The ebooks on classical, jazz, and rock guitar are for sale on my website in a PDF format.
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Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
OMRI: Hello Ethan. My name is Omri and I am a guitar player. I got your books about electric and classical guitar, and they made me start learning the Alexander technique with a teacher. Thank you for them and for giving me my first taste of this now big part of my life. Music has been the biggest thing for me ever since I can remember, it is what i want to do for a living and what I feel and think about all the time. But here also lies the problem, I get stressed around my instrument and find it hard to express myself deeply. I started to read “New Pathways to Piano Technique”, but find it a pretty difficult read and not very guiding and practical. I am amazed by the opportunities it suggest and want to experience what you have after reading it. Do you have any suggestions? How can I approach these wonderful concepts? Thank you for all the beauty you bring.
ETHAN: Thank you very much.
First, the main principles of “New Pathways to Piano Technique” are clarified in my ebooks on the classical guitar and jazz and rock guitar. There is a section in both of these books where I write about hitting the right notes with total trust.
Here is the problem with applying these principles of “effortless accuracy”. There truly is nothing you can do on the guitar, except play FEARLESSLY, if you want to use these principles from “New Pathways to Piano Technique”.
This means you have two choices. The first choice is to play the guitar avoiding making mistakes. The second choice is to play the guitar with the faith you will always play the right notes. And when you do make a mistake, you continue to have the faith you won’t miss the notes as you continue to play.
You have to understand that almost all guitarists play AVOIDING mistakes, rather than TRUSTING their hands to play the right notes. It seems to be psychologically easier for guitarists to assume it is easier to miss notes than play the right note.
Simply, the Bonpensiere book says, “If you know which notes you want to play and trust your hands and fingers to play them, YOU WILL PLAY THE NOTE YOU’RE AIMING FOR.”
As long as you believe it is easier to play making mistakes than not making mistakes, then you will have more faith in playing wrong notes, than having more faith in playing the notes you want to play.
There is no reason to ever play the guitar carefully, because to play carefully means you’re playing the guitar fearfully, and to play fearfully does not create greater accuracy. Playing fearfully avoiding mistakes really destroys the joy of making music.
OMRI: So, here is an exercise in learning to trust your hands. Play the 2nd finger on the 2nd fret, 3rd string. Wait a second or two and then instantly shift the hand, arm, and finger to the 7th fret on the same string. The intention is to move as fast as possible, so you HAVE to trust your body to place the finger precisely on the 7th fret without any hesitation.
It’s very important that you wait a moment before you shift, allowing the string to sound, so that when you do shift you do it with total abandon. Almost every guitarist who shifts on the guitar neck does it to some degree carefully to try to guarantee accuracy. The faster the fearless shift, the more legato between the notes.
When you watch someone like Itzhak Perlman play the violin, he never plays carefully with the left hand or the bow. He just goes for it.
You can use all kinds of variations on this exercise in trust on the guitar – like shifting instantly from the 2nd fret on the 2nd string to the 7th fret on the 4th string. Ultimately you’ll be able to place more than one left hand finger accurately in a shift from a chord to a chord.
What we’re talking about is leaping around the neck of the guitar, always keeping the fingers close to the strings moving as quickly as possible but NOT RUSHING. No matter where you start, be absolutely clear where you’re going, and shift instantly, quickly, and fearlessly.
When you miss, do it again with even MORE trust and even less carefully. Eventually you’ll realize the only way to play truly expressively, fearlessly, and accurately on the guitar is to trust the fingers to hit the mark (the right notes).
OMRI: Would you mind giving exercises for the right hand (fingers and pick)? My biggest technical problem on the guitar has always been developing speed with the right hand. Particularly with a pick but playing with the fingers is not that easy for me either. Don’t trust it probably ;-).
ETHAN: When you use a pick, it is the BICEPS that rotates the hand. I didn’t discover this until I was through with my Alexander Technique training. One of the most things I learned in my Alexander Technique training was to troubleshoot. This means that I learned to define a physical problem, and to always find a way to solve that problem.
When you are aware it is the biceps, each head of the biceps muscle taking its turn to rotate the forearm, which of course rotates the hand and the pick, then you play with a pick being moved by a free upper arm. You don’t mistakenly think the hand and the forearm are rotating themselves.
This knowledge means you aren’t asking the body to something that can’t be done. IN OTHER WORDS IF YOU’RE TRYING TO ROTATE THE PICK WITH THE FOREARM, YOU END UP WITH A TENSE FOREARM, TENSE UPPER ARM, AND YOU CAN’T PLAY VERY FAST WITH EASE.
So, move the pick back and forth in a very small arc across the same string, letting the biceps move the hand, pick, and forearm faster and faster.
When you play with fingers, you can only go as fast as your reflexes will allow you, so for alternating fingers to play notes faster and faster, the finger that is to play next has to already be on the way to playing the string behind the finger playing. An obvious exercise is to play the same string alternating fingers, or thumb and finger faster and faster.
The right hand, with a pick or finger style, can never be accurate when you have physical misconceptions of what is actually happening, because these misconceptions make playing faster and faster harder and harder, which means you get tenser and tenser and miss the string or strings you want to play.
OMRI: So far it looks great. I tried your recommendations today and they feel easy and natural, except for playing fast with a pick, which I have never felt comfortable with. How do I inhibit myself from TRYING to play with my forearm and just let my biceps work reflexively?
ETHAN: You play as if the pick is SUPER GLUED to your fingers, which means you don’t squeeze the pick to keep from dropping it.
When you move the pick back and forth across the string do not play with a collapsed wrist. A lot of guitarist’s flatten the wrist to the strings, because it feels like they have more control over the pick. This is how you create carpal tunnel syndrome.
The hand should be aligned with the back of the forearm, not the under side of the forearm.
When you move the pick across the string by rotating the forearm instead of moving the hand back and forth, side to side, it is a very small back and forth rotation. Let yourself experience this an uncontrollable rotating/shaking of the hand and forearm, like having Parkinson’s disease.
Even if you don’t feel the biceps is rotating the forearm, it is. Moving the pick back and forth across the same string is such a small rotation of the forearm, that even if you don’t feel the biceps rotating the forearm, simply knowing that is what is happening and not getting in the way by trying to force it to happen, allows the forearm to rotate very fast.
NEVER TENSE TO KEEP MOVEMENTS SMALL AND ACCURATE AND FAST, BECAUSE EXCESS TENSION ALWAYS SLOWS EVERYTHING DOWN!
OMRI: I will have to get used to it, as I don’t have much trust in my right arm. I’ll have to develop it. Thank you very much Ethan.
ETHAN: You welcome.
The trick is to let yourself lose control of your playing, so that you can create the REAL control you never really had and deserve.
GOOD LUCK!
9/7/14 – A CONTINUATION OF OUR CONVERSATION:
OMRI: I have another question. I got back to Bonpensiere’s book, trying to figure out more. I mostly understand him now, and I started experimenting with the suggested basic experiments. My movement is very light now, thanks to the last two years of Alexander Technique lessons weekly, but I find it tricky to experiment with whether I move voluntarily, or the involuntary product of my ideation, using Bonpensiere’s terms. I also understand now that developing TRUE trust in my body, its accuracy and spacial awareness, is not a short process. Do you have any suggestions as to playing by “V Proposes, V2 Disposes”?
ETHAN: In New Pathways to Piano Technique, Luigi Bonpensiere says that if you tell your hands what to play, which is V, and you trust your hands to play the right notes, which is V2, then you will almost always play the notes you intend to play with effortless precision.
To say the above is easy, what the human mind finds hard is to BELIEVE it. It doesn’t have to take a long time to flip from not trusting your hands, to always trusting your hands to play what you ask of them, but accepting that this works is the difficult part. It is a shift away from not having faith in your body, to playing the guitar always assuming you play what you want, and if you miss you have faith you won’t the next time. In other words, you place even greater trust your hands to play the right notes the next time and try even less to be accurate.
When I first experienced this on the guitar, it was more than an intellectual placing of the fingers on the right note. I really felt my fingers play the right notes, as if they were drawn to the right notes by a magnet on the neck of the guitar. It was amazing! I just kept leaping around the guitar getting out of the way of hands and letting them play what I wanted to play. I started with jumping from one note to one note and then added two then more notes, experiencing the pull of the “magnet on the neck” to be just as precise in chords.
What I’m trying to say is ultimately you can’t LEARN to play the guitar with effortless precision, you have to move as quickly as possible TRUSTING your hands to play the right notes, which is a very emotional experience of playing with faith in your body, rather than playing without faith and only trusting endless repetition. This is what the child prodigy does so easily, choosing faith over fear.
One other point, if you think that the tension level is at its lowest point in your body when you play the guitar now, you will be amazed at how much less tension there is when you trust yourself to play the right notes, rather than HOPE you play the right notes.
OMRI: So what I should do is to continue with the exercises in the book, applying more faith and letting go more and more, while being clearer with what I want my body to do? And then it will just come to me one day?
ETHAN: Yes. This is the opposite of everything you’ve ever done on the guitar. This is about going for it each time with faith, rather than hoping that if you do thousands of repetitions without faith, that you’ll become extraordinarily accurate. This is the opposite of believing endless hard work will always work infinitely better than faith, when it comes to becoming good at something. Actually what you’ve been doing is placing your faith in repetition and not in yourself. PUT YOUR FAITH IN BOTH!
If you could internalize what Itzak Perlman does on the violin, you’d have the perfect combination of hard work and trusting yourself.
9/13/14
OMRI: Hi Ethan! Last night I meditated, watched Perlman, and then experimented with the concept of trust. I placed four objects on the table and hit all of them accurately with my eyes closed! I decided to limit these kinds of exercises to only a few minutes every day, so that I don’t become obsessed. This morning I did the same exercise again before my meditation (I meditate for two short sessions every day). After watching Perlman, this time I couldn’t hit the same objects. I wonder whether I have become dependent on meditation, or the trusting, or loving and forgiving state will just be cultivated in time. Thank you so much for your support Ethan, hope we can meet one day.
ETHAN: In the Bonpensiere book, it says when you play a difficult passage and things don’t go right, remove even more effort to get it right. Trust your hands even more by letting go of trying to hit the mark. So, in hitting the right object, withdraw even more effort to do so, and trust your body to place your hands.
9/25/2014
OMRI: Hope you are doing fine and taking care. Things have been getting so much better since we last talked, and I owe it to you and bringing down to earth Luigi’s teaching. I got to a point in his book that challenges my faith once again, and I think it may be because his phrasing is sometimes unclear to me. He talks about hitting a mark “not yet seen but known to be there”. Did he literally mean hitting a mark that you don’t have any reference to? Never seeing or touching it? Is it possible? He talks at the beginning about either looking or touching the object first with eyes closed, to give the body reference, so I am not sure what he meant with this one. I wonder what you think.
ETHAN: What page is that on? It’s been a while since I read the book. I’d like to read that statement in context and then answer your question.
For me once I got what the book was teaching, I proved to myself that if I knew what note or notes I wanted to press on the guitar neck and play with my right hand; I’d just play them moving fast and fearlessly and not miss, whether I was looking at the neck or not.
OMRI: It is on page 30. Well for me it is more of a gradual process, building trust and faith with the book’s progressive exercises.
ETHAN: My interpretation is you’re setting up an exercise where you look at one object and hit the other object knowing where it is, while looking at the first object. You’re right about this book. It is written in a very Victorian style of writing, which is an early 1900’s style that can be very unclear. If you ever read any of F. M. Alexander’s four books, he wrote in this very wordy style.
Another possible way to interpret this exercise of an object “not yet seen but known to be there”, is that without consciously looking at something, we do see it with our peripheral vision. This is like walking into a room and looking at nothing in particular, but everything is taken in that is in our field of vision and filed away somewhere in the brain, including precisely where it is.
OMRI: So I already accomplished it the way you interpreted, not seeing the object and hitting it while looking at another object. It is indeed very difficult to me to understand this writing style, and I am not sure if I would have gotten something out of this book without your help. So, thanks for that and for turning me on to it and to Alexander in the first place. I will keep you posted Ethan.
ETHAN: You welcome. You know English is changing so rapidly, that the older a book, the harder it is to understand the writing. I wonder if that will happen to Hebrew, given it’s been a static language for thousands of years, and now it’s been modernized and is spoken again.
9/28/2014
OMRI: I noticed that although I had some success with Luigi’s exercises away from the instrument, I’m still not trusting myself on the guitar. I keep working with the book with the intention to complete all of his assignments and experiments. This one crushed me. On page 35 he suggests an experiment with some kind of a circle. I used a vinyl disc for this one. First step is to touch the center and then the circumference, second step is to move it on the table, with eyes closed and find the circumference and then I can find the center. I know it is not the exercise, it is me. I just figured out that this whole process is like a microcosmos of myself. I am fearful. This process of turning the fear/hope into faith is the biggest challenge of my 24 years of life. I know that faith will lead to the success I am seeking, the question is whether I can find my faith through practicing the exercises on the instrument and away from it or not. I never thought that this process would be that deep.
ETHAN: You’re right. When you shift away from playing the guitar without trusting yourself to trusting yourself, it can be a major challenge to your ego, possibly even a threat. It means you move from living a life of not trusting yourself to trusting yourself.
I think of the ego as being amoral, wanting to preserve the status quo, even if what you’re doing doesn’t serve you anymore. So, the ego may resist the trust that can make the guitar an effortless joy to play, because the ego knows this could cause a major shift in how you live your life, how you know yourself.
The question you have to ask yourself is it worth it to live fearlessly in trust or not? There is a compromise, and that is to play the guitar with trust, compartmentalize this trust, and not let it change your daily life. Think about it.
9/29/2014
OMRI: It is worth it, no doubt. Maybe being fearless with the guitar and music is a first step towards it, and may serve as a spiritual path. I am now reading Zen in the Art of Archery, may find something in it.
ETHAN: For me Zen in the Art of Archery is saying the same thing as New Pathways to Piano Technique. The Buddhists don’t talk of letting God hit the bull’s eye with the arrow, but that is how I interpret the book. New Pathways to Piano Technique is about trusting your internal computer, is how I interpret the book.
OMRI: Maybe Herrigel’s words will inspire me as well. Anyway, I will not stop, I can not stop, until my mind is convinced. I refuse to live in a mental prison.
ETHAN: So, it sound like the genie is out of the bottle, and you couldn’t put him back in even if you wanted to.
JAZZ AND ROCK, AND CLASSICAL GUITAR EBOOKS:
The ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Jazz and Rock Guitar Technique, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical. It will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to create the accurate guitar technique you want without sacrificing your body.
The ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Classical Guitar Technique, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical. It will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to create the accurate guitar technique you want without sacrificing your body.
