Monthly Archives: February 2023

National No-Brainer Day

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No-brainer

Sometimes, things just line up. I just broke my computer and frankly, I’m too lazy to type an entire blogpost using my thumbs.

Then (on my phone) I got an email reminding me that this week (Monday to be precise) is National No-Brainer Day. That brought two thoughts to mind. First, that sounds like an excuse to spend time just playing to have fun! And what better way to get that into your day than to spend your regularly scheduled practice time having fun? That’s right, there is no better time! And second, what a great way to get a blog post out without having to do all that typing – make a graphic to remind us to have a little fun!

It was…
A No-Brainer!

So, sorry not to bombard you with words this week. Instead we have a graphic I could gin up with my thumbs (good thing they are prehensile).

If you love the little graphic let me know, it can also be a poster (which I would be happy to send you to enjoy).

How will you celebrate National No-Brainer Day? Let me know in the comments!

And please forgive any egregious errors, my thumbs have a mind of their own!

Dancing a tune

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Dancing a tune

Do you ever think about how your fingers dance over the strings? When you watch a really good player, their hands really do seem to dance among the strings.  They place surely and there is a fluidity to the movements that belies all the thinking that goes into those fingers in the moment.  But maybe more importantly, that fluidity is built on all the thinking that happens before the playing ever begins.

Early in learning a tune you might be focused on learning the melody, but you also need to work the fingering.  This is true regardless of your means of ingesting the tune.  Whether you learn it by reading or by listening, you still have to get your fingers on the strings. And in a way to makes it sing!

And this is where some of the trouble begins.  Because we need to think about a bunch of things.  And also think about a bunch of “groups of things”.   Groups of things are also known as Patterns.  And music in simply patterns. * 

What things?  Well, there are things that are easy to detect and we can easily find the patterns –

  • we can hear the pitches (and where they go)
  • we can hear the rhythm
  • we can see the dots (and where they go)
  • we can see the grand staff
  • we can see the bar lines
  • we can see the strings
  • we can see our hands
  • We can feel our hands

Not only are these things easy to note and each is a dimension of the tune.  What is more challenging to find is the relationships between all those things.  Because the pitches and dots, and the grand staff and the bar lines are related to the strings and where the fingers go (duh, I know that you know that I know that you know that).  But sometimes they don’t quite line up, like when

  • there’s a pickup at the start of a long line of notes (the bar line can distract you)
  • the phrasing makes is seem like there’s a break but really the fingers need to keep on going
  • there’s a place where you haven’t fully accounted for the notes in a particular direction (or how many ups for how many downs leave your fingers tied in knots – yikes!
  • there’s a note on one clef and you think you must take it in the hand for that clef

To avoid the unpleasantness of running out of fingers, having a finger fumble every time, never getting that eccentric note, or getting weird phrasing – because your fingers are not ready to take on the pattern you’ve encountered – take time to really notice what all the patterns are, first in each “dimension” of the music (sound, rhythm, staff placement, etc.) and then try to find the higher level patterns that may be concealed if you focus on only one thing.

Keep at it.  Don’t let it defeat you – it’s like a Rubik’s Cube only way more complicated (and a lot more entertaining).   Once you draw your focus away from the individual patterns you’ll be able to suss out the multidimensional patterns that will define the fingering for you.  And then your fingers can dance over all the strings!

What pattern gives you fingering fits?  Is it a particular tune, or a specific single pattern, or series of patterns that just won’t fit together? Let me know in the comments!

 

 

* I can’t take credit for this wisdom.  I learned this way of thinking from Kris Snyder, and I have unceremoniously stolen it from her.

We love a challenge

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We love a challenge 

What is it about a “30-day challenge” that makes them so popular?  Maybe they are attractive because we seem to be addicted to making ourselves better people.  And we also know that to make ourselves better (different might be a better word) we have to make changes.  Change is hard, and maintaining a change is even harder.  And we usually think a month isn’t so long, so you can endure whatever it is that you’ve decided to tackle.

Enter the 30-day challenge!  These are not magic – they are just structure.  And better – they are structure that someone else devised (so we fool ourselves into thinking that, because someone who knows something (maybe) generated it, that it’s better than anything we might come up with).  If someone else came up with it, it will be harder to dismiss partway through.  Besides, structure imposed by someone else isn’t self-improvement, it’s just improvement.

These plans are prescriptive.  They tell us to make a change, and then tell you how to make that change – in small ways, over time (i.e., 30 days).  To help us along, the challenge usually includes some means of noting and documenting the changes we are making (like a calendar).   It really is an adult star chart (because do we really ever outgrow the star chart from our preschool days?).

And because someone (not us) has defined this process as a “challenge” we honor it, and our commitment to it.  We don’t try to get ahead of ourselves – rather, we identify that we need all 30 days to make this change, so we need to allow it to happen over time, but we also can’t rush it!  The authors of the challenges also remind us that it’s ok to miss a day or two, so it is ok to not be perfect.  And we dutifully complete the challenge because we committed to it.

But maybe most importantly of all, these challenges build over time.  My personal favorite – the 30 day burpee challenge – starts out so painlessly that even I could do it.  Day 1 – you do one burpee* and then it builds incrementally over the intervening 30 days until you’re doing enough burpees to tackle anything.

Kidding aside, you can set your own 30-day challenge for anything you need to work on. Not getting to practice enough? Make a 30-day practice challenge!  On day one you might confine yourself to 5 minutes of practice, and increase each day – but also committing to the minutes you complete are also focused on what you want to be working on, not checking facetagram or adjusting your bench, or drinking your tea or any of the many ways we can sidetrack ourselves.  Or you could create a 30-day tuning challenge?  Sight reading? Warmups and technicals? There are so many things you might consider making a challenge to ensure they become part of your everyday life.

What would your 30-day challenge be? Here’s a tracker (download).**  Write in what you’re focusing on and make little increments for each day. Write those in the blocks and check each one off as you accomplish it.  Let me know what you decide (and how it turns out!) in the comments!

 

* If you don’t know, a burpee is a fitness exercise that is a combination of things no one liked doing in PE in school – it’s a pushup mashed into a squat thrust with a layup mixed in that you’re supposed to do really quickly. It builds both strength and cardio. And if you’re not sure, if my sarcasm is too subtle, I usually spend my time reading about 30 day burpee challenges, but do I do them? Ha! No.

 

**Think of it as your little reward for reading to the end!

February

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February

It’s already February which means that January has slipped past us (not sure how that happened, but I double checked – it’s definitely February).  Did you think I was going to let the beginning of the year slide by without bringing up goals and having a plan for the year? Ha!

So, have you identified your goals for the year?  If you did, how’s it going?  If you are like many people, you might have set some goals for the year back in December of early January, but you might not have made too much progress.  However, the year is early yet, so there is still time to catch up!  And if you haven’t set any goals for the year, here’s your opportunity. 

Where to start?  Well – what is important to you that you accomplish?  Is there a tune you wanted to learn? Or is there some technique you struggle with or that you still need to learn? Or maybe you want to be ready to perform for an event?  Some sort of “stretch” you want to try?  Those are all goals. 

What’s important is that you identify something that’s important to you and that you want to do.  It’s not complicated!

Once you’ve set some goals, we’re all caught up and we can get started (or re-started!).  What next?

Well, we need to commit to working on those goals. That means committing to it now.  And tomorrow.  And the next day.  Next month and throughout the year.  So often I tell you to write things down and this is no exception.  You write these down so that the day after tomorrow, when there are loads of other things on your mind, you will still remember that you have a goal, what it is and that it’s important to you that you get there.  Otherwise, it’s easy to get trussed up in the day-to-day and lose sight of it!

But goals are kind of big, so we need to break down each one (this is another place where writing it down can be helpful – we’re about to make a list of tasks!).  No matter the size of your goal, usually it can be broken into smaller tasks – each of which we can finish…and then celebrate!  We just have to keep focused and consistently doing what’s needed and moving on to the next step.

And we need to be kind to ourselves.  If you miss a day or a task takes longer than you thought – ok, it takes longer. Just keep at it.

What are your goals this year?  Do you know how you’re going to get there? Want to share an example?  Let me know in the comments!