In my experience, each musical item, as it were, from a symphonic soloist part, to song to a single note, has a working speed. That speed can be as slow as slow motion to any speed above that.
The big defeat that awaits so many students, when unsupervised by an experienced master, is that they do not work at their working speed because of impatience, in most cases. They work usually way too fast or too slowly due to pseudo-perfectionism. That means that, when practicing too fast, they are practicing their glitches/chronic mistakes very, very well, and it shows! And, some stay too long at one speed with a given musical item, when they have already mastered it.
For the slow-fixated person, it is necessary to remind them to define their goal: Are we practicing to play music or are we using the guitar to indulge in a pseudo-perfectionistic mania? Staying stuck at one speed when it has been mastered and the goal attained, is not perfectionism…it is not music making either since the musical goal is to play that part faster.
Perfectionism means work until you get it right and then practice something else that needs to be worked on. Not “kind of right”, put perfectly clear and expressive as it should be, and then do it flawlessly and easily every time you play, like a musician is supposed to do! Otherwise how can we expect to enjoy our music if it is horribly disfigured by us?
So the working speed is very useful because you can tell after a bit that “it is time to play a little faster” at the new working speed…because now you actually can do it easily and perfectly!
Where most fail is that they move to a speed that is a bit too fast for the time being, where they cannot practice easily and perfectly, and so they acquire those glitches and handicaps instead of a wonderful technique! :)
Playing the guitar…very well…requires a very expanded form of consciousness. Such an expanded consciousness is present in all of us, but not often cultivated. Only those of us born with that destiny will spontaneously listen to our inner-master. So in that light it is easy to understand why most of us fall into technical inadequacy and seem unable to get out of that state. We need to expand our consciousness to the basic level of an artist’s consciousness. That means transforming ourselves into something we (mistakenly) think we are not: An artist!
But if we stop, put the smart phone down, put the iPad down, and think for just one moment: If music is an art and artists play guitar..How am I going to play guitar without becoming an artist? or realizing the artist inside myself?..without expanding my mind like an artist? without changing radically the way I experience life, reality, and all human experience?
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