I’m just out of the hospital. I was there for 6 days, sick for a few days before that, and now I’m recovering. My friend John Burton said, “How can I help?”, perhaps thinking I would ask him to water the plants and pick up my suit from the cleaners. I said, “Can you write something for Substack?” He did, and here it is. I don’t know of anyone else I would ask.
I have mentioned John before in the context of his podcast/radio show Home From Here, over the air on Radio Free Rhinecliff and on-line at MixCloud. In the post he touches on one of the incredible stories that makes up his life story. Through those stories he has found, and is doing, his life’s work, which not many people can say.
Thank you, John.
My thing is this - to get to the part where you can play something well without thinking about it, you have to spend many hours thinking about it.
A decade ago I had a mental health crisis, was misdiagnosed and prescribed what I found out were toxic doses of lithium, almost died by my hand and by the pills, then spent a whole summer with a 7 year old girl detoxing (NO MEDS AT ALL THANKS) and learning how to get and stay clear.
For me (and I stress the “for me” part), meditation and practicing clarity was the magic elixir. And after a decade, almost anything I do now I am better at than I was 10 years ago. And that is certainly true of my guitar playing.
Tom is a master of the art of practice so there isn’t much to talk about that he can’t talk about better. He talks about movement and listening and discipline and technique all the time, and he is right. There may be one other corner of the studio to make your practice better. Paying attention to what is going on in your head.
Being over-critical is the biggie, right? If there is no difference in your mind between wanting to be better at playing and being disappointed at where you are presently, then you are being over-critical. Negativity in any form spirals, and here is no exception. After disappointment comes frustration, after frustration comes a few missed days of practice, after a few missed days of practice comes a step back, and you have fulfilled your own expectations.
Instead, move your mind to the space where you can hear clearly what you want to play eventually, and also know that what you are playing right now is the only path you have to get there. Wait? You’re on a path! That's something to be grateful for. And all of a sudden your head, and your playing, are in a better place.
Being present is also really challenging in practice, especially in drilling. If my brain had an odometer while I practiced it would have turned over weekly. But I created this trick, when I am finger playing and thinking about dinner. When my mind takes that walk, I don’t try to focus on what I am playing, instead, I try to focus on what the instrument (guitar in my case) is doing when I am NOT playing. There are microseconds between even the fastest of plucking, where the instrument is doing the work. I try to hear that. 100% of the time it lands me not only with the guitar but nearly inside it. It’s a redirect. It’s an attention hack. But it works.
Lastly, the struggle with perfection. You always want to hear, “You played that perfectly.” The problem is, you never will play it perfectly because there is no such thing as perfection. UNLESS. Move your mind from trying to practice so much that you play something perfectly once to understanding that you play it perfectly every time. Because every time you play it, you are making progress, and since there is no perfect, progress is the only thing you can do, and you are doing it, which is ironically perfect.
I do this before I practice too, and it helps me get right. I do a breathing exercise taught to me by a singer when I was getting stage fright. But it centers really well too. And it is simple. Breathe in four beats (at whatever your cadence is) and breathe out for eight. Do that til you notice you are where you should be. It won’t take long. By that I mean, maybe a minute.
Then start practicing. When you mind isn’t where your hands are, listen to the instrument in between when you are playing it. When you are overly-critical, remember that you are on a path. And when you are frustrated at not playing perfectly, know that you already are.