The Art of Practicing
~ Repetition and MuscleMemory – Part 1 ~
By: Jeff Vivrette
Most people, with the exception of young children, understand that you need to practice most things in order to be able to master whatever it is you want to do enough to get a benefit from it. Even if it means you have to practice only once, you’re still practicing. In mastering something enough to use it you are not necessarily mastering the entire process but perhaps a portion of the process. Let’s look at the word “master” and what it really means:
Master: “One who has control over or ownership of something”. What we see here is that to “master” something doesn’t mean you have to know everything there is about it or to be perfect at a particular thing. What it means is that you have “control” over a certain thing. In guitar player terms, it may mean tuning your guitar, playing the simple melody of “Ode to Joy” or playing an “E minor” chord. Once you have learned how to tune your guitar by yourself, you have “mastered” tuning your guitar. You may need to get better at it, but you have control over this process, nonetheless!
You know from experience that you couldn’t tune your guitar by yourself when you first started playing. But each time you picked up your guitar and tuned it you became better at it. Why? Because each time you did this you were in fact, “practicing” tuning your guitar. Remember how awkward it felt when you first began trying to get your fingers to fret notes on the guitar neck? After a while this began to feel more natural to you. Why? Practice! Every time you put your fingers on the strings you were practicing and getting more comfortable with the process of placing you finger on the string and pushing it down until it created a clear sound. So now of course we get the picture that practice is good and it produces results. But it’s important to note that it wasn’t just practicing that yielded the result. It was practicing over and over and over again that yielded the desired result. “Repetition” is a critical component that may seem obvious but it must not be glossed over. Otherwise, you will miss out on one of the critical elements of practice that will separate the “good players” from the “best players”!
Repetition alone isn’t enough either. In order to get maximum results, each repetition needs to be as close to perfect as possible because “repetition” is a key component to developing “muscle memory” and “muscle memory” is what enables guitar players, golfers, martial artists, baseball, football and hockey players to do what they do so well. The list is endless because it includes everything we do every day of our lives from walking to running a marathon. “Muscle memory” is the result of your body performing a specific action multiple times and your mind storing this action into its memory bank so that it can be recalled and executed with little or no thought at a later time. It’s the programming of your brain to tell your body to do something specific that it may have the strength to do but not the coordination to do. Over time and after repeated movements of a particular action, the brain becomes programmed and coordinated to this new action or series of actions. The action then becomes automatic.
Activities such as brushing the teeth, combing the hair, or even driving a vehicle are not as easy as they look to the beginner. As one reinforces those movements through repetition, the neural system learns those fine and gross motor skills to the degree that one no longer needs to think about them, but merely to react and perform appropriately.
Another good example of muscle memory is speech. As one speaks, one usually does not consciously think about the complex tongue movements, synchronization with vocal cords and various lip movements that are required to produce pats of speech, because of muscle memory.
In speaking a language that is not one
‘s native language, one typically speaks with an accent, because one
‘s muscle memory is tuned to forming the phonemes of one
‘s native language, rather than those of the language one is speaking. An accent can be eliminated only by carefully retraining the muscle memory.
When playing the guitar, each muscle, joint and tendon of our hands must perform a complex, synchronized dance in conjunction with our arms, back, shoulders and brain in order to perform each action required to do every movement needed to play a note on the guitar. Even more complex is that these actions must be coordinated between 2 hands so the picking and fingering actions are in synch with one another. And to add even more to this is when we play more than one note at a time!
Sure makes walking seem like nothing, doesn’t it!
I think now you understand the need for muscle memory in your playing. The question is, how do we achieve and improve our muscle memory to, in turn, improve our guitar playing?
We learned above that muscle memory is developed through the act of repetition and allowing your mind time to commit the repeated action to memory so that it can be recalled automatically when needed. By breaking your practice down into manageable actions you can begin to apply repetition to them and develop your muscle memory for that specific action. As your muscle memory develops for that specific action it becomes 2nd nature to you and you begin to be able to play it with relative ease and recall it in an instant with little or no thought.
It is VERY important to keep the following statement in mind when developing your muscle memory: “Garbage in – Garbage out”!
Your muscle memory does not discriminate and does not care if your repetitions include mistakes because you are trying to play something too fast. Being an equal opportunity developer, it will commit to memory exactly what you tell it too!
I wish I could count on both hands how many times I’ve told my students to SLOW DOWN! But I don’t blame them too much. We all want to speed things up at times even when we know deep inside we shouldn’t. We all think, by nature, that if we practice harder and faster we’ll improve that much faster. Well, I’m here to tell you that is not true.
In fact, it’s the opposite!
Remember what we learned regarding speech and accents that an accent can be eliminated only by carefully retraining the muscle memory? Well, the same thing is true with our guitar playing muscle memory. If we develop our muscle memory around playing too fast, with mistakes and sloppy, it will take much more time to retrain our muscle memory to play correctly than it would have to start slow and train the muscle memory correctly from the beginning.By practicing SLOWLY and CORRECTLY we train our muscle memory to play whatever it is your learning top play correctly. As we slowly increase the speed in which we play it correctly, our muscle memory is developed even further and before long you will be able to play what was originally very difficult at slow speeds, flawlessly at fast speeds! By taking the time to do it right, you save yourself a LOT of time and frustration.
Go too fast and develop poor muscle memory by repeating your mistakes and sloppy playing and you’ll get REALLY GOOD at playing REALLY BAD!
I know that’s not what you want! And that’s not what I want for you either!
In “The Art of Practicing - Repetition and Muscle
Memory – Part 2” we’ll be discussing specific details of how you can incorporate the process of “repetition” into your practice routine to develop quality muscle memory.
Until then, take care, have fun and don’t let anything keep your from your dreams!
Oh! And remember to SLOW DOWN!
Jeff
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