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.

The endless plateau

It's been almost two months since my last post. I'm still playing away, but I feel like I'm on a huge plateau and the temptation to reduce practicing is ever present.

I think it's because I've gotten into what I think of as a "runner's dilemma". The idea is that you build up your regular runs to some particular distance and then the next time you run you feel like you have to make that distance or better. That can be a really good thing as it encourages you to improve. It can be a bad thing because it makes each run more daunting.

I haven't run in quite a few years, but I feel like I have the same thing going on with my guitar practicing. I have a set of songs that I go through and if I don't get to all of them, I feel like I was a slacker.

Music and families

I've taken to reading what appear to be extended obituaries in the morning paper. The "Region" section of our paper does longer stories once or twice a week about some fairly ordinary person who's just passed away. They're really charming stories that often reveal some interesting personal history, e.g. Aunt Edna moved here from Romania and bought a ranch in Sonoita, or my dad invented peanut butter, or uncle Fred owned a little store where kids could get snowcones for free, etc.

Anyway, I found one the other day about a guy who was described as an incredible guitarist, but who had never taken a lesson. On reading the story, it turned out that i) he really was an incredible guitarist, and ii) that both of his parents were guitarists and that when he was a kid both parents would routinely pull out their guitars for the evening.

Not to detract anything from the guy in question--who really seems to have been an incredible guitarist and an all-around nice person---but I'm wondering how much variation there is in terms of "music in the home". While the person in question may never had had any formal instruction, it seems like he had almost daily exposure to guitar playing by several family members.

I think my experience is probably pretty close to the norm for most Americans. My siblings and I all had music lessons of various sorts, but our training and playing lasted only a few years. Neither of our parents played anything, though both had had similar upbringings. (My parents are divorced, but I think that's orthogonal.)

So the general question: how much variation on musical "exposure" is there and does that play a role in whether kids pursue music?

The specific question for me: can I honestly expect to make serious progress on the guitar when I did not have extended childhood or current exposure and am no longer taking lessons?

A new book

I'm still working on songs in the Shipton book, but I've got another book that's been sitting around for a few weeks that I've started playing from: You can teach yourself fingerpicking guitar by Tommy Flint.

Fingerpicking, if you don't know, is when you play the individual strings with individual fingers. No pick. No strumming. I've got a few songs like this already, but this is a whole book of them.

The very beginning of the book is way too beginner-oriented, even for me! But I've flipped through the book and the stuff near the end is way more advanced than I've done so far, so I figure it'll be a nice one to work through.

At the moment, I'm struggling with the fact that the introductory material appears to have been written before the dawn of time. It's not so much inaccurate in any technical way; it's just culturally way out of date.