Dana's Thoughts - (always under construction!)


The Beauty of Discipline
-December 31st, 2004

I want to take a few minutes to outline why I believe that disciplined practice is the most effiecent way to improve your songwriting and your mind in general. I should say here that I am by nature a most undiscipled person, where my mind flies off in 2000 directions at any given time (thanks Mom!), so being able to concentrate for me is quite difficult to achieve. Not that being linear is always preferable in any situation, in particular I try not to be too much like this when I am writing a piece of music, because too much thinking can get in the way. I don't try and write to formulas.

What I am talking about here is how discipline can set you free to improvise and tap the resources that are in your head. I have done a lot of guitar teaching over the years, and I guess I am a traditionalist, in that I stress - heavily stress - learing scales. If you were a classial guitarist for a long time like I was, that means the Segovia scales. These encompass the entire length of the instrument, and I played them faithfully for years and years. What I try to instill in my students is that playing scales does not need to be thought of as punishment! Far from it, the more you do the studies, the more you find in them. Once you have progressed past the simpler tasks of making certain that the correct notes are played in the correct sequence, then you can begin to actually listen and hear what you are doing. Playing an instrument, I feel, is first getting the muscle memory in your fingers or lips, etc, and getting that to the point where you don't have to conciously think about what you are doing. You have to reach this point first before you can progress to the next levels.

Now you can actually think about the sound you are producing: is it rounded, are you paying attention to the attack, are you perhaps even giving a slight vibrator - but it all must be under control. It is always much harder to play a consistent tempo, volume and timbre than to do otherwise. I am re-learing the first instrument I played, the trumpet, so I am going back to square one again, after forty years. Wind players will I think all tell you the same thing: the way to get good is to play slowly, along with a metronome, what are called long tones - simply you play a note and extend it until you run out of breath, and then breathe in and do it again. Its important to note that the most beneficial exercise is really the simplest - can you produce that long and beautiful note for the entire breath? Everything else proceedes from this basis.

It is only when you can be consistent with what you are attempting to play that you can start to open up and express whatever it is inside that is trying to come out. If the tools are there, you are not going to build that lick, the phrase, the song because you will be worrying about how to make the note, not what the note is supposed to say.

Of course being able to do this level of concentration and discipline can have positive benefits outside of playing music. A few months back I bent over to pick something up and bam! my back just gave out. I hobbled around like an old man for a week. Since then I have gotten back into doing yoga everday with a video cassette to guide me. Yes, its helping, but the real challenge is to make myself wake up early every day, and do the work. As hard as the poses are (and I am talking basic poses here, I am not in great shape!) it is much harder to take the time and tell myself that this is good for me. If I can do that, doing the actual work of the yoga poses isn't so tough.

And now if you will excuse me, I have to practice.....