Once home the ciabatta gets a thick layer of butter on one side, a combo of mayo and Horseradish sauce on the other, the meat goes in the middle (after the cat has pestered for his portion), and the whole lot goes in the microwave for 15 seconds on full, just to raise it a touch above room temperature and bring out the flavours, without melting the butter! That’s the usual – today no microwaving was needed – the bread had just come out of the oven at the deli. Fabulous!
G&L Topic of the Day: Desert Island! For my last G&L TotD, an easy subject with no controversy!
You’ve been exiled to a desert island for a year. The electric eels love hearing guitar and are pleased to provide power for an amp and effects pedals!
You can only take one G&L guitar, one amp, and as many pedals as you like.
Question: Which G&L guitar/bass, amp and pedals do you take?
Part 2 of the question: when you get home after a year, which guitar will you have missed most and be desperate to play?
Non-G&L Topic of the day: Practice! It’s a bit long, but I hope you like it – it’s a biggie subject for me. I work with athletes who are looking for peak performance in their sports, and they put themselves through hell to achieve it – as I did when training in Asia. One of my friends is an ex- concert pianist, and now teaches others at the highest levels. Sports or music, the road to highest achievement is the same…
‘Deliberate Practice’.
The road is now well mapped, so I thought I’d summarise it here:
1. Design your practice to improve performance. Many of us pull out a guitar and play for a while and call it practice. Most of the time we are playing stuff we can already play well. We could probably play it well 5 years ago.
Designed practice needs to identify the elements we are not good at; activities that are just beyond our current abilities. Then we need to work out how to most efficiently improve them – a good teacher can help greatly – even world class athletes have coaches/teachers. Picasso, Mozart, Tiger – they all had fathers who carefully designed their practice strategies when they were young and developing. Age is irrelevant though; the principle is the same.
2. Repetition. Once a skill just beyond our current abilities has been identified, and a strategy for practicing it has been worked out, it needs to be practiced until that ‘weak’ area becomes our strongest area, or at least as good as anything else we do. Only when it is should we identify our next weakest skill.
For Christmas I got a pile of ‘LickLibrary’ DVDs on what I consider my weakest areas. There’s months, probably years of work for me to go at!
Repetition was something I learned the hard way; in Penang I had a Chinese teacher who would identify my weak area, correct it, then say “Do thousand times!” Then he would disappear. Often he would be watching from a distance. After a couple of hours he would come back and say “Show me!” Then he would correct me and say “Do thousand times!” and walk off again. That would go on until he was satisfied, sometimes just doing one movement combination for several days. It was f***ing painful, but it worked.
3. Mental focus. Repetition is bad news if it’s done badly! It needs absolute focus and concentration on making every rep as perfect as possible, which is mentally exhausting. That doesn’t sound much fun! But after a while, it becomes meditation.
I used to shoot competitively (target rifle, practical pistol and target archery); I loved that moment when only the target existed – I had disappeared, the bow/rifle/pistol had disappeared. That’s what I look for in repetition. And it’s so satisfying when you feel something that was beyond your abilities a few hours before becoming easier by the rep.
4. Feedback. I knew however well I thought I was performing a movement, my teacher in Penang would be able to spot mistakes and correct them. Trusting our own judgement of our improvement isn’t enough. A good teacher can’t do the practice for us, but their feedback is invaluable.
My pianist friend, after every 500 times he plays a phrase he’s working on, records it, then compares it to the greatest known recording of that piece being played. After he works out where he falls short, he isolates the problem parts and practices just those. Then puts them back into the phrase and starts again. I’d love to have the time to do that with a few famous guitar solos!
The reality that deliberate practice is hard is good news.
It means that most people won't do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more. Do I practice guitar like this? Erm…. no!
I know I could become an excellent guitarist by strict application of these principles, but I just play for my own enjoyment.
With everything I competed in seriously, I applied these methods and they work. But the two things that make it possible to work that way are absolute desire to achieve, and absolute belief that you can be excellent.
‘Talent’ has been proved to be imperceptibly important compared to hard work, so the ‘self-belief’ part is easy, compared with the ‘desire to achieve’ part. And that part I don’t have when it comes to playing. I just want to enjoy it.
I don’t much care that most people are better than me. But I will casually work through my Christmas LickLibrary DVDs!
Question: Would you take this type of approach to practice? Or do you just enjoy playing?
Well, that’s my first tenure as Lunch Reporter done! I have enjoyed the challenge of it, but most of all I’ve enjoyed ‘meeting’ some of you guys who make this forum what it is. Thanks guys.
Next week…. I’ll find the time to play my lovely new G&L a bit!!!
I doubt I'll ever really advance my knowledge of G&Ls to the level of Louis or many others here, but if I hang around and learn from you all, it will increase my enjoyment of playing. And isn't that what we are here for?!? 
