There is one thing I always tell my students: you can’t think about playing guitar and play well at the same time. Thinking about playing is the same as analyzing it, a function of the left side of your brain.
Doing creative things is controlled by the right side of your brain. When you start using too much of the left side of your brain it prevents your right-brain from generating the “images” necessary for a good performance. In order to play music properly you must “hear” the music as you play it.
In one of his instructional videos, Jimmy Bruno mentions seeing pictures on the fretboard. Whether you are hearing or seeing, what you are not doing is thinking in terms of descriptive sequences: “first finger, third fret, fifth string…” These analytical (left-brain) processes are useful when learning something musical (a scale, a chord shape, etc.) but you must move beyond this in order to think of a scale or chord as a picture or a sound. (Right brain) How do you get to this point? As usual: practice, practice, practice…
The two sides of your brain
If you watch sports, I’m sure you have heard the announcer refer to an athlete as playing “unconscious”. Whether it’s hitting four three-pointers in a row or running off a series of birdies, what is being exhibited is a zen-like state where the athlete is not thinking about their actions, where they are instead focusing on the task at hand, as opposed to the thousands of people watching them, the money they could win or lose, the championship trophy…
Something I hear all the time while teaching lessons is: “I was able to play it perfectly at home, I don’t why I can’t do it now”. The problem is that the student is distracted by the fact that I am watching: they are thinking about not making mistakes (the kiss of death!) vs. focusing on what the scale should sound like/look like. This ability to focus on the task at hand is very difficult, and the reason why Tiger Woods is a very wealthy man.
The good news is that focus can be attained by anyone willing to work hard enough at it; if you do something enough times you will be able to learn to execute if perfectly. What it really comes down to is if you love what you are doing enough to be willing to do it over and over and over again until it becomes a physical reaction, instead of a mental procedure.
Imagine your best gigs. Didn’t your playing seem to flow effortlessly, even though you hardly thought about your playing? This was because you could “hear” yourself, you were focused on the sound of your instrument, the flow of your songs. Now think about a bad gig. You couldn’t remember the changes, you forgot the arrangements, your solos felt stale… Pretty soon this is all you can think about, which inevitably leads to more mistakes, which bums you out, which is a distraction… You get the point.
Dimebag Darrell had no recollection of recording his solo for “Cowboys from Hell”, because he was blackout drunk. Eric Clapton doesn’t remember five years of his life (heroin), even though they coincide with his tenure in Cream, which many feel was his greatest playing! I’m not advocating drug/alcohol abuse here.
My point is that they were able to do this because even while “unconscious” their brains knew how to execute ideas they had rehearsed countless times. Use your practice time to learn something to the point where you no longer have to think about it: learn it, and then forget it!
Related Posts:
Sing! – Using Vocalization to Master the Guitar
Lifting Weights – Structuring Your Guitar Practice Regimine
The Mental Game: Preparing Yourself to be a First-Rate Guitarist
