Owning those hard parts....

One of the things I have to consider when I’m doing my weekly lesson planning is how each student will handle what I’m going to present in their lesson, or more specifically, how will they deal with the “hard parts” of an exercise or song. Because more than anything, I want them to succeed and feel good about their playing. That’s one of the main reasons they come to me for guitar lessons and I’ve never forgotten that simple but oh so important fact.
 
Very few songs are easy to play from beginning to end, even very basic ones that use only a few chords. This is most likely because songwriters – the good ones anyway – know that in spite of the necessary repetitive aspects of a song that make it predictable and palatable to the player and listener a good song also holds a few surprises, sections that stretch the predictability a bit. Those sections are where the challenges can often be found. I always point out those bumps in the musical road when I’m introducing a song to a student and offer a practice strategy to get over them.
The most obvious tactic is pulling out those four or so measures and practice them on their own, then begin working them back into the flow of the song. But what about a student who does that for a few practice sessions or longer and doesn’t see any substantive improvement?
 
I can relate, believe me! There are more than a few songs that I play and perform that confounded me for a long time, years in some cases. Even now, after playing certain songs for decades I truly never know exactly what’s going to happen when I launch into it. I get rattled the most by songs with hard parts that I’ve known for a long, long time and thought I had them conquered. Now here’s the really strange part. Without warning I begin making mistakes I’ve never made before.
 
I’ll quote my late father who took up playing guitar late in his life and said it best. In one of our weekly phone calls he was commenting on a song he was working on with his teacher (he was taking classical guitar lessons). My dad was a man who rarely used “colorful” language beyond the very occasional “damn” and “hell” but he said: “Gene, I had no idea how many ways there are to f*** up a piece of music!” We had a good laugh over that but he was most certainly right!
 
I try very hard from the get-go to gauge a student’s personality and how they react when they make a mistake. Some get angry and assure me over and over that played the song perfectly at home. Some just stop (even though I urge them not to; a steady beat will cure ills better than anything else, no matter how bad the difficult part sounds when practicing at home), make the required adjustment and continue – only to make the same mistake when that hard part is encountered later in the song. Some just laugh and forge ahead. This is MUCH more common with women than with men. I’m guessing that ego and perception play into that reaction to some degree. Most men have an innate tendency to view guitar playing as some sort of contest with themselves and they do not react well to losing that contest. I urge them to not be too hard on themselves. Go ahead and make the mistakes but always be analytical and try to figure out just why that mistake continues to happen. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: You are going to make many mistakes while learning a new song…just go ahead and make them but make a mental note of where they happened and pull that section out of the song to practice. But don’t believe for one minute that pure repetition alone will solve the problem. WHY do you keep making that mistake? Is a certain finger touching a string it shouldn’t? Is one finger too far away from a fret, making it impossible for another finger to make the stretch that is required? There is always a reason but there is also always a solution.
 
First, if you try the “remove and fix it” solution be sure to always, always, always play a few measures of the song right before you enter the minefield. That way you can prepare yourself physically AND mentally for what lies ahead, even if you know the path will be frustrating and difficult. At the other end of the difficult passage be sure to do the same: keep playing, do your best to keep the beat no matter what!
 
A while back I had a student who did make a big effort to be analytical about his playing and I’m sure during his practice sessions at home he made a conscious effort to identify just why certain things just weren’t working. He even went so far as to keep something akin to a diary about his playing. This was great and very helpful to me when we were making our way through certain songs. But ultimately - in spite of his attempts at adhering to the small details that make or break a song - the end product was not satisfying. He had played guitar for quite a while before he started his lessons with me and even after over a year of lessons, substantial progress was just not happening.
 
Finally, I noticed something. He was making his changes without stopping. His finger placement relative to the frets and other fingers was fine. He kept his wrist dropped and flexible. But…. Sometimes he would play a sequence of chords just fine and then when it came around again there were far too many muffled notes.
 
In short - he was not pressing down hard enough at certain points in a song.
 
This is the most basic of all the skills required to play guitar. I just made the assumption he was applying solid, consistent pressure from the beginning to the end of a piece of music. I was wrong. He was actually applying just barely enough pressure to achieve clear tone for parts of a song, but not throughout. From where I sat, everything looked the same and based on over 50 years of teaching guitar it did not occur to me that he was applying varying amounts of pressure depending upon where he was in a song. With virtually everyone I’ve taught plus some very fine recreational and professional guitarists I’ve known, at a point somewhere in their learning process they finally are able to get good clear tone in almost everything they play. In reality they may be actually be pressing down harder than they need to but the results speak for themselves.
 
I’m absolutely certain he wasn’t aware of this habit and if he was from time to time it either didn’t bother him or he made a conscious or (more likely) an unconscious decision to only apply the bare minimum of downward pressure with his fingertips. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. This was especially true when trying those “hard parts” that I spoke of earlier.
 
Why? Because, quite simply, over the years he had been playing it still hurt to press down hard.
 
We worked hard on correcting this long-held habit. He did complain a bit about how much his fingers hurt after playing, but…. Within a month during which time he built up his finger strength, developed stronger calluses and remarked that even his wife could hear a radical improvement in guitar playing he finally was able to thoroughly enjoy his playing and the results. Yeah!!!
 
This was a prime example of discovering the roots of problems within difficult sections of songs.
 
One more time: There IS an answer to every issue you may have when playing a certain song - or your entire repertoire. You just have to ask yourself the right questions.
 
Peace & good music,
 
Gene