Tap Technique Breakthrough

I have only two tap technique pieces in my set so far - Eddie Van Halen's Spanish Fly and Joe Satriani's A Day at the Beach - though there is a third that I wrote coming up soon on my to-do list (The Toccata in E Minor from Sonata One in E Minor; link, PDF and streaming MP3 in the right sidebar).

The first problems I encountered when I started learning tap on the nylon string were, 1) Getting the tapped notes to ring well, and, 2) my left forearm would pump up and lose strength from all of the anaerobic activity involved, especially on the two-finger Satriani tap piece, which is motoric and fast throughout.

The problem of the notes not ringing well solved itself as I built up calluses on the tips of my right hand i and m fingers, and just a whole ton of forward and reverse wrist curls on my Bowflex allowed me to build up my forearm strength and endurance. Whereas at first my left forearm would pump up just one time through A Day at the Beach, now, three years later, I can go through it ten or more times in a row with no problem (And both of my forearms are all sinew and ripples now).

The final remaining problem has been that, in actual performance situations, I'm not warmed up to the tap technique when I get to the tap tech pieces in the set. When Im practicing, it takes three to five times through those pieces before I start to really flow with and groove on them, so in performance situations I have to play them rather slowly and deliberately. This has vexed me for over two years now, but I finally came up with the solution.

What happened was, I asked myself, "Self, what if you play these pieces once through each at the end of every suite when you practice, instead of eleven times through and only at the two places where they belong?" - the idea being, if I play them all the time when I'm not warmed up to them perhaps I'll get better at playing them relatively cold. Yes! That's the answer, right there.

There's two ways to look at this: I'm either getting much better at playing them cold, or I'm making myself warmed up for them all the time. Regardless of perspective, after just a couple of times through my set maintenance practice routine doing this, I can jump into them cold way better now.

Whew! What a relief.

So, if you are trying to learn tap tech, but like me find actually performing tap tech pieces in the middle of a set with mostly trad tech nightmarish, try this: Just play them cold a lot. It's worked near miraculously for me, and in just a week or so (But remember, I've been busting my butt over tap tech for a few years now).

*****

Had a really cool private party gig at a home in the hills above Alpine the other day.



The house was a gorgeous Spanish style place, and since it was below 60 degrees - my minimum required temp for outdoor playing - they put me in the living room. I thought it would be just another background music thing, but it turned into a command performance situation, with the living room packed with guests, many of whom had never heard me play before. It was a blast.

I wish I'd thought of taking some outside pix, but I only had my iPhone, which has a pretty lame camera (As you can see).

*****

I've come up with a novel approach for writing the final blog and book form of Why Music Works: The Harmonic Series, Musical Context, and the Natural Laws of Musical Motion." I'm writing all of the examples, which I call musical proofs, out in Encore 5 first, and then I'm going to go back and re-write the text. So, the first thing I'm going to post/publish will be an index of the musical examples, each of which will have streaming MP3 audio, a JPG of the score, and a link to PDF's, if anyone wants them. There are also Observations and Deductions on the score pages, so the index will serve as both a review and a primer.

There is going to be a lot better flow this time from a pedagogical standpoint - I've been working on this for two years since the Musical Relativity series of posts - and the musical proofs are way, way tighter now. I have 45 of the example proofs done so far, I'm really psyched at how well they are turning out, and I'm thinking I'll probably have well over sixty before I'm done.

My metronome slow-play season starts after Thanksgiving, and I could be interrupted by a move to San Antonio at any time if I find a house, so I may not have anything but the index posted until next March or so. We'll just have to see how it all works out.

*****

Off to San Antonio for a week tomorrow, so I can look at houses, do some bee's wax, irritate old fiends friends, and spend Thanksgiving with mommy. So, have a happy Thanksgiving, and I'll have a post for when I get back.



Don't think mom invited Erica Campbell. Pity.

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The Experience is No More: Mitch Mitchell Dies

No band influenced my teenage years more than The Jimi Hendrix Experience. The only others even in the same league to me were Cream, The Who, and Led Zeppelin. I didn't have any posters of anybody but Hendrix in my bedroom, however. In fact, I had this one from Woodstock. I see that it's "rare" now and commands $85.00!



That poster was in the bedroom of my first three apartments as well, until a ruptured pipe upstairs from my condo destroyed it in 1980. I wanted to be the right handed white guy version of him for years, but my musical tastes eventually turned to jazz and then classical music. I always thought that particular poster represented the epitome of the rock guitar god much more than the more flamboyant poses and guitar burning stunts: Eyes closed, riding the wah-wah pedal... just into it.

So, it was with a true sense of loss that I read today that Mitch Mitchell has died while on tour with his tribute band, Experience Hendrix. Noel Redding died back in 2003, before I started this blog, and Jimi, of course, infamously died in 1970 at the age of only 27.

My favorite Hendrix album was, by far, Electric Ladyland, and THE higlight of my NYC rock band days was the time my band did some recording at Electric Lady Studios, which was, "The House that Jimi Built."

RIP and Godspeed, Mitch. I'm sure there's one hell of a reunion concert going on about now in Rock and Roll Heaven.


The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Noel Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Mitch Mitchell.

*****

Major undertakings going on, and another epic series of deep musico-philosophical posts are on the way. Plus, a review of GVOX Encore 5, which is what inspired this upcoming series of epic posts.

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Interesting Representation of Jesus (Updated)

While doing a Google image search of "Jesus" to get wallpaper for my iPhone (Hey, it's the "Jesus Phone" right?), I came across this image.



I'd link to the site, but it didn't explain any more than this: The image was made from The Shroud of Turin. It is quite striking to me, and I've read more than one book about the Shroud, in addition to many, many articles.

Anyway, I think it looks quite inspiring on my "Jesus Phone."



UPDATE: Here is Chist Pantocrator, the sixth century representation of Jesus that Dr. Shield mentioned in comments.



This was also based on the Shroud of Turin, and any student of western civ ought to be familiar with it... which begs the question, of course, that if carbon fourteen dating places the Shroud in the middle ages, how does Christ Pantocrator even exist with a much earlier date of nearly a thousand years? I'm smart, but I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, and the first thing I thought when those carbon fourteen results came back was, "Well, duh. The Shroud barely survived a fire at about that time, so of course it's infused with carbon from around that date." Simplistic, as there are other factors involved, like the patches of cloth from the repair after that fire, but really.

Much practicing and house hunting going on, so posting will continue to be once a week or so, and, well, trivial I guess.

Nothing trivial about this, however.



Never seen this sectacular redhead before, but the set dates from 2005, so she's not exactly new. Yes, her hair is really that red. All of it. LOL!

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The Difference Between Practicing and Performing

Lot of developments here, so this will probably be a long, long post.

One of the things I have trouble getting into the heads of my students is the difference between practicing and performing. When you perform, it's just a matter of recitation - going through the set that you've developed - while practicing is preparation for that. So, as a result, just reciting your set in your bedroom is not enough to prepare for a performance, you rather have to concentrate on certain things when you practice in order to be well prepared.

One of the main things is repetition. When you perform, you just play your tunes as they are written to be performed, but when you practice, you have to do more than that. Some pieces I can keep comfortably under my fingers by just playing them regularly - I'm thinking of the figuration preludes I've written here - but others I have to put a little extra effort into - that would be the more intricate polyphonic and homophonic stuff.

What I have discovered over the years, through admittedly anecdotal trial and error, is that prime number repetitions work the best. Now, I'm not attributing any magical properties to prime number repetitions, rather I have come to the conclusion that because prime numbers are only divisible by one and themselves, they form a single unit larger group. Since the human mind is an example of bi-fold symmetry, it tries to divide everything by twos, fives, and tens. Everyone knows how to multiply by two, five and ten almost instinctively, but sevens and threes are a different matter (Remember the IIII ancient by-five counting system you learned as a kid?).

The least of these "magical" prime numbers is three. Most musical repetition schemes are based on two (The only even prime number), and if you exceed this, it puts your mind and your memory into a whole different state.

Let's say you have an antiquated Baroque era sectional binary piece in your set with the form of A, A, B, B. If when practicing you play it A, A, A, B, B, B you'll be doing your memory much more good than if you play it as you'd perform it. Aside from the single additional repetition of each section, you are also having to concentrate more to change the form. Just knowing this can make for more effective and efficient set maintenance practice.

Now, let's say you have a thoroughly modern piece in your set with the form, A, A', B, A, A', B, A". You are already playing the A sections five times, a prime above two, but you only hit the B's twice. If you just got through the piece like this; A, A', B, A, A', B, A, A', B, A" you will have hit the A's seven times and the B's three. This is a very efficient memory reinforcer, and a great strategy for set maintenance.

For major biggie pieces, like the crowd pleasers in my set, I'll go ahead and play them three times through in their entirety, and for the super special pieces in my set, like the tap tech pieces, I'll play them a full eleven times. Admittedly, all of that repetition above seven is to maintain the calluses on my right hand i and m fingers, but eleven seems to work much better than ten. Humorously - or not - when I went to thirteen reps, I started to get some overuse syndrome symptoms. Don't think I'll go for seventeen just yet. LOL!

So, try the additional repeat scheme in your practicing for set maintenance, and stick to the prime numbers and see how it works out for you.

*****

I mentioned previously that I have gotten into a scale practice regimen for the first time in years, and that this activity made me rethink my nail shape and length: They have gotten both shorter and flatter on the tips (The i and m have gotten shorter and flatter, while the a and c have stayed round, but are shorter).



This has been one time I'm glad I use glue-on acrylic nails. Experimenting with nail shape and length is a lot easier if you can just put on another set when you screw up versus having to let your mistakes grow out. As you can see, the index and middle fingers are quite short and relatively flat, while the ring and pinky are a bit longer and rounded: I think of them as two pairs, and the ring and middle fingers don't play the scalar passages, and they are at an angle that requires a bit more length.



From the other side, you can see that the index and middle barely show, while the ring and pinky carry a bit more length. The shorter i and m make scale playing much more smooth - no string snap or nail hang-up - while the longer a and c allow me to reach more distant strings easier when I'm playing arpeggios and whatnot.

*****

As you can see from the top photo, I've gotten the eleven-string fretted Reynolds-Godin Glissentar out, and am playing that again. To be honest, I haven't even picked it up in well over a year. What happened is, when I started radically altering my nail shape, I wondered how the new nails would work on it. Since I'm sending it off to Jim Kozel to have a RMC Polydrive installed in it this winter, I thought I should re-familiarize myself with it anyway. Good idea! The shorter nails make all the difference in getting the string courses to ring evenly, and the extra effort involved in playing it - think playing two guitars at once - are giving me added left arm forearm strength. Playing it a bunch now will hasten my being able to add the guitar into my set when I get it back from Jim next spring, and my other two guitars feel like butter after a set go-through with it.

Since the Reynolds Glissentar is so hard to play - some of the hard chords in my figuration preludes were dull thuds the first time through, and my left forearm would cramp up after thirty minutes with it - I have been playing it in between the other two guitars: Godin, Reynolds, Parker, Renolds &c.

The first time through, I just played my set as I'd perform it (Or tried to!), and then I've been adding repeats of the crowd pleasers, the tap tech pieces &c. each additional time. I've been through my set three times with it now, and am progressing quite quickly. I'm psyched!

Here it is, then, The Holy Trinity:


The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. LOL!

*****

No houses on the horizon, so I'm here in Alpine for the time being. Kind of a bummer, because now that I'm into the idea of moving, I'd like to "git 'er done" if you know what I mean.



New model to me, but I'm digging the red eyebrows. Too bad about the eye makeup; I'm sure the lashes are red too.

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Computer Catastrophe (Updated)

Sorry for the break, but my heretofore trusty Mac Mini froze up the other day, and nothing would fix it but wiping the disk clean and reinstalling everything. Unfortunately, I lost all of my iLife apps - iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and Garage Band - and they were not on the disks the Mini came with (?!), so I had to finally order a disk set of those apps. I lost a HUGE iPhoto library... for... ever, but all of the good stuff was backed up on my SmugMug account, so really no great loss, and I managed to recover my vast iTunes library off of my 30GB video iPod using TinkerTool (whew). All of my other vital stuff is on a 250 GB external drive, so I got off pretty easy, considering. The disk checked out OK and repairing the permissions didn't help, so I'm not sure what the problem was.

UPDATE: I'm still having the Mini freeze on me (But not terminally, as was the case before), and I found out what the problem was when I stumbled across this thread in which a Mini user had the same kinds of freezes after installing new RAM. So, I ran the Hardware Test disk, and guess what? Yup, I have developed some bad memory addresses. I've been wanting to upgrade because I only have 512 MB anyway, but the Mini is a MAJOR PITA to get into. Well, I also found an online tutorial for that, so I'm going to order 1 GB worth of fresh RAM and get with the program (ProTools gives me memory warnings all the time, so I've needed to do this for a while now).

Anyway, no more posting until iLife gets here next week because I have nothing to manipulate photos with. Believe it, or not, I've never even opened up any of the other iLife apps - I know nothing about Garage Band other than that it has a silly name and takes up disk space - so I basically just paid $79.00 for iPhoto!

Why Apple includes iTunes with OS X but not iPhoto is beyond me, as it seems just as necessary, but whatever.

I'm planning to get a digital video camera to make YouTube clips of me performing anyway, so I suppose I'll need iMovie soon enough, and I have two other computers that need the iLife apps, so I guess I ought to have a disk of them. Reinstalling ProTools LE 7 was actually worth while, as I got an entirely new point upgrade, from 7.0.2 to 7.1.0 out of the deal for free (I actually ended up with two ProTools LE 7 disks when I bought the Digi 002 earlier this year), so that was nice.

Oh, I also ordered the all-new version of Encore, v5.0.3, and my initial impressions are very favorable (I ordered a disk, but they also gave me an instant download of the full version, which was very cool). It pretty much works as before, but it looks like an OS X native app now instead of something ported in from OS 9, and the on screen display is WYSIWYG! Far more attractive. The old maximum file size feature bug is now fixed, though I haven't tested that out yet. First thing I'll do is try to combine all four movements of Sonata One into a single file so that they play seamlessly as I intended.

Finally, since this post will push the last Sonata One post off the bottom of the page - and this is post 401 for MMM since May, 2005 - I put a sidebar section with links to all four of those posts in the blog template.



It's a rerun, but one of my favorites.

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Progressing as a Guitarist: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

OK, so that was overly simplistic.

It has been an interesting adventure, picking up the guitar four years ago at forty-six, after not touching one for the previous four years. In the beginning, I learned very rapidly - or rather, I relearned - and in a mere two years, I had relearned almost all of my previous repertoire, and recovered circa 80% of my technique. After that, however, things became more of an effort.

More likely, I have to say that I took many steps forward, and then I'd have a revelation that made me rethink everything, necessitating that I step back a few paces and restart the process. Then, there were plateaus - frustrating in the extreme - but even during those times I knew I was progressing, even if it was just adding new pieces to my set.

Of course, I've also rebuilt a performing career during that time, and all of the gigs I've done have gotten me back into the game. Many years ago, I was an extremely nervous and self-conscious performer, and today - at the dinner club and piano bar gigs, at least - I'm so relaxed I can daydream and people watch during most of my set. Virtually all of that progress was simply due to the fact that I got busy and performed several times every week. Like I say to my students, If you want to get good at playing in your bedroom, then play in your bedroom; but if you want to get good at performing, then you have to perform a lot, and in many, many differing circumstances.

Well, the scale practice routine I recently started has been an unexpected double-sided blessing-curse. As I got into it, I had to rethink my right hand angle of attack, and more importantly, my fingernail shape and length: The i and m nails got a LOT shorter, and much less pointed as well. Of course, this made me rethink the p (Thumb) as well, and it got shorter too, and also more angled toward the inside of my hand.

The immediate result of this was that I started dropping a lot of notes in some of the pieces in my set. My nails were so much shorter and flatter on the tips that I was simply missing the strings. It was so bad I had to drop some pieces from my set for a while!

Well, a few weeks later, I've tightened things back up, and my tone - a product of nail attack and release - is much better, and I've gotten to a whole new level. Painful at first, but the end result has been the biggest technical leap I've made in well over a year.

So, as you progress, expect these setback-breakthroughs. Initially they might seem depressing, but it is the overall goal that you'll be closer to in the end.

FOOTNOTE: The house deal fell through because the seller was overly proud of the work he'd done to the place, and he wouldn't come down enough on his - way too high - asking price. Too bad, as I loved the place, but in addition to being a perfectionist, I'm also a cheapskate (Perhaps that's why I'm terminally single?). I understand markets, and I don't have a perfect 800 credit rating for nothing. LOL!



That's one of the most perfect redheads I've ever seen. No freckles, so I'm betting she never sees the sun (She's Russian, so that might figure). Her hair is actually redder than that, but she dresses it with something that dulls it a few shades - sacrilege. I only know this because the rest of her hair... er... never mind. LOL!

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Musing Musical Monk Mulls Move

How's that for alliteration?

For the past year, I've been thinking about leaving Alpine. I don't really want to leave - I absolutely love it out here - but several factors are weighing on my mind. For one thing, my mom turns 80 on New Year's Day, and I'm the only family she has, so I ought to be closer to her, and secondly, I'm well connected out here and all the way to Tucson now musically, so I will still be out here enough playing gigs. Finally, I need a bigger market - San Antonio is my home town and there are 2.3M people there these days - so logic and necessity have both conspired to prompt me into action. This is no small deal, as I positively hate moving... but I've been here five years, and that seems to be the maximum time I spend in any one place, going by the pattern of my life.

Well, being that I've been a housing inspector for both FEMA and HUD in past years, lets just say that I have impossibly high standards for a house. I've been looking for a while, and have turned down a house or two because they weren't "perfect" - I know an amazingly detailed inspector in San Antonio who I have working for me - and I must admit that I figured that my standards would delay the process for a year or more.

Well, God has a sense of humor. It's - needless to say with the credit crisis - a buyers market today, and guess what just came up for listing? A small house just a couple of miles from mom's place that belonged to a building contractor! He's been in the place seven or eight years - the house is 25 years old - and it's a tricked out hot rod for such a small house. I'm talking 1,400 square feet, three bedrooms, two baths, corner lot (Mom's place is well over 2K square feet).

Super clean looking from the front.



New roof, fresh paint, nice landscape work.

The contractor-owner redid every room in the house: dining area.



Living room.



Kitchen.



Master bath (Hall bath has a tub and is completely tiled in bright white: I probably won't set foot in it for fear of smudging something. LOL!).



So, this is the ultimate bachelor pad for me. Perfect in every detail, redone by a meticulous independent contractor like I used to be... so, I put an offer in on it. Oh, the back yard has a covered section of the patio with ceiling fans (!) and an open stone section with a permanently installed gas grill. YESSSSSS!

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