[Harp-L] learning hard stuff, the easy way

[JON KIP <jonkip@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All this talk about "groove" and "getting better" reminded me of something..... take from it what you will, or not. I'll stop after this one...some, if not all of my online  meandering lately is due to Practice Avoidance on my part.... I've got some hard stuff to learn, so it's easy to be distracted by shiny object or The Internet...or, as my wife says "Hey, Jon, look!!!! Hailey's comet"

Learning really difficult passages.
(I got this from studying clarinet with a couple of San Francisco and Oakland Symphony guys back when I was young, they were alive, and Oakland had a symphony. Things change, but the system remains valid.)

One standard way to practice , say, a series of eight sixteenth notes......1,2,3,4, etc....

pretend there's a hold over the odd numbered notes, and that the even numbered notes are really very short, almost grace notes...give them no thought.

Do that painfully slowly, until at least one family member asks you "don't you know anything else?"

And when they ask, you say "Well sure, listen to THIS, you'll enjoy it."

and you reverse the thing.... very quick odd numbered notes, and put a hold over the even numbered notes.

Of course, you have to decide on the best fingering for the notes, but that's your job, and the choices are usually obvious. (although yesterday, I got a call from my teacher, who'd seen what I'm working on, and he suggested a non-obvious fingering, which really screwed me up, but he was right and it's better now)

The point is that you're dividing the work up, learning half of it at a time.... 

For me, this has ALWAYS worked. Again, it's not of my invention, but I took private, mom and dad paid good University of California Professor bucks for the lessons, and these teachers knew what they were doing.... after all, you can't be all that shabby and play in the SF Symphony. 

at some point, add a slow metronome to the mix, gradually increase the speed, and all will be just fine. I'm doing this now on something that is, to say the least , Challenging.  And I find that doing this for an extended period one day, the next day I'm really worse at it, so I redo it, and by the third day, it's starting to behave...and sooner or later I arrive at the fine place where I say "Hey why did I think this was difficult?"

All this is to say that the Chromatic Harmonica can, if you choose,  be approached like any other real instrument. I wouldn't know how to approach it any other way, but lots of people do and they do have lots of fun. 

You just have to decide if it's worth the effort or not... and nobody says you HAVE to do that in order to have fun..... I read recently that the first musicians, cave men, I suppose, played music for FUN, and they didn't get paid for it.

some things never change, I suppose.