Mind and Body

My guitar teacher has been on vacation and I'm struggling. I'm still madly in love with guitar playing, it has the feeling of a new grand passion and I think about it almost all the time, including in meetings when I'm supposed to be concentrating on toilet paper market size. I've been hanging out on online forums asking questions of experienced players, and lurking around picking up the lingo and learning everyone's opinions about all sorts of gear. I bought five different guitar magazines on Friday evening, to get immersed in them and work out which ones I want to subscribe to. I listen to guitar music all the time, and have been grabbing my little notebook and writing down songs I want to learn and amp sounds I want to emulate (Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Green River" was the one today, playing in the background at a coffee shop near the university). I stay up too late watching Jimmy Page videos on YouTube. I read my new Guitar Handbook and wonder about blues chord progressions and scales. I've got it bad, bad, bad.

But my playing is deteriorating, without regular instruction. I just play the same stuff, over and over, but I don't feel like I'm getting any better. My fingers are still stiff, the chord changes aren't smooth or fast enough. My D string buzzes all the time, and I think it's me and nothing about the equipment. I can't integrate bar (or barre) chords into a stream of other chords, I have to stop, take a second, look at my hands, place all the fingers, then strum. I've been sort of picking out little melodies but I don't know where all the notes are on the fretboard. Bottom line, I am not yet good enough to express through the instrument the music that is inside my soul.

I was reflecting on this asymmetry today. I know that I'm an unusual student because of my age and background, and my teacher always remarks on how quickly I pick up the theory stuff, and the fact that I come in with theory questions at all. Most of his students are little kids, so I'm sure I'm learning guitar the other way around to how they learn it. The mental stuff is easy for me. I'm a trained philosopher, I have ten letters after my name, I read all the time, I have an overactive busy brain, I crave learning new things, of course I'm going to pick up the theory stuff easily. Brain stuff goes in easily. I've always been good at brain stuff and I enjoy doing it.

It's the body stuff that's frustrating. The only way to get good at chord changes, or to get reliable tone out of your dumb fingers, is to play things five hundred billion times each. And when I do practice regularly, or back when I had my last lesson before Christmas and had some new stuff to work on, I could tell that I was getting better, that things were getting easier. But now, during this break, lacking focus, lacking a clear assignment - there's nothing he specifically gave me to work up and show off with when he gets back - I'm just going around in circles. From all the listening and YouTubing, I have sounds in my head and heart that I want to emulate. But in my body, I am far from being able to achieve that sound. And while I was feeling like a prodigy right at first (my teacher is brilliant that way, he loads on the praise so I feel special and am motivated to keep working, and even if he's lying and says this to all his students, I don't care because it works on me), now I'm realizing how very, very far I am from competence. I might not actually get to tour, and change the face of electric guitar playing for historical posterity, and get my own page in the next edition of the Guitar Handbook, and have lots of my own videos on YouTube. I might not live that long. Or worse, I might not have the raw talent to support it! Argh!

But I should keep on, right? Because the difference between talent and accomplishment is hard work. Woodshedding. Practice. Playing everything five hundred billion times, until your fingers are as smart as your brain.