In the dark

I was practicing the other night at dusk working through a piece I've played for some time. It was getting dark, but I didn't want to get up to turn on the light. I realized that some pieces I play by looking at my right hand, other piecies I play by looking at the music, and others I play not looking at anything.

I realized this because the particular piece I was playing seemed to get worse as I got darker; it was one of the pieces I need to look at my right hand for.

Some of this is based on familiarity. There are pieces i know really well and I'm used to playing them without looking at anything.

Some is technique. I find that I generally have to look at my right hand more if I'm playing with a pick, perhaps because I'm less sure of the location of the pick, than I am of my actual fingers.

I guess the oddest thing is that for the pieces I play without looking at my right hand, it's not a good idea to actually look, it makes my playing worse. That is, if it's a piece I can now play without looking at my right, looking down actually causes me to stumble.

In any case, it was an interesting realization that turning the lights on or off will help and hinder playing different songs.

Low/high strings

I was banging away yesterday -- trying hard not to, of course (see last post) -- when it occurred to me that it might not be how hard I'm hitting the strings that distresses me, but which strings I'm hitting.

Digression. It's hard to talk about which strings because the small strings, those that play "higher" notes, are the strings lower down across the instrument as you play. So if you say "low" strings, it's ambiguous between the position of the strings and the notes they play. I'm gonna try to say "high-note strings", etc. to keep it unambiguous.

Certain chords mean skipping over some of the low-note strings and I'm usually pretty good about watching out for that.

I think that I've gotten in the habit of hitting the (other) low note strings and missing some of the high-note strings though. Maybe I'm obsessing or worrying overmuch about it, but maybe my strums are, hm, "truncated", and don't reach all the high-note strings all the time.

I tried working on this yesterday and things sounded pretty good.

Encore doucement

I have a vague memory that I actually have already posted on this topic, but that actually makes this even more interesting...at least to me.

I was practicing away and thinking as I went that my strings needed replacing. Well, I went off and trimmed my fingernails (always a good idea for lots of reasons), sat down with a nice cabernet to resume practice and was suddenly overtaken with the urge to play softly.

I almost went to jelly at how nice things suddenly sounded, was reminded what a nice guitar I have, and how all was right with the world...if only Napolitano wasn't leaving the state and the university budget wasn't in the toilet...but that's a whole different story!

The gist of all that is that I have to remember not to bang away at the guitar and play with some delicacy sometimes.

Little progress

Things have been really really busy at work of late and this has meant little time for the guitar.

I'm trying to keep up quality practice sessions on the weekend, but during the week, I can miss several days at a stretch.

I don't think I'm backsliding, but I sure miss it!

New floors and the guitar

We're having new floors put into our living room and den. The work isn't done yet; the floors are down, but we want them to come back and fix the edging. This means all our furniture...or most of it...is still stuffed into other rooms.

This has meant that I've been practicing occasionally in rooms with a bare floor with virtually no furniture. This, in turn, means that there is a whole new acoustic dimension to my practicing in those rooms; I can hear all sorts of things I don't normally hear.

I've found that when I'm playing fingerstyle, my fingernails occasionally bump up against neighboring strings. This isn't a problem if those strings aren't vibrating, but I'm playing fast enough and more complex pieces where that's now often the case. When those neighboring strings are vibrating, I get a noticeable buzzing when I bump.

I suppose this is normal. The better and better one gets, the more little bad habits one notices and wants to correct.

The alternative analysis is that I'm getting worse!

Precision

I find I have a whole bunch of songs that I "can" play, but that don't really sound like music to me. Some of that's probably that they're so familiar, or that the versions I'm playing are so simple, but some of it is that I think I'm just not precise enough.

I find that practicing alone I settle for all sorts of mistimings, buzzing strings, etc. I tried working on that one day last week and had very sore hands the next day!

I figure if I say it out loud here maybe that'll keep me honest!

Another strumming epiphany

I've never liked my strumming. Somehow it feels like I'm banging away at the instrument, either too loudly, or hitting the wrong strings, or there's buzzing, or there's an evil strumming gremlin made of broken glass who lives between my strings.

I did discover something about my right-hand technique recently. It seems to be that fingerstyle things sound better with my right hand further across the sound hole than flatpicked strums, which seem to sound better further back to the right.

I could be imagining this....or it could be that gremlin has simply moved for a few days, but that's my current thinking.

Close your eyes

There's this version of Wildwood Flower that I've been playing for a long time. Over the last few months, it seems to have gotten a little rockier. Moreover, I've been finding that the harder I work at trying to get it back to something smoother, it just stays rocky and clumsy.

I noticed the other day that when I closed my eyes and stopped looking so closely at where my fingers were going that it got a lot smoother.

Regularity

The semester has started up again and even though I'm not teaching this term, it's really irregularized my practice schedule. Now there are at least two or three days a week when I may only get in a few minutes: tune up, a few scales, maybe a few of the pieces I know by heart and then put the guitar back in the case.

I'm trying to make up for it by doing really full practice sessions on the weekends, but I can really notice the difference when I miss a day or so.

I'm definitely off the plateau and am making some progress with the fingerstyle book, but it's slow going....

The edge

Well, I'd been on a plateau for some weeks and then the holidays were on us. Somewhere in there I decided two things. . First, I was going to pursue lessons again. Second, I was going to make an effort to really get in quality practice time every day.

I found a guy to do the lessons with and met with him. A very nice fellow, but after I explained where I was and where I thought I was going, he said he wasn't sure he had anything to teach me. It was very weird. I guess what he was saying was that unless I wanted to change my goals, I was doing the right thing to advance them. That sounded like a good thing. Anyway, I mulled that over for about a week and then decided I'd skip lessons for now.

Practice. Practice over the holidays has been good. I've been making lots of progress with the fingerpicking book. I can't really put my finger on the nature of the progress, but some of the ones that are supposed to sound like music actually vaguely almost mostly kind of sound like music.