Second time around

I haven't posted in a while, but practice has been going pretty well.

I've been focusing on memorizing a finger-style piece that had been a problem for months. I'm about halfway through now. Slow going, but it's working.

I did have a little epiphanette the other day: when I go through my practice routine, sometimes pieces are rough. I'll occasionally go back to play them and they're typically much cleaner the second time through. It could be because I've simply already played it, but I'm thinking now that it has more to do with focus. The first time round, I'm trying to get through the whole repertoire; the second time through I'm focusing on just that piece.

Yet another strumming epiphany

My practice schedule has been off lately as I'm in the middle of dealing with a kidney stone. All should eventually be fine, but the moral of the story is: keep hydrated!

The strumming insight, which is really a continuation of one from two posts back, is that I realized that when I strum, I now hit all the strings that I'm supposed to. I think that's actually wrong though. It sounds lots better if I pass over or only lightly graze the bass strings (making sure to hit all the treble strings per two posts ago).

Now I could just be imagining this. Or it could be an effect of playing a "boomy" dreadnaught. Or it could be a huge new step in the right direction.

I'm hoping it's the last.

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!