on the in-betweens

My first quarter of classes is complete, but my second has yet to begin.

I already feel like I've been in Seattle a long time, but it's only been about three months. My sleep cycle is skewed, and day is night; I feel like I'm in a time warp.

The house is now so wonderfully quiet.

I exchanged emails with old rock band pal DSM yesterday, and it turns out he's now married, with a two year old son and a two-hour commute to his job.

I enjoyed the House Team Circle meeting last Wednesday. One big positive point for me was that I went to my "alone place" during the meeting, that internal place where I play the guitar because I enjoy playing the guitar. And I now recognize this is the state of mind I need to bring with me onstage if I ever intend to put stage fright into its proper place as a source of energy.

The House Team Circle meeting with CG on Saturday was also eye-opening, and I feel like I now am at the beginning of knowing how to break down a piece of repertoire and learn to play it in solid time.

Saturday was also the day when I realized that other musicians universally perceive the metronome as speeding up and slowing down while practicing to a click. I've noticed it before now and then in my personal practice, and it's been a regular feature of House Team Circle meetings, but I somehow never made the connection in my own consciousness that this is a common perception and that it might be important.

Always before, I thought of it as the musicians speeding up and slowing down, or the music speeding up and slowing down. "Are we speeding up in this passage?"

During the TTA rehearsal, CG told the team to pay special attention to moments when the metronome seemed to speed up or slow down while rehearsing a particular piece. He didn't ask them to look for moments when the music sped up.

For me, this points toward something about the subjectivity of musicians' time sense, especially in a group.

After all, a metronome doesn't really speed up or slow down (within the statistical limits of quartz oscillation, of course). It's in our consciousness.

Although, I should point out that the music unequivocally sped up when the Chicago group played "Eye of the Needle." I can't remember if we rehearsed it with a metronome or not. Maybe my internal clock was reasonably well-calibrated after 15 or more years of practicing with a metronome, enough that the music was an external reality that was speeding ahead of my internal time sense.

Here's the funny thing about listening to the TTA team after CG's statement: in order to hear any slight variation in the perceived metronome tempo (and there were a few here and there) I had to enter the time flow of the music as a musician by tapping a finger and listening as if I were performing the music. If I had been casually listening, I would not have noticed anything, at least not with this group.

I've also been pondering how my ongoing experiment the "touch-pressure" picking paradigm has changed my relationship to time.

If you're swatting at the string with a stiff arm and picking hand, the pick contacts the string somewhere along a curved arc, and it's hard to control exactly where (and therefore when) you strike the note. Unless every swing is exactly the same, you could be a little early, you could be a little late. You might even miss the string.

If you are already touching the string, it's then just a matter of applying pressure and getting to know where the "break point" is where the pick and the string slip past each other. If you want to, and you've learned control, you can push the break point a bit earlier, or hold off until later. Or you can be dead on to a metronome click.

The touch-pressure paradigm definitely makes things easier when you're working at ultra-slow metronome speeds, say 40 bpm with four clicks per notes. Your ability to swat and control the point of contact breaks down.

From another point of view, it's also occurred to me that very fast picking may also lead to the same thing. I sometimes see guitar magazines advising players to "make their movements smaller" as they speed up. In our first meeting, one very good guitarist advised me to make my pick strokes "narrower," no more than the width of the string.

So, if you progressively make your movements "smaller" and "narrower," won't you logically at some point cross over into touching the string with each pick rather than swatting at it? Your pick stroke can't get much smaller or narrower than that, can it?

Time to go eat, and then practice...