Erik van Goch -> RE: Flamenco Playing and Practice Time (Dec. 31 2012 3:01:17)
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ORIGINAL: guitarbuddha quote:
ORIGINAL: Erik van Goch Many of the exercises i did were incredibly easy in physical execution (thinking about lifting a finger comes close) but extremely demanding when it came to generating the focus to benefit from them. I am careful to avoid such exercises now. I now believe that exercises by their very physicality should AID focus. Anything which has the opposite effect leads to the problems you have been describing. D. That sounds very much how i looked at it before i knew the true meaning of focus...i could very easily do scales and other kind of finger exercises (applying basic levels of awareness, monitoring, validation and adjusting) without going to hell and back (assuming that's the problem you referred to)...but that basic level of focus did not dramatically improved my capacities. I guess you have focus and focus...the focus i mean involves living the object of your focus with all your senses...you have to feel it, see it, hear it, taste it, smell it....the focus i mean obviously involves constant and unconditional awareness, monitoring, validation and adjusting but on a totally different level applying 100 times more focus on a 1000 times smaller object.... you basically have to become one with the object of your focus and in a way you have to become that object yourself....and as soon as you found, lived and understand some (hind of) truth you must (try to) re-live that truth in your mind only as well (including feeling the physical contact, feeling the string vibrations, feeling everything...without moving a finger, just using your mind only). The few times i was willing/able to focus to that extent it did indeed cost me blood, sweat and tears....but the reward was bigger than i could have imagined in my wildest dreams as well. The micro exercises did not only improve my physical skills dramatically, they also improved my ability to focus dramatically..... 10 years later i discovered that my tendency/ability to re-play those fragments of truth in my mind only as well (as real as real can be) basically was the guitar equivalent of the mental exercises monks in tibet use to improve the level of focus/meditation/imagination/awareness of there students...when done well it brings you in a higher state of awareness that lifts "focus" to a completely differed level....on top, thinking about a movement generates the same nerve-impuls as doing it for real...and growing (physical or mental) appeal on certain muscle-groups also increases the amount of nerves that hooks in to connect with it. Quite recently (20 years after i applied it) i read that the monotone/meditational/hypnotical techniques i applied not only generates a higher state of awareness but also structurally changes your brain which starts to produce more grey-matter. To give you an example of such "higher state of awareness"......after 2-3 weeks of total focus i obtained some kind of mental oscilloscope that somehow could slow down/freeze the trembling of the string.....re-plugging a trembling string to me suddenly felt like pushing someone on a swing...you have to do it on a very specific moment in time/movement...if you ad energy on the right moment(s) you add energy, if you do it on the wrong moment(s) you distract energy....wonder how many people experienced/enjoyed/applied that level of awareness/sensibility...i made the same progress in bio dynamica, energy transposal and tonal control. After 3 weeks of total focus (2 hours a day) playing the guitar (temporary) became as easy to me as breathing ....it is unbelievable how easy it is to play the guitar if you can pair optimal relaxation to total control of input/output....but obtaining those tools was far from relaxed (at least to me) and i lost those capacities as soon as i stopped playing the guitar on a regular/daily base. ....oh, and i noticed an other (repeatable) advantage of those "40 hour rebirth sessions" (reprogramming yourself from scratch in order to free yourself of bad habits).....you discover that you are actually better of skipping the brain at all.....The first time it happened to me it felt like an alien force took over total control of my body.... from 1 second to the other i had nothing to say anymore about how my hands moved or the kind of music they produced....they were playing chords and melodies i'd never had seen and heart before....Scary?....not at all, if that alien force plays the guitar a 1000 times better than you could ever dream to do yourself and actually equals PDL you don't complain but simply enjoy every second given to you. It took me over 15 years to find a musician who "suffered" the same problem....he was one of the best musicians/stage performers i ever met and before every performance he took some quality time of meditating/mental preparation. He told me that visitor was not an alien force taken over control of the body but that at those moments your subconsciousness took over control of your body...i was never able to open that window on command but had to wait patiently till it offered it services to me which happened every now and then...but always in periods i was in the middle of (or just passed) a 40 hour rebirth session...not sure it was linked to the micro studies, the mental visualisations or the sheer fact that at those moments i would have favored 1 perfect execution of an open string over receiving 1.000.000 dollar...... appearingly that's what needed to become PDL......for a few seconds/minutes. I recently decided that those wonderful encounters with my subconsciousness probably are what we call duende...the last time it happened to me was 20 years ago and it was most definitely worth those trips to hell and back :-)
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