welcome to the suck

Post 6 of 90.

Long day at work. "Killer Veggie" pizza for lunch. Tired.

I had a cappuccino after work and read part of a new book on lyric writing. Then commuted home for quick dinner of leftover chili soup.

The cat is on antibiotics. Something bit him under the armpit and it was infected.

About 9:30 I went down to the studio for some practice.

Tonight:
--Alexander lie-down (w/cat on chest)
--guitar tuning follies. Is that C string sharp or flat? Does the tuner even know?
--right hand picking on the A string, no-tempo, then to one note every four beats @ 60 bpm, one note every two beats @ 60bpm, etc. up to 16th notes @ 75 bpm, along the way looking for the feeling of release in the wrist, as well seeking out whatever it is I need to let go of somewhere in my shoulder and arm in order to break through to the next level.

Also looking for the correct support for the right arm on the guitar. Some of this involves experimenting with small changes in guitar height, as well as looking for only the necessary tension I need. There's a lot to let go of in getting the shoulder and arm to relax while making the picking motion and maintaining the floating right hand. A step too far and the arm flops off the guitar, although I experiment with purposely allowing this to happen, just to see what it's like and if I can identify the precise crossover point from relaxation to collapse. I can still pick certain things faster if I lightly plant the right hand on the bridge, but this fixed position robs me of a great deal of freedom in switching from string to string, so there seems to be no future in that approach for me. But with the floating right hand, there's some other element thrown into the mix that I still haven't learned to blend in and control properly. Some of it is most certainly excess tension, but where? And what?

It once again seems easier when I stand. I'm ectomorphic, with a short torso and long limbs, and I cannot seem to get the guitar high enough to avoid being interfered with excessively by my right thigh. It would be almost up under my chin, and then it would be too high to suit my long monkey arms.

An observation about myself is that I tend to attack things intellectually, and then use what I find to work on the other centres, but it's beginning to seem like I need on some level to trust my body to have the intuition to figure out what to do to make this picking technique work properly. Which I suppose means an unavoidably large amount of simply sitting and picking attentively with the metronome until my body just "gets it" and lets go of whatever is getting in the way. But I'm uncomfortable with it because it's not my usual way to trust my body, and I have a hard time now and then accepting that the body itself can contain its own sort of knowledge base. I seem to have some kind of bias that if it's not available as a precise verbal thought-form, it hardly counts as knowledge at all. And yet I intellectually (ironically) also understand that, yes, it is a sort of knowledge after all.

It's just that I've gotten so sick over many years of the massive amount of work it's always taken for me even to begin to play the instrument at the feeble level I've managed to arrive at so far. Playing the guitar has never come naturally, and I would love to stop worrying about the guitar and make music instead.

In my previous late- and post-teenage incarnation as a guitarist, I got to where I could play some whizzy-whizzy metal leads now and then using the wrist fixed on the bridge, but there was a long haul of sitting, practicing, and sucking, seemingly without hope. Then one day it was there and I had crossed over, but in looking back, I cannot identify exactly when or how it happened. Playing a lot of lead guitar in a band certainly helped, and looking back I can see that very often it was slow, attentive practice on particular things that led to improvement, but it was never very systematic and predictable. (That is, Ian wasn't very systematic or predicable. Just determined and a little lucky now and then, perhaps?) It's still mostly a big mystery to me, and I find myself now having the exact same feeling of working through exercises all over again and feeling like the suck will never end. Will whatever mysterious force that helped me break through before and end my previous run of suck please come back and give me a hand here?

All the same, with what I 've learned and achieved in the last few years, even at this level I'm playing things that before I would have thought, "Oh, that's impossible." But still there's another level to be reached.

And when am I going to get around to fretboard familiarity and find time to work on my ear? And work on composing and songwriting? And just have some fun? So much to do.

Anyway, I finished out tonight with that simple old 3444 Primary cross-picking pattern between the E and A strings, no-tempo only while I worked on moving from string to string with a gradual pressure approach, trying to wire that relaxation in at as deep a level as possible.

It occurs to me that I need to go out and buy a new kitchen timer with an alarm to replace the one I've had for a while. I lost the little battery compartment cover somewhere. I tend to get lost for hours in extremely basic right hand stuff, and I don't have hours available to touch on everything that needs to be touched on. Maybe it would be healthy to move on after a set interval interval of time instead of getting lost in whatever I happen to be examining at any one moment.

There was a moment during my work on relaxing my right arm and shoulder when I could scarcely believe the wacky, tense way I used to hold my right arm on the face of the guitar. I wound up with the pick actually over the fingerboard side of the soundhole. Sometimes even over part of the fingerboard itself. Weird.

Discovery: discordant notes will drive the cat from the room.