You Don't Need More Gear

I've been critiquing lots of local releases as of late, and I'm noticing how much time is wasted chasing phantom progress. Some recent examples I've heard as of late:

"I'm not ready to start playing more shows. I don't have pro gear." 
"Once we get signed, we'll start building a fan base."
"We just need more exposure!"

Sitting down and creating is hard. With each artistic effort we face nebulous goals, irregular progress, hazy feedback, no deadlines, mercurial collaborators and an endless list of setbacks. We may get better, we might not. One of the awful realities of creative work is that it's possible to spend six hours writing and still get no useable ideas. It's easy to feel like you're held hostage waiting for a slim visit from the muse.

The only way through this resistance is hard work.

However, it's much easier to say that something else is holding you back. (If only I had a $1200 guitar, I'd really be able to shred!)

By laying blame elsewhere, we rationalize the fact that we're not doing work by saying "There's no point in doing the work, because _____ is preventing me from succeeding." Believing that your success is subject solely to forces outside of your control is a lot less stressful than facing fear of uncertainty. 

I'm not saying chance has no part, far from it. Luck very clearly factors into many, if not all, success stories. What I am saying, though, is while we have to deal with the hand we're dealt for variables such as luck and inborn talent, hard work is one of the variables related to success that we can actually influence. We have only so much mental energy we can expend per day before becoming less and less productive. As such, it's paramount that we focus our energy on what we can change instead of wasting precious effort complaining.

So what's your excuse?

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Bonus points: Here's a great read on Internal vs. External Locus on Control i.e. whether you believe the outcome of events is more related to personal effort or external influence.

How Can I Improve A Student's Motivation to Learn?

Don't call them smart.

I'm serious.

Jonah Lehrer goes over some classic psychology research by Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller showing how calling students "smart" can backfire.

Her most famous study, conducted in twelve different New York City schools along with Claudia Mueller, involved giving more than 400 fifth graders a relatively easy test consisting of nonverbal puzzles. After the children finished the test, the researchers told the students their score, and provided them with a single line of praise. Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence. “You must be smart at this,” the researcher said. The other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

The students were then allowed to choose between two different subsequent tests. The first choice was described as a more difficult set of puzzles, but the kids were told that they’d learn a lot from attempting it. The other option was an easy test, similar to the test they’d just taken.
When Dweck was designing the experiment, she expected the different forms of praise to have a rather modest effect. After all, it was just one sentence. But it soon became clear that the type of compliment given to the fifth graders dramatically affected their choice of tests. When kids were praised for their effort, nearly 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. However, when kids were praised for their intelligence, most of them went for the easier test. What explains this difference? According to Dweck, praising kids for intelligence encourages them to “look” smart, which means that they shouldn’t risk making a mistake.

Dweck’s next set of experiments showed how this fear of failure can actually inhibit learning. She gave the same fifth graders yet another test. This test was designed to be extremely difficult — it was originally written for eighth graders — but Dweck wanted to see how the kids would respond to the challenge. The students who were initially praised for their effort worked hard at figuring out the puzzles. Kids praised for their smarts, on the other hand, were easily discouraged. Their inevitable mistakes were seen as a sign of failure: Perhaps they really weren’t so smart. After taking this difficult test, the two groups of students were then given the option of looking either at the exams of kids who did worse or those who did better. Students praised for their intelligence almost always chose to bolster their self-esteem by comparing themselves with students who had performed worse on the test. In contrast, kids praised for their hard work were more interested in the higher-scoring exams. They wanted to understand their mistakes, to learn from their errors, to figure out how to do better.

The final round of tests was the same difficulty level as the initial test. Nevertheless, students who were praised for their effort exhibited significant improvement, raising their average score by 30 percent. Because these kids were willing to challenge themselves, even if it meant failing at first, they ended up performing at a much higher level. This result was even more impressive when compared to students randomly assigned to the smart group, who saw their scores drop by nearly 20 percent. The experience of failure had been so discouraging for the “smart” kids that they actually regressed.

Totally counterintuitive, yet research since the original paper (1998) bears these findings out.

So when you're trying to motivate someone to perform better, praise and reward hard work (which can be changed) and not innate talent (which can't).

Everything Is Connected (Continued)

Touching off of last week's post, I'd like to share with you how getting personal training helped improve my musical skills.

I've been into lifting weights for a couple years now as a way to blow off steam and keep myself healthy. After hitting a frustrating plateau in my weight lifting for a couple months, I decided to get over being stubborn and ask for help from a personal trainer.

I've had more progress in these last six months than in the last four years. Wow.

Lessons I've learned:

   -There's a limit to how long you can have an effective workout. Anything over an hour and you're getting diminishing returns. 30 minutes of optimal practice a day is more effective than two hours once or twice a week. Not only will you be more focused, but you'll retain more of your practice over the long term.

   -Change your workout every 6 weeks. Your body adapts to how you train it. When you hit a plateau, it's time to change your patterns. P90x calls this concept muscle confusion, but that's primarily a marketing term for what trainers have known for decades. Plus, constant change keeps you from getting bored and not focusing intently on your practice.

Even better, midway through a workout, an idea pranced through my head. What if I were to take what I've learned from my trainer and applied it to my practice?

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My Current Bass Guitar "Workout"

Grinding on scales can get boring, so this practice regimen aims to sandwhich in the boring drills with fun improv stuff. Practice sessions are to last ONLY 30 minutes. If I'm "in the zone", I go on to the next day's routine because Practice is more effective if you vary between different tasks, such as between dexterity and improvisational exercises.

   -A Day, Speed Scales: One scale, two octaves starting at bottom, 3 different fingerings, fast. Then do it in 3rds, arpeggios (135 and 1357), picked and fingered.

   -B Day, Ear Training: I'll pick a song solo I like, preferably not a bass solo so I'll expand my style, and try to learn it by ear. Miles Davis has brought my solo game up a few notches already.

   -C Day, Slooooooo Scales: Same scale as A day, two octaves starting at top, all conceviable fingerings, played painfully slow, arpeggios (135 and 1357), played as eighth notes, triplets, doubles, and triples both picked and fingered.

   -D Day, Brain to Instrument Improv: This exercise is to help improve the connection between what I think and what I can play, which has been something I've been wanting to fix for some time now. First, I listen to a 30 second segment of a song I want to work with. Then, I'll sing an improvised bassline into my computer's sound recorder. After that, I'll try learning the part I sung on my bass.
Two important things I've learned:
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Everything is connected.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Rethinking Practice

With the album release AND graduation coming on strong, these next two months are going to be lighter on updates but I will try as hard as I can to make time to keep delivering quality content.


This weeks I've got two great articles on how to practice/study more effectively. With as hard as it is to squeeze in practice time, getting the most out of this time is important to every musician. 


From Jonah Lehrer:


"A great deal of previous work has shown that simply presenting the stimuli to the participant is usually not enough. They actually have to do the task. This is where our group comes in. Basically, what we say is, yes you do have to do the task, just not for the whole time. The main result is that if you practice for 20 minutes, and then you are passively exposed to stimuli for 20 minutes, you learn as if you have been practicing for 40 minutes. You can cut the effort in half, and still yield the same benefit. This finding could be important for clinical training programs, such as the ones that attempt to treat language-based learning disorders."
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/how-much-should-we-practice/
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From NPR's Piece:

Test yourself: Doing practice quizzes can help you retrieve information on test day. "Tests have a very bad rap as a measurement tool," Carey says.  But psychologists have found self-tests slow down the forgetting of material you've studied. "If you study something once, and then you test yourself on it," Carey says, "you do better than if you study it two times over." (Practice playing your parts unaccompanied, then try writing out the tabs/notation of the part without touching your instrument, mentally rehearse fingerings when you're bored waiting in traffic. I practice right hand dexterity drills using a the side of a pen to mimic my strings)

Move around: Changing up where you study can help you retain more information. "If you move around and study the same material in several places," he says, "you may be forming ... multiple associations for the same material, the same words and so on.  So it's better anchored in your brain, and you can pull it out easier."

Mix it up: Think about a football player who does strength training, speed training and drills. Carey says alternating between different facets of a subject in a single sitting can "leave a deeper impression on the brain." For example, when studying French, do some verbs, some speaking and some reading. Spending your time in deep concentration on just verbs, say, isn't as effective.  (For musicians, practice scales, warmups, technical exercises, soloing, improv, music writing etc to keep your skills well rounded.)

Space it out: Information learned in a hurry is lost just as fast. Carey likens cramming your brain to speed-packing a cheap suitcase — it all falls out. So if you really want to learn, space out shorter, hourlong study sessions. "There's no doubt you can cram your way through an exam," Carey says. The problem is that it's so easy to forget what you just crammed — and once it's gone, Carey says, "It's gone. You're not getting it back."  (One 3 hour practice session a week is nice, but not as long-term effective as six 30-minute practice sessions.)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130728588&ps=cprs

Of Unicycles and Songwriting

Unicycles seem magic. Somehow a stick with a wheel on it being used as a means of transportation seems inefficient. But it works. A good friend of mine decided to take up unicycling as a hobby (?) a year back and now regularly commutes to work on it. He wants to start a unicycle crew and roll around town clowning on those with two or more wheels.

Yeah.

To an outsider, unicycles seem magic. But really it doesn't take anything more than practice and strong knee pads. It's a skill. Sure, you can read articles on unicycling, watch youtube videos of professionals in action, or purchase "super high-quality" unicycle accessories to try and get better. But it's a skill. You get better at unicycling by unicycling

The same goes for songwriting.

Is it any surprise that the great songwriters of our generation have massive song catalogs? Sure, there's trash in all vast archives, but that doesn't matter when you create songs that become cultural touchstones. 

Let's get down and nerdy.

Think of song writing skill as a percentage of good songs, similar to a free throw percentage. Assume you've got a songwriting skill of 7%, meaning whenever you write a song you've got a 7% chance of it being "good" as determined by your audience. If you only write five songs a year, what are your chances of putting out a decent album? What if you write five songs a month? A week? 

What matters is both your songwriting skill percentage AND the number of attempts you make. There are limits to how good you can make your songwriting skill through laboring over a single song, studying, or otherwise avoiding writing songs. If you want to be good at a skill, practice it! This should not be hard for musicians to understand.

And as you increase the number of songs you write, you'll get better too. Going from five songs a year to ten songs a year gives you more practice writing, performing and editing these pieces, giving you a stronger idea of what a good song is and is not. You'll understand your strengths and weaknesses, and how best to leverage the talent you've got to create a memorable piece.

If you want to write good songs, write more songs. 

Science: How To Improve Your Practice

Practice is more effective if you vary between different tasks, such as between dexterity and improvisational exercises.


Courtesy of The Situationist:http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/the-situation-of-practice/


“While it may be harder during practice to switch between tasks … you end up remembering the tasks better later than you do if you engage in this drill-like practice,” Winstein said.

Music Lessons Make You Smarter

Once again, an amazing post by Eric. More info at Newsweek and in the book This Is Your Brain on Music.

Music really is awesome for you. Let's take a look at everything music does
-Childhood musical training creates a sustained increase in IQ.
-Musical training improves math skills
-Musicians have a 10-15% larger corpus callosum, the brain structure connecting the left & right hemispheres

However, it has yet to improve musicians' ability to arrive on time. Bummer.

Creating vs. Honing

The more time you spend as a musician you'll begin to realize the importance of listening to your moods. Sometimes practice will be super-productive, other times you might as well be sniffing paint it's that pointless.   

Do you know the difference between the moods of creativity? 

-=Creating is when you're drawing new ideas out of the great cosmic jar of idea-plasm and giving them a basic shape. You do not criticize ideas during this phase, it's pure idea generation. Neuroscientists have shown that during phases of pure and spontaneous creation, your brain turns off self-censoring and inhibition. A new idea is highly disruptive and challenging to your current schema of the world, so it only makes sense that your defense mechanisms would kick in to shut down this idea that would cause too much of a ruckus. If you've got an over-active internal censor, you risk shutting down millions of brilliant ideas before they have had time to breathe. This is *part* of writer's block. (To be discussed in a later post)

-=Honing is where you're chiseling and chipping away the rough edges and giving definition to the idea-plasm. This is where you get fussy about how long you swing the third eighth in the second repeat. Unless you're full of more hubris than Kanye, you realize that not every idea is generation-defining, so you weed out the bad ones here. As such, make sure that when you're in this mood you're using it properly. When you're feeling analytical, now is not the time to try being creative and making music, you'll just end up pissed off that you can't come up with any ideas. Go retool an old song or woodshed some scales while your brain is in this mode.



Don't get confused of which phase you're in. It'll stunt your art.