HOW TO MAX OUT THESE LESSONS
You have been performing for some time now and know that you need to UP your playing level. How can you do that? These lessons will max out your study /practice time which is first and foremost about technique. Technique is muscle memory on auto-play. Once you achieve proficiency – only then can your imagination lead your playing within the parameters of your music. What are the parameters? The genre or style, the arrangement and who you are playing with: the ensemble. These parameters contain your playing while at the same time your technique set it free.
But what is your greatest goal?
Your two goals here: TECHNIQUE and INTERPRETATION
Let’s take technique first and foremost.
Technique is key to being everything your potential can become. Then and only then, youir performing becomes beyond your (mere mechanistic) technique.
Here’s how to reach those two goals – MAX OUT these lessons.
Use a lesson in its entirety or use only those individual aspects you need to master or in review, brush up on your technique. Use what you need/ skip what you don’t.
These lessons end at the highest level – mere moments the curtain goes up on a sell-out performance.
Or moments before a career-changing recording session countdown – when you must re-check your tuning and your equipment and be certain that everything (and you) are at the highest level. Here’s your mental CHECK LIST –
Is your equipment at the highest (peak) level?
Are you capable, and determined to –
Is your technique at the highest (peak) level?
- drive the tempo
- emphasize the style and even amplify it
- power the dynamics
- articulate the phrasing
- deepen and broaden the color of the music – alter the very experience of the music –
If you need to improve your technique and want to get there 2 – 3 times quicker, jump to lesson 11 (Studies) through lesson 16 (Stylistic adaptation of studies).
Work up to speed always with a metronome and in all keys – all positions on the fingerboard.
For example: If you fly through a particular exercise or passage in the lower positions but falter with the same in the upper positions, skip practicing the exercise in the lower positions except once or twice and then go straight to the upper positions and stay there until mastered. Twenty times? Thirty? Fifty?
Start slowly until perfect and only then gradually increase your metronome’s speed until you are up to and above the speed you need to be at and above that achieved in the lower positions.
Practice in all twelve keys following the teachings in lesson 14 – Stylistic adaptation of studies; the why and the how.
Need to tighten up your intonation (for all but especially fretless instruments)? Go to lesson 3 – Intonation. Master that section.
Let’s dive in –