise what to do. However it shows that it is only
when
something is taken on board and made to happen by the learner, that
learning
of any significance takes place. The big question then is what is the most
effective way to make that possible.
Secondly, nobody is self-taught. May I explain. The part of you (if you
are
into the Inner Game it's Self 2) who actually does the playing is not the
part
(Self 1) who does the directing and instructing in the previous paragraph.
So
whether you are performing for the china dogs or an audience of thousands,
the
effect of what learning you have done, is felt only by the receptive performer
part of you. So for all intents and purposes, you as performer have not
taught
yourself; you are responding to the impulses supplied by elements who are
not
involved with the performance, your teacher (who may be trembling in the
third
row), or your internal teacher (who may be trembling closer by!) A large
measure of the success of the performance, whatever it is, is determined
by your
success in forgetting your teachers while acting according to what they
have
said. The rest lies in the fitness to you of what your teacher(s) have
said.
So the paradox can be resolved if we accept that as learners we are
self-taught....as performers we have teachers, whether within or without.
So given that much of the effect and value of teaching lies in being able
to
cross this divide from learner to performer (even if it's only to the china
doggies), a good proportion of what makes a good teacher has to be to do
with
enabling that transition. A good deal of what has been volunteered as qualities
of a good teacher is common sense, so I won't reiterate. But I would suggest
that certain a priori qualities need addressing, long before consideration
of
playing/sightreading/technical knowledge matters.
Basically, the teacher has to create an environment in which the student
can
progress sustainably. Unfortunately every individual has a different make
up,
and needs a different balance of stimulation-motivation-expectation. For
many
teachers, it is their practice to play safe and not push any of these very
hard
at all. The result too often is that expectations are not high, so there
is no
disappointment when they are not realised, but the lack of stimulation
(primarily of the imagination) leads to a gradual loss of interest. But,
well
the student kept coming for a few months/years. The opposite danger is that
of
charging the student with loads of high energy input, so they get very excited
and live on a high level of motivation; this is dangerous because it brings
powerful personality forces into play, which may make the person very good
at
the instrument, but may just as likely cause a catastrophic collapse (-"I
can't
cope with these expectations/surely I don't deserve to be that good/I can't
keep
this much practising up so I'll have to stop altogether,....") The
truly good
teacher knows how to strike a happy medium, to push hard enough but not
too
hard. This is not something that can be taught and it certainly is not taught
in conservatoires!
But if there were no other use for a teacher, it would be this; to supply
a
point of perspective for the learner, i) in terms of motivation and ii)
technical observation. It's asking a lot of one individual to do all the
practising and get that motivation balance right as well, and to
watch their
fingers as though they were outside of themselves. This is why for most
people
a teacher is a Good Thing, assuming they have the necessary skills. Which
you
have to assume because unless you can observe the teacher' failings the
chances
are they are well ahead of you.
Finally, it is often discussed whether teachers find self taught players
exhibit more technical (and musical) faults than taught players. In general
the answer is undoubtedly Yes, but I would go further and say that all the
taught players I have received also exhibited faults, but in general the
self-taught players had bigger ones! Oh, and yes, I have technical faults
and so does everybody, even the most apparently perfect players (JW,
DR, MB...). They just have very very very small ones.
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Nail Preparation - some guidance
First off I shape the nails i) either by folding a piece of 600 grade wet
and dry sandpaper around each treble string and playing normal strokes over
it, thus shaping the nail in accordance with the movement of the string
underneath or ii) by using a fancy German device that does a similar thing
but using 6 round files.
***
If you are using the sandpaper method, I suggest the following details;
i. cut the sheet into four pieces (easier to handle)
ii. fold it gently, so that the string will tuck into the fold nicely; do
not press the fold hard as that will tend to crack the abrasive surface
of the sandpaper .
iii. tuck the string into the folded corner of the sandpaper so that the
rest of the sandpaper lies away from the direction your finger will be moving
in
iv. it is that gently folded surface that does a lot of the work on the
nail, so...
v. ...make a new fold for every time you shape your nails this way, thus
keeping the "cutting edge" fresh
vi. do the 'a' finger on the first string, 'm' finger on the second string
and 'i' finger on the third
vii. do the thumb this way as well, though you will need to arrange the
general profile with a file because this method does not actually shape
the thumb nail, it merely provides a better "fine detail" approach.
To do the thumb you will put the sandpaper on the bass strings in the direction
of the thumb's normal strokes, ie the opposite way to the finger strokes!!
********
Yet more details on the methodology:
1. the motion is your NORMAL plucking movement, just as though you were
playing (as close as possible!)
2. use repeated freestroke
3. everybody's nails respond differently so you need to experiment and see
how much impact the process has on your particular nails. I go for 10 or
so strokes and then try it on the bare string, and continue if necessary.
Basically it is a matter of how much nail the sandpaper is taking away at
each stroke.
4. fold the paper, gently so that the abrasive surface is not broken. Tuck
the string into the fold, with the rest of the paper on either side of the
string;
_____________________
(O____O_____O_____O___
where the O is the strings, the ( is the folded surface and the _________
is the remainder of the sandpaper.
This keeps the paper in place well enough because you have the paper 'anchored'
by being either side of the 6 strings. You can also hold it still with your
other hand by squeezing the strings through the sandpaper.
********
***
Then I shape off the leading and trailing edges which this method of
shaping do not address - especially the trailing edge.
Then take off the burr underneath, - all with 600 grade by the way so far.
Then I take some 1200 grade that has been rubbed against another piece of
600 - this is very smooth! -
First I rub over the edges with some of the coarser parts of the paper,
and then with the finer parts (ie where it has been worn smooth already).
Then its a piece of old leather.
Then a piece of wood I found washed up on the beach at Biarritz (SW France)
after my first concert there. This really is very smooth indeed.
And if I want to get carried away there are various sea-smoothed pebbles
around the house which get 'nailed' every so often.
Of all these steps, the first is the most important, followed by the rest
in descending order.
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Getting the most out of practice time
Your practice time is always limited - no matter how much you have, the
way you use it will greatly affect the progress you make. For the sake of
an example let's take one hour as a typical practice session.
In general terms out of an hour I would devote 15 mins to technical study
- cycling through scales, arpeggios, slurs, as you will find laid out in
the Iznaola Kitharalogus manual with practise routines already made up.
For repertoire it depends so much on where you are at and what technical
matters you have to improve. Above all don't try to lift your technique
with repertoire - leave that to the first 15 minutes. I would generally
suggest a mixture of 19th and 20th century studies to begin with, mixing
in some freer types of music in time. If you are going to practice reliably
6 days a week, for one hour, I would assign a minimum of 15 minutes to each
piece, giving you 3 a day, and leave out one each day to rest it - that
gives you 4 pieces to work on at any one time. Learn it slowly and thoroughly,
deciding on the best fingering and sticking to it - writing it in if necessary.
Practise small chunks at a time, a chunk being defined as the biggest bit
you can play perfectly first time. If that is one note, so be it! Reduce
tempo until you can play the chunk, and use a metronome to keep your rhythmic
realisation accurate - you will have plenty of time to get expressive later.
When practising like this, maintain a cool and unemotional attitude - emotional
involvement in the learning stage is a very bad idea. Monitor muscles at
all times for tension and constantly seek ways to reduce the muscular effort
being used.
As you progress you will find you can learn faster, but you will also find
the pieces get longer. You may therefore find you have to reduce the number
worked on at any one time, or - practise for longer! Remember also the benefit
of laying items aside after a while, and coming back to them (this frees
up some time too). Expand your repertoire interest back into the baroque
and renaissance (using F sharp tuning for the latter) and forward into more
adventurous contemporary items, only when you have an efficient technique.
So more advanced repertoire generally follows success with technical work;
try though to keep some easier items going, so that you can maintain a deeply
interpretive attitude to them - its very hard thinking about interpretational
matters when your technique is being stretched to the limits. If possible,
resist the temptation to work on repertoire items at the outer limits of
your technical preparation; you may conceivably be able to play them, but
often at the cost of musically meaningless performance. We should be musicians,
not machines.
Play chamber music - whether guitar duos, trios....etc or with other instruments,
perhaps on a weekly basis. You learn a huge amount that is very very hard
to learn on your own. The principle is that a solo guitarist is in fact
like an ensemble all on one instrument; playing in a real ensemble gives
you insights you can transfer to your solo playing.
What works in practising strategies?
I would suggest it is dangerous to generalise dogmatically. People can only
speak for themselves and what they have seen work with their pupils and
friends.
But in general I would suggest a practice programme based on need; thus
-
i. if you have identified a particular technical feature you need to develop
(slurs, left hand position, arpeggios...) then you might usefully spending
a lot of time devoted to that.
ii. if you have to learn a piece quickly to take part for instance in an
ensemble concert, then by all means concentrate on that!
iii. if you have longer term goals then you need to work sustainably - which
means sustaining interest while developing and improving useful skills,
and using your learning machinery in an effective way. This means;
a) regular slow practice of new material
b) regular breaks of one session from all material, ie say one day out four
or seven you don't play it - even if you are working 'hard' on it. This
period of rest gives your nervous system time to 'think' about the piece,
and when you return to it you will find some things sort themselves out
c) occasional longer breaks ie 2-3 weeks for the same reason as above
d) do some technique work every day, if only as a warm up exercise. However,
if you are likely to find yourself in performance situation where it is
not possible to warm up first, also practice 'performing' from cold at home.
However proper practice should only be done when the hands are stretched
and in a good state, otherwise you will be programming into the pieces associations
of strain and less-than-ideal hand preparation that are undesirable. So
always warm up.
e) make a careful distinction between 'practice' and 'practising performing'.
The former is an analytical process where you rehearse finger movements,
decide on interpretive matters and assess your progress logically. The latter
is when you visualise yourself in front of an audience and play 'as though'
an audience were present - in other words you don't stop and go over something
just because it didn't go quite right - you play in fact a peformance in
all details bar the audience. Most people do far too much of the latter
at home, and much to little of the former. It feels good to 'perform', it
engages the emotions and feeds the agreeble sensations of fulfilling whatever
dreams we have; but it is bad practising. I would advise a ratio of a least
10:1 - in otherwords, 10 play throughs, slow and methodical checking before
hand what is going to happen, ie really practising, for every 1 'go for
it'
performance.
f) make a written practice chart, and fill it in at least one week in advance.
This makes it remarkably easy to resist the temptations to just have a quick
sight-read through one thing, or to spend too long with another thing. It
gives you the prespective to keep working at longer term goals, whether
technical or repertoire, and helps therefore with longer term goal realisation
g) write down your goals! Whatever they are, your goals will seem much more
real and tangible if you write them down, and read them every day ie before
practising. Three rules for goals; they must be Present tense, Positive
and Personal (often known as the three P's).
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Making transcriptions of piano music - how do you do
it?
The answer is - it all depends;
i. on the nature of the original - key, texture, style etc
ii. on the technical constraints of the intended player/s
The best option if you have it is to copy the music into a notation programme,
which will enable you quickly and easily to transpose it into the three
or four
likely possible keys. You can also easily try out various simplification
procedures to see if they work and retain enough of the music's essence.
Another option is just to keep looking at music until you find something
which
seems will work without any transposition or general fiddling around. However
this is very rarely found.
Individual cases often dictate the approach however. For instance, the presence
of an important repeated pedal note may dictate the use of an open string,
or
the creation of an unusual tuning, which in turn will dictate key.
Simplification procedures meanwhile revolve around the necessity of leaving
out
notes which are 'padding' and to the sound of the piano may be necessary,
but
which for the guitar are both unnecessary and technically inaccessible.
So for
example when you are faced with a big thick chord, all the notes of which
you
cannot possibly play, you identify which are the important notes, the ones
conveying necessary harmonic or melodic information, and which (if any!)
are
merely padding, ie doublings of the octave and fifth etc. Thus, if you have
a
chord with numerous padding notes and the lowest note is the 7th of the
chord,
you may be able to leave out most of the padding but make sure you keep
the 7th
as it contains a lot of essential information. Now, the game comes when
you are
at the borderline between being able to include all the necessary,
information-rich notes, and the inclusion of them being too much for a six
string box like ours. Then it is usually time to conclude that i. the piece
needs more than one guitar ii. maybe it just won't work at all.
The previous comments about simplification pre-suppose that there is a texture
thick enough to include padding. Things get really tough when everything
is
important. This may either be in cases of real counterpoint (such as Bach
inventions), or in cases of a more classical texture ie tune accompanied
by
Alberti-type bass. The latter is not really counterpoint, but you can't
in all
honesty simplify an Alberti bass (I suspect you would find a lot of this
if you
tried your hand at Clementi) and so for this reason the apparently simple
music of
Mozart etc is often impossible or at least unreasonably hard to transcribe,
whereas the music technically harder (for the pianist) of Albeniz etc is
in fact
easier.
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On Stage Fright
There are some things easily enough said about performance anxiety, but
they are things almost entirely from personal experience, informed as that
is by observation of students and colleagues, and a fair bit of reading.
Firstly, stage fright is I believe a compound of many anxieties and fears
that manifest as one amorphous sensation. This compound is made up of very
long term things, such as childhood experiences (ie approval/disapproval
by significant others), self esteem, self belief, the roles one is used
to occupying: and more short term things - have I practised enough? etc.
Underlying all that is a basic animal fear of being looked at by lots of
others. Some of these things take serious therapeutic work, depending on
the individual. Some things work more easily for pretty well everybody.
Firstly, it gets easier with practice. Play regularly in public in "safe"
situations where it doesn't matter if things go wrong. This acts as an innoculation
against nerves. Recognise that most people experience a drop in their ability
in front of people, so choose to play things that are well within your technical
capacity, rather than the difficult things at the limts of your technique.
This helps build positive experiences of playing, reinforcing self belief
(ie "So I can do it!")
But the most powerful thing is something I have not seen discussed in this
particular area, only in other places. "Context dependency" is
the fancy title of a phenomenon in which one is only or best able to perform
in the surroundings and environment in which one learnt the 'steps' one
is now trying to reproduce. This translates as follows: if you practise
always in the same room, facing the same way, at the same time of day, wearing
the same things, following the same practice procedure, these associations
get engraved into the notes you have learnt.
If you then go to a different place, time of day, etc, your nervous system
is saying to you "hey, you are going to want me to fetch these movements
out of memory, but I don't know where they've gone!" because memory
is a thing of associations, and memories are laid down and retrieved by
associating one thing with another. Remedy: change your practice place,
time and routine, (to diffuse the dependency on one particular context)
and as much as possible replicate that of your intended performance situation,
including dress and time, and visualise the event in as much detail as possible,
as many times as you can before the day, including pictures of the audience
reacting with great applause at the end of your performance. It works.
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Visualisation
Visualisation is the internal pre-imagining of an action, playing the action
on the screen of your mind as it were. So why do it? Well, very many artists
use visualisation as a tool in their preparation of technical aspects of
their work, and as a preparation for performance.
The benefits of visualisation to the technical dimension are principally
as follows. If you are able to learn, for instance, a sequence of notes
with enough conscious clarity that you can play those notes, make those
movements, in your imagination with absolute precision and in great detail,
then you can be really sure you have programmed those movements into your
system very thoroughly; more than that, there is clear evidence that when
you mentally rehearse those movements you are actually stimulating the nerves
in your muscles that are actually used in the execution of the movements
on your instrument.
The difference between mental rehearsal and physical execution is primarily
that in the mental realm the only mistakes you make are due entirely to
mental inattention, (not physical error) and so from an early stage in your
preparation of a work it is possible to mentally rehearse (and so programme
those nerves!) absolutely perfectly. This also - and equally importantly
- means that you can programme that system of yours while the muscles that
will carry out the work itself are in a state of absolute relaxation (and
the more relaxed your are the better you visualise - akin to meditation).
So that the muscles learn to associate those notes with a state of relaxation
- by far the best way to go about learning any piece of music is to do it
with as little physical tension as possible.
The second element is that of performance preparation. Put simply, stage
fright is a reaction to an unfamiliar situation, and many people find it
diminishes as they get used to being on a stage in front of lots of strangers.
Just as vividly imagining playing a sequence of notes causes the nerves
of your hands to go through the motions of actually doing it, vividly imagining
being in front of a large audience can bring on exactly the same symptoms
as physically being there. The advantage is that you are able to visit this
experience as often as you like, until the stress symptoms reduce. You can
also visualise yourself experiencing whatever outcome you want from actual
performance, and thus subtly teach your nervous system to expect that reaction,
and thus cause it to behave, in ways we cannot consciously fathom, so as
to bring that desired result - favourable of course!
So once you get any stage fright put away in your box of experiences you
can move on to visualising and programming in the sort of really positive
outcomes you want.
Be very clear that what you visualise is what you are programming in, thus
it MUST be positive! Visualise even as a 'joke' any kind of musically or
experientially non-desirable outcome is asking for big trouble. A common
metaphor is the garden one - you don't need to plant, water and fertilise
weeds, they flourish without any assistance! But clearing out the weeds
and cultivating really desirable plants takes a lot of work and consious
effort.
Most human endeavours are like that, and too many people live a life of
weeds because the weeds shoot up without effort. People are not used to
the idea that if they consciously change the pictures on their inner screen,
and the stories in their inner script, they can radically change their effectiveness
and their outcomes.
The most powerful tool in this is visualisation.
There are lots of books either about this subject or incorporating it into
their scheme of work, which you will find in larger book shops under the
personal development type sections. Personal recommendations; "The
Inner Game of Music" by Barry Green & Timothy Galway, and "Mindstore"
by Jack Black.
Now read this.
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