Guitar Lessons in Boulder & Longmont, CO with Joseph Brenna

So you’re new to guitar, or perhaps you’ve been playing awhile and want to improve your technique, or learn applied music theory to break out of your current confines, or become a more expressive soloist or a better rhythm guitarist. One of the most important steps you can take is to find others to play with, and have at least one weekly jam session. Without exception I’ve found that my students who are playing with others in addition to practicing at home progress at 2 or 3 times the rate of those who mainly practice alone.

There are many reasons for this. One is that practicing alone can often mean practicing out of context. Live music is dyamic and fluid, it’s a river running, sometimes quiet and serene, sometimes racing in rapids over falls, through canyons, around hairpin turns. The practice that you do at home is to prepare you to jump in and ride this stream. It’s careful and controlled - you put on the metronome and practice finding the groove as a rhythm guitarist; you practice scales and then use them to make melodies over a loop (see my post on using loops); you learn to mimic a lead or rhythm part from one of your favorite songs and practice it along with an mp3. You practice a tricky passage slowly and carefully to produce the best possible tone and timing. These are all skillful ways to develop your abilities, to sharpen the tools you bring to playing.

But when you play with others, something else happens. First of all, the predictability of your carefully structured practice vanishes. Your partner starts a song at a faster tempo than you are used to playing. Or she chooses a key to play in that is unfamiliar to you. Or you find that she’s not going to stop and start over when you falter, she keeps playing and you have to somehow pull it together, find your place, and jump back in. These are valuable experiences that raise the bar on you and prod you to react more quickly, think on your feet (or fingers!), hold your poise.

It’s the energy of interaction that is missing from solo practice. A metronome can’t hear what you’re playing and give you clues to deepen your groove, but your playing partner can. His solo is a response to the groove you throw down, and in turn you groove in response to his solo. You’re dancing with a partner rather than alone, and you never know exactly just how he is going to move next, so your senses are opened and you respond spontaneously. Your carefully memorized licks may not work in this dance, but something new emerges, something that comes from the facility you’ve acquired in practice together with the energy of this moment.

So your practice at home is honing your skills, putting tools in your toolbox. Then when you play with others, you’ll be surprised. At first you won’t even be able to use these tools. You feel awkward and self-conscious. But you try anyway, and soon you are beginning to get the hang of it. And then you are surprised by the music you are making. This experience gives you both positive feedback, and negative feedback, each of which guides you and feeds your desire to practice more. When things go right in your jam session, it feels so good you can’t wait to go home and practice and learn more. And when things go wrong, you discover your limits, and now you know what you need to work on in the practice room in order to go beyond them.

Playing with others provides an essential balance to practicing alone, is a great motivator, and after all, it’s the reason you wanted to learn to play music in the first place, isn’t it? So don’t wait - talk to your friends, your co-workers, scan the ads on Craigslist or place one yourself, put a sign on a community bulletin board, or go to a jam session at a club. However you do it, find someone to play with. If you’ve learned a few chords and can hold a rhythm, you are ready, so get out there and jam!

I recently began meeting with student who had been studying with a couple of other teachers, but wasn’t getting what he wanted out of lessons. He’s a fellow with a real passion for blues and rock guitar, as well as dedication, and good musical instincts - a natural sense of rhythm and phrasing. But although he’d been introduced to a lot of scales and riffs, he wasn’t really able to jam on songs.

The problem turned out to be a common one among students learning lead guitar. He simply wasn’t practicing in a musical context. Practicing scales up and down the guitar, or repeating a riff, or experimenting with making your own melodies is going to produce limited results unless you do these in the context of actual music. The pitch of each note you play gains meaning from its relation to the chords and key centers you are playing with. And the rhythm of your melodies has to lock in with the rhythm of the music.

One way to practice this is with a partner. You can take turns as rhythm guitarists, supporting one another practicing leads. But what about when you are practicing alone? The solution is to practice with loops.

Several looping pedals are available on the market. Generally, a loop pedal goes in line between your guitar and amp, and works as follows. Suppose you want to practice with a repeating 4-bar section of music. You begin playing the rhythm guitar part, and on the first beat of the first bar you press the record button on your pedal. When you get to the first beat of the first repeat of those four bars, you press another pedal which ends the recording and turns the 4 bars you have recorded into a continuously playing loop. Voila, now while you practice your scales, or riffs, or improvised melodies along with the loop, you are working on your timing, rhythm, and feel as you play.

One of the simplest and most affordable loop pedals is the Boss Loop Station (there are two models). For a comprehensive list of looping devices available, as well as a wealth of looping tips and tricks, check out the website Looper’s Delight.

Looping can also be done on your computer in Garageband on your Mac, or with higher-end audio programs. On your PC (and on your Mac if you don’t have Garageband) try the free software Audacity, or a higher end program. One advantage to hard-drive based looping is that you can store your loops and keep them as a practice library. For instance, you can record loops in all keys, with a variety of grooves, and open them whenever you like for practice.

You can also loop sections of songs on your hard drive, and many programs will allow you to slow down your music files without changing pitch. So if you are having trouble figuring out that Charlie Parker or Eddie Van Halen solo, and playing them up to speed, use your loop to isolate and repeat sections of the solos and slow them down for transcription and practice.

For the past couple of months I’ve been teaching a student named Jenn who is in Boulder temporarily to take an 8-week class. The class goes from 8am to 6pm, and we have a guitar lesson once each week in the evening. Unfortunately, that schedule doesn’t leave her much practice time, which means that she is having a hard time assimilating the lessons and being ready for new material. So are the lessons worthwhile?

We’ve found a solution, to make these lessons as accessible when she returns home as they are now: videotape. Last night, Jenn brought a camera to her lesson and videotaped me going through all of the material that I’ve presented in each lesson. I explained and demonstrated all of the exercises, rhythms, fingerpicking patterns, and songs that I have written down for her each week. Now when she goes home, she can have total recall of everything we’ve covered, and the ability to see, hear, and even play along with everything we’ve done. She can take all the time she needs to study and learn the material. And if she has questions from time to time, I’ll be available by email to answer them for her.

I’ve had many students make audio recordings of their lessons in order to aid their recall of what we’ve done together. Videotape is an even better medium for this. I recommend it for everyone who is taking guitar lessons, and welcome it in my studio!

Recently I played for Elephant Magazine’s live talk and music show, “Elevision”, at Trilogy in Boulder. The show features interviews about all things sustainable and eco-friendly, and music (which is also, of course, sustainable and eco-friendly). A clip of the music, introducing the show, is now up on Elephant Magazine’s website. I’m looking forward to receiving the full videos of my performance. As soon as I do, I’ll post them online, so stay tuned!

Recently one of my students mentioned that he has occasional weakness in his picking hand. When I asked what he was doing about it, he said he thought it was diet related, and made some changes. The red flags immediately went up for me!

While its’ good that he was taking some action, guitar players should take all such symptoms very seriously, and get them checked out thoroughly. Weakness, numbness, soreness and pain are early indicators of problems that can quickly get out of hand. Early intervention is the best way to stop an occasional problem from becoming a crippling disability, and there are many types of health practitioners who can help you diagnose and treat incipient problems.

Believe me, I know from experience! In the early to mid ’90’s I suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome in my left wrist for 5 years. Though I visited an osteopath, and then went to the Miller Clinic or Performance Injuries in New York City for retraining and physical therapy, my ability to play and practice was severely curtailed. The problem was managed, but not solved during this time, and it continued to spread and worsen until I had so much pain that I couldn’t sleep on my left side. It wasn’t until I visited an acupuncturist in 1995 that I was finally healed.

There are two lessons that I learned from this experience. First, don’t overdo it and don’t play through pain. At the time of my injury I was teaching about 25 students per week, playing both acoustic and electric guitar in two bands, studying classical guitar, practicing at least 4 to 5 hours a day, and working out with weights several times a week. My career was beginning to take off, and the last thing I considered was slowing down. By the time my symptoms progressed to the point that I couldn’t squeeze my left hand to play a barre chord, it was too late.

The second lesson I learned is that it often takes a lot of trial and error to solve the problem of a performance injury. Though I visited many qualified professionals, many of them were unable to help me; some administered therapies which worsened my injury.

That is why prevention is so important. If an injury goes too far, it can take years to heal.
Recently I have experienced some problems with my right hand, and I have greatly curtailed my practice schedule, and even canceled gigs for a short time. The good news is that my healing is well underway. And as a side benefit, I have changed the focus of my playing away from technique and toward creativity. Since I am rarely practicing before a gig, not all of my chops are accessible. However I find that I can relax into spontaneity and improvisation in my shows, and make music that is interesting, fresh, and moving. So perhaps I have learned a third lesson: when life tries to move you in a new direction, don’t resist - go there!
During this latest period of injury, I have done a lot of research into performance injuries. Here is an in-depth article that I highly recommend for anyone who is dealing with performance injuries.

In the September 14, 2007 issue of the New Yorker, the eminent neurologist and author Oliver Saks published an article entitled “The Abyss”, about the English musicologist Clive Wearing. (This article also appears as a chapter in Saks’ new book “Musicophilia”.) In 1985, Wearing was struck by a brain infection which left him with an extreme form of amnesia - a memory span of only seconds together with a deletion of virtually his entire past.

Remarkably, Wearing retained “virtually perfect preservation of … musical powers and memory.” It begs the question: “how does he retain his remarkable knowledge of music, his ability to sight-read, play the piano and organ, sing, and conduct a choir in the masterly way he did before he became ill?”

Saks says that Wearing’s case makes it clear that “two very different sorts of memory could exist: a conscious memory of events (episodic memory) and an unconscious memory for procedures; and that procedural memory is unimpaired in amnesia.” Further describing procedural memory, Saks says “it is all-important that the remembering be literal, exact … repetition and rehearsal, timing and sequence are of the essence here.” Rodolfo Llinas, another neuroscientist, uses the term “fixed action pattern” (FAP) for such procedural memory.

The implications of the existence and role of procedural memory for effective practice are huge. It explains why some practice - hurried, inexact, riddled with errors - is far worse than ineffective, it accomplishes negative results. Whereas practice in which a musician begins slowly and patiently, working in order through the steps of gaining familiarity, accuracy, rhythm, and finally speed, so that each repetition of a section of music is played with perfection, yields the desired result: a consistent and easy execution of even the most highly demanding music.

Philip Toshio Sudo, in his book “Zen Guitar”, points out that practice does not make perfect; only perfect practice makes perfect. The reason for this lies in the role of procedural memory. The law of karma functions accutely through such memory. What you do, you are likely to do again. With practice, which involves repetition, this likelihood increases which each repeat - either of mistakes, or of accurate playing. This is why it is so critical to practice slowly and carefully. Accuracy is the primary goal to be achieved during practice. In musical pieces of moderate or greater difficulty, other aspects of performance - timing, speed, expression - are only possible once an accurate performance has been cemented by procedural memory. Then the performer can let go, allowing the music to unfold from her hands without effort, while giving herself over entirely to the sensitivity and feeling of the music itself.