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Sometime in the mid Nineties, a TV- fees collector knocked at my door, wanting to inspect my place for receivers. I wouldn´t let the brisk guy in though, for which he announced to be coming back with the police.
Right afterwards, I humped my TV over to neighbours and gave away that thing. It became a 15 years without TV consumption.
A pity however, that in those abstinent years I was practising guitar only sporadically and if at it rather fiddling around / sessioning, not so much working out technique.
Continuous practising set in just a ~ 5 or 6 years or so ago. And almost three years ago a chum of mine who is in the electricity and satellite receiver biz, found that my current unplugged TV needed to be put into work. Initially having hold off, in the end I was greatful for his friendly installation, for foreign newspapers being scarce where I am now, which makes the TV option of regular news and documentaries just the more appealing.
What came with it, eventhough aware of the drawbacks beforehand, has been practising guitar while watching TV.
Actually, my TV set for some reason has ceased functioning since almost a week, and the efficiency of pure dailys practising that came with it, made me open this thread.
It can be such a comfy routine to practise before TV. During trash you won´t watch attentively anyway, rather focussing on the guitar technique. Only when something interesting pops up, the guitar goes on automatic pilot and you make for a half-assed TV viewer.
The physical disadvantages of playing seated, let alone slouched on a sofa, aside ...
It´s like tango. Very wasteful of your learning efforts.
When distracted by something external, like TV in this case, your imperfect routines will at least to a degree be taking over and with that re-imprint what you´ve actually been trying to sort out. In the same time, executing detrimental routines turnes out practically worse than doing nothing / not rehearsing at all.
Only when focus is switched back to the guitar, will you find to have unconsciously gone back to old routines; resetting once again for the correct ways. - Until auto pilot got you back again. That way it is like tango, with two steps forward and one step back, if not of lesser efficiency than that.
Conclusion:
I think it depends on the individual goal.
In case of being either quite advanced / stuffed with almost perfect routines already, or not too eager about progress, a TV watching / guitar playing mixture could be alright.
If however wanting to overcome subtle dysfunction with playing / overcoming hurdles to seamless technique, TV sessions will more or less be equalling fighting oneself rather vainly.
One thing that seems without question to me is that miniscule subtleties which make the difference between ergonomical and self-hampering execution won´t allow distraction / take all the didactical detail and awareness available. -
I have let the TV stay cancelled for now, eventhough it would take only a phone call to have it fixed. Thinking to either let it be as is, or raise the discipline to keep TV and guitar sessions separate from each other.
The difference between with and without seems like say ~ 10:1.
I do that kind of thing all the time , watch something banal on the T.V. or maybe discovery channel and also pick a technique , like tremolo and just mainly do the right hand for like the whole programme , maybe I play the guitar ...maybe I learn something off the TV about wolves or deep space things ,,..or maybe I dont know anything about wolves and cant play the guitar either.!
German TV, specially the ARD, seems to feature these all day long, now. Only thing missing would be them announcing in the daily news to have ran out of oregano.
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