BUILDING ON ROCK
I had a guitar lesson with a professional shredder last week… but we didn’t do any head banging.
Instead, my tattooed instructor did the exact opposite by showing me how to establish a solid foundation.
That’s not what I thought I’d signedup for. I’ve paid good money in the past to hear James Kennedy pick out complicated riffs on stage with the heavy metal band Oceans Ate Alaska, so I was expecting him to slide straight into bends, hammer-ons, pull-offs and other high-speed soloing techniques.
But I’m happy to say the back-tobasics session was extremely rewarding, even if learning all the notes on the fretboard and playing the C major scale at a steady beat weren’t the reasons I took up the guitar. Not getting those things right, however, may be the reason I’m still struggling to play things other people want to hear.
Jibs, as James is known by his friends, didn’t actually say that to me, but he did tell me improving my timing and learning to build cords from the C scale would allow me to jam with other musicians and be able to create music on my own. And developing those skills are what I now want to do.
My partner, meanwhile, says she gave me the lessons as a birthday present to help me get back into playing the guitar after I took a break last July. The break was actually in my ankle, and I thought I’d be playing the instrument everyday while I lay around the house in my cast. But that didn’t happen because I couldn’t
stand or sit comfortably to play, and once I’d stopped for a few months, I found it difficult to get back into the habit.
Anyway, while I was trying to keep in time with his metronome, Jibs said that if I don’t have to think about what I’m doing while I’m practising, then I’m not really learning. That surprised me because I thought I might have been thinking too much, but I suspect I just wanted to play the way professionals appear to play without putting in the ground work.
So, when I got home and went over the things we’d worked on, I started thinking. And pretty soon my mind wondered away from music and started thinking about how I could improve the foundation of my everyday life.
Eventually, I realised my injury hadn’t just affected my guitar playing, I had also allowed it to interrupt other activities I’ve used in the past to help develop relaxed effort and concentration. Things like archery, yoga and meditation.
I haven’t gone back to releasing arrows yet, but I did try to do half an hour of basic yoga the other morning, followed by a ten-minute meditation. And you know what? It was really difficult.
But I had a really good sleep that night, so now I’ve decided to go back to basics with the basics and just do a few stretches and balancing poses followed by five minutes of watching my breath.
Okay, it might not be a proper yoga routine, but it’s giving me a foundation for the rest of the day… and that’s a whole lot better than banging my head against a wall.