lots of guitar playing

I couldn't seem to get going for a while when my alarm went off this morning, so I only caught the last half hour or so of guitar calisthenics at HQ. I think they were working on close-voiced arpeggios when I came in (7ths in C, perhaps?) rather than the usual NST fully-inverted triads in 6ths. But once I sat down, the group shifted to three-triad stacks in A Harmonic Minor, which has been an ongoing project for a while now; Harmonic Minor produces a lot of interesting chords and combination, and I think today everybody found the F major/B diminished/E major stack particularly wacky. Some eyebrows went up when that one came around.

My onboard tuner no longer works for some reason. I have no idea why. I don't think the battery is dead, but I'll change it out and see if that helps. The Peterson digital strobe tuner is too bulky to drag all over the place, so it's back to the A 440 on the metronome and my ears.

Wow, using my ears to tune--how weird is that?

I've still gotten better at tuning by ear, though; after studying the overtone series for a little while, I've learned to compensate a little bit for the slight sharpness of the 3rd harmonic (the just-intonated Perfect 5th) when I tune by ear. I always used to wind up with my lower strings flat relative to equal temperament.

Igor K. tune up with a digital tuner, and when I checked against his open strings, I was close enough that I didn't find it necessary to retune.

The Tuning the Air team took off for tech rehearsal at CHAC, so Igor K. and I stayed to work on repertoire for the House Team Circle (since Andrew M. is now going to be working on the house team, I guess we can officially go with that name).

Igor and I worked mostly on "Eye of the Needle" and stopped a few times to break a few patterns down no-tempo; there were a few stress points here and there for both of us that were destabilizing the following notes. Igor had one pattern with a finger pivot that was tying him up in knots, so we got in there with no-tempo and posing to practice building a relaxation response into our muscle memory.

We even took a few patterns into time with the metronome after cleaning them up no-tempo, and with one of them we made it 80 bpm with two clicks per note. Which felt fast, especially when you're intentionally studying every tiny physical movement and trying to rotate your attention through your body to relax unnecessary tension.

At some point, once you have something exactly how you want it in muscle memory, you're supposed to hand it off to your autopilot system as the metronome speeds up, but I can safely say I have not reached that point yet. I'm not sure yet at exactly what point you begin the handoff. I'm still learning to walk before I can run.

But I can definitely say that the feeling of intimate contact with the string, of "playing from the string," hasn't completely found it's way into my full-tempo playing. Not to the point where I can feel it unambiguously and say, "Ah, there it is!"

I do have a feeling of smoothness when I play various things, and my left hand finger release is better than it used to be; that is, my fingers generally do not react and pop up--at least on things that I've worked on in detail and where the skill has somehow transferred to other material. When I hit something requiring physical moves that are not polished and ready in my collection, I sometimes crash. The pinky stretch combination was killing me today in calisthenics; that move creates so much stress in my playing mechanism, that I crash the pattern and have to drop out about 50% of the time.

I'm still thinking out how to approach that one, and it occurred to me today, that a pinky stretch based in the First Primary 1234 fingering might work as a place to at least start working on this. With this pattern, the first three fingers would at least already be firmly placed and out of the way, and I might find it easier initially then to study, inhibit, and direct my sympathetic tension reactions to stretching my pinky out. I will also have to begin on the higher frets where the stretch is smaller, and the pressure on my left hand from being supported farther out from my torso won't be so intense.

Thing is, the particular section of the Harmonic Minor fingering under study begins with a pinky stretch while two of the other fingers are in a "light," relaxed state where they are more prone to tense up. The ring finger is down, and stays down as the pinky stretches and frets (a Succession and Completed Flow issue), but this pattern in the series is down below the 5th fret in Key of A (if my notes are correct) where the stretch and the tension are huge.

This is going to take a while.

I have pretty good stretch and strength in my index finger, but you don't always get infinite choice in fingerings when you're whipping something out on the fly. You sometimes find yourself boxed in by a previous fingering choice.

And while I'm thinking about it, here are a few big questions on my mind about learning to play the guitar and make music:
--How is it exactly that work on a particular fingering or exercise goes into your general guitar playing toolbox and improves everything you do, while other things that somehow should transfer to other situations don't?
--What is the exact mechanism by which this happens?
--How can I identify the important, transferrable stuff and therefore speed up my development as a player?

The no-tempo work of "dragging" relaxed, light fingers from position to position when shifting fingerings has begun to show up on a general level. Maybe this points toward some sort of skill or approach waaayyyy down below the surface of a guitarists physical practice that leads to general improvement.

In the end, I want to make my practice time count. I want to get improvement for every minute of time I put in.

I realize this is probably unrealistic. Maybe it's just my intellectual self wanting to run, run, run, when I should be asking my body to figure it out--however the hell you do that!

When I look back to my pre-Guitar Craft playing, I remember working on exercises from guitar magazines and just sucking for so long. And then something happened. On some level, I got something and all of a sudden I was shredding heavy metal leads, but I couldn't tell you what it was that changed. I can't even remember a particular moment of transition. It's like one day I just woke up and there it was, at least in my memory.

Maybe my memory is just faulty.

So how's that? A long entry and I refrained completely from reporting on crazy roommate antics. Yeah!