Beware Practice!

This might seem odd...beware practice? Practicing is a good, and you should practice as much as possible until you're so good you don't have to (Yngwie for example claims to not practice anymore after years and years of maniacal bedroom shredding). I'm certainly not that good yet, I'm still in the phase that, like Vito Bratta once said, "being a guitar player is like being a marathon runner...you have to be a guitar player to understand...you have to keep it every day or you start to lose it."

Then again, Vito allegedly practiced so much that he pretty much lost the use of a hand. Classical guitar or something. They say he practiced all day every day, even after a show.

As I think many guitar players, and just people in general, overlook, you have to constantly deconstruct your habits to make sure they're benefitting you. Bad practice can be worse than none at all. Again, I cite Vito. I would bet he injured himself by consistently doing something that hurt his hand. He probably tried to play through it, got used to doing it, and eventually exceeded the capability of physiology. Whether or not this is actually the truth for Vito, it most definitely can happen. Paul Gilbert says he deconstructed his picking technique because the way he was originally holding his pick was hurting his hand. For 18 months he slowed himself down (which for him means somewhere just shy of warp speed) and learned how to pick all over again, and all these years later he's still going strong. One damn fine guitar player, and educator, is PG.

Anyway, watching your practice carefully isn't just a way to avoid injury. Practice by it's nature is about repetition; you play something until you get it right. Start slow, build up to the tempo you want. Then do it again, a thousand times. You're not going to learn to play Presto by listening to it in the car.

So how's it apply to me?

Every single day, I practice at least four scales, and all their modes, up and down the neck, as a drill and warmup. For instance, today was Church, Harmonic minor, Melodic minor, and Pentatonic Mixolydian. Then I go through all drop 2 and drop 3 inversions of Major7, Minor7, Dom7, Min7b5, and Dim chords. Then I do the arpeggios of same with roots on three strings. I just use these as drills to warm up, and I get a lot of benefit out of it. I can rip up and down the entire neck in pretty much any scale and mode.

But recently, I caught myself doing something I didn't like; after running up and down a position, I found that when I got back to the root, or whatever tone I was targeting (it's often good to say, "I'll go up from the root to the third, then descend to the fifth"), I would vibrato the last note. Every single time. I didn't even realize I was doing it, it was just a way of concluding the run.

Vibrato is great; Steve Vai calls it "the soul of the note." You should practice vibrato entirely on it's own to really learn to control your timing and intonation. It's a lot harder to get right than it sounds.

But...you should be aware of it. ANYTHING that you do during practice that you don't even realize you're doing, means you're not really paying attention to what you're doing, and the sounds you're making. You're just going through the motions. You may as well just hold a baseball bat and twiddle your fingers on it, the exercise would be more or less the same.

Why is this alarming to me? Because I know that if I'm doing it in practice, it's probably working into my live performance. I practice WAY more than I gig (a sad truth). So without a doubt, my practice habits will show when I gig...even the bad, or unrealized, ones. So I know that, unless I deconstruct this habit, many of my runs will end with the same identical vibrato, unintentionally. Even if it sounds good, it should be intentional, not incidental; I should be listening and making sure that my resolutions make sense in the context of the music, not just to my fingers.

How am I working on it? I started by saying, "let me use no vibrato. I'll just sustain the note". Sound easy? Uh huh...try changing a simple picking pattern that you've done for so long that you don't even think about it anymore. You'll flub the run at any speed faster than your brain can keep up with, because your fingers and your brain take time to rewire habits.

Other things I'm doing; slide into the final note instead of picking it to work in some legato. Instead of landing on the note as usual, play the octave; work in some string skipping. These deliberate things force you think about what you're doing, and give you a greater instinctive arsenal; sometimes you'll find yourself sliding and sometimes sustaining without vibrato, and so forth, because you'll have more practiced options to satisfy your ear.

Anyway, that's where I'm at with this now, and so far, so good.

As always, thanks for visiting.