Using the Brain in Relieving Tension in the Hands - Routines
When I pick up to learn a new piece, at the beginning I find it super difficult to play. Especially when I try to produce a good recording of, say, a falseta with insufficient practice time, my hands hurt and I get a headache. "But I have played harder stuff in the past! Why is this happening? Did I lose the strength in my hands all of a sudden?
The answer is not in the muscles but neurones in the brain. More specifically, the neural structures where the guitar playing data is stored.
Guitar players do not necessarily have stronger hands than average as far as mundane tasks are concerned. In other words playing stretchy chords repeatedly does not necessarily correlate to an equal increase in generic muscle strength.
So, what is changing? Let me do some pseudoscience...
When attempting to play something we don't know very well, we engage MORE MUSCLES THAN NECESSARY to accomplish the task. So, instead of, say, using 2 muscle strands to play a barred chord we use 5 or 6. I am throwing these numbers off the top of my head, but you get the picture. In fact, sometimes even the muscles in parts our body that are NOT related to guitar playing may start to tense up. I noticed that my mouth twitches when I push forward to play something by using just brute force.
As we get more and more familiar with the sequence we are working on our motor system LEARNS TO ENGAGE ONLY THE NECESSARY MUSCLES to accomplish the task and ELIMINATES THE ONES THAT ARE NOT NEEDED. This structured info is stored in the brain of course. Therefore, as the neural connections associated with the passage practised gets thicker, the engaged muscle strands required to pull it off gets thinner, so to speak.
Once this weeding out the unneeded musculature process is done, then the necessary muscles start building fine tuned strength.
The well known process to achieve this is REPETITION. Each time you repeat a sequence on the guitar the mental representation of it gets darker, thicker, better tuned, you name it… And if you do these repetitions on a regular basis, then you have established ROUTINES. A routine is a regularly followed sequence of actions.
In our world, playing the same falseta every morning for 20 minutes slowly with the metronome is a routine. You have to play as slowly as you can play the falseta perfectly and repeat it several times so your brain can set up and store the necessary plan of action for your muscles. It's like tracing the contours of an intricate picture before you colour it in. The contours need to be accurate and strong before you pick up the colouring brush. Or something like that…
And this is why NOODLING on the guitar almost never leads to playing well. That is playing stuff you already sort of know aimlessly jumping from one bit to another. I don't have anything agains noodling. But if you wish to advance your technique, then you need to set aside time on a regular basis to actually practise via almost meditative repetition.
Routines can be applied to both pieces and specific techniques. This has been the main idea behind my daily routines series at the atrafanaStore. Each package adresses a specific right hand technique with exercises to be performed daily.
Happy routines
The answer is not in the muscles but neurones in the brain. More specifically, the neural structures where the guitar playing data is stored.
Guitar players do not necessarily have stronger hands than average as far as mundane tasks are concerned. In other words playing stretchy chords repeatedly does not necessarily correlate to an equal increase in generic muscle strength.
So, what is changing? Let me do some pseudoscience...
When attempting to play something we don't know very well, we engage MORE MUSCLES THAN NECESSARY to accomplish the task. So, instead of, say, using 2 muscle strands to play a barred chord we use 5 or 6. I am throwing these numbers off the top of my head, but you get the picture. In fact, sometimes even the muscles in parts our body that are NOT related to guitar playing may start to tense up. I noticed that my mouth twitches when I push forward to play something by using just brute force.
As we get more and more familiar with the sequence we are working on our motor system LEARNS TO ENGAGE ONLY THE NECESSARY MUSCLES to accomplish the task and ELIMINATES THE ONES THAT ARE NOT NEEDED. This structured info is stored in the brain of course. Therefore, as the neural connections associated with the passage practised gets thicker, the engaged muscle strands required to pull it off gets thinner, so to speak.
Once this weeding out the unneeded musculature process is done, then the necessary muscles start building fine tuned strength.
The well known process to achieve this is REPETITION. Each time you repeat a sequence on the guitar the mental representation of it gets darker, thicker, better tuned, you name it… And if you do these repetitions on a regular basis, then you have established ROUTINES. A routine is a regularly followed sequence of actions.
In our world, playing the same falseta every morning for 20 minutes slowly with the metronome is a routine. You have to play as slowly as you can play the falseta perfectly and repeat it several times so your brain can set up and store the necessary plan of action for your muscles. It's like tracing the contours of an intricate picture before you colour it in. The contours need to be accurate and strong before you pick up the colouring brush. Or something like that…
And this is why NOODLING on the guitar almost never leads to playing well. That is playing stuff you already sort of know aimlessly jumping from one bit to another. I don't have anything agains noodling. But if you wish to advance your technique, then you need to set aside time on a regular basis to actually practise via almost meditative repetition.
Routines can be applied to both pieces and specific techniques. This has been the main idea behind my daily routines series at the atrafanaStore. Each package adresses a specific right hand technique with exercises to be performed daily.
Happy routines
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