A New Beginning

Today really showed my lack of discipline/consistency. I actually woke up at a good time, did some yoga poses to warm my body up before meditation, and got a halfway decent meditation session in – even though I never really hit that deep meditative state. The meditation wasn’t as centering today since I didn’t have that extra dopamine burst of starting something for the first time. Once the novelty runs off is when the real work begins. The same could be said of my practice session today. I got more time in which was a step in the right direction, but I took more breaks too and found myself distracted more easily. I started with 10 minutes shy of 2 hours today on piano instead of violin, to experiment with the rotation, and I found it to be better (at least for today). I like to switch things up every now then to keep my mind fresh and to remember that schedules aren’t supposed to be prisons. This same notion carried into my piano practice. I did a few times around the block playing to Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode but found myself quickly losing focus. That’s when I decided to switch to a YouTube video of Jacob Collier and Chris Martin playing Sparks. Jacob Collier has quickly become one of, if not, my favorite artists of all time. His imagination and color are so spectacular that each song he plays draws you in to this beautiful universe he creates, usually spontaneously which just adds to the magic of it all. I’m trying to learn as many lessons as I can from him on color and chords, so I often find myself playing along – or at least trying to – to his work. Truthfully, I enjoy bouncing between two songs to work out, particularly one up tempo and one a bit slower tempo. They’re complementary palate cleansers, if you will, for each other. I find anymore than two songs are too close to juggling, something I’ve never even come close to mastering. Sparks is this great three chord emotional song with lots of room for extensions, particularly the 9th, which on the piano is fun and easy to understand when you break things down into triads. For example, if you take Db (the I chord of the song) and play some shell structure like a 1-5, 1-7, 1-3-7, 1-5-7 or 1-5-8 (you get the picture) in the left hand and play triads in the right hand, you can see these basic building block triads and extensions as the same. My favorite voicing in the right hand was playing a C-Eb-Ab, which would be the M7th, the 9th, and the 5th (technically 12th) extensions of the Db chord, but it’s also an Ab chord in first inversion. So, instead of having to think in these isolated ideas around the chord I can start connecting these simple building blocks I already know, and it allows me to see how these chords all start to connect in more interesting ways. Not to mention, Jacob plays some amazing licks and passing chords that I’m hoping to imitate, assimilate, and innovate on. Chris Martin even asks Jacob at the end of the song if he had seen the movie Amadeus (which if you haven’t seen, love music, and have three hours to kill is a great movie), to which Jacob replies he had not. So, Chris begins to describe a scene where Mozart meets Salieri for the first time. Salieri is playing an original composition, Mozart hears it once, and sits down at the piano and begins to play it. He doesn’t play it straight like the original, however, he adds some flourishes and improves the theme in some parts much to Salieri’s dismay. Chris likens this scene to what Jacob just did with his song without all of the jealousy. It’s a touching moment between two fantastic and humble legends.

I bounced around a lot today, and I’m more or less okay with it. Of course, I would love to be hyper efficient and really have something to show from my work each day, but that’s just not the reality of the situation. I had a little more fun today. I even couldn’t help but pick up my electric guitar for a couple of rounds of Johnny B. Goode, and truthfully, that has to be the name of the game. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing you’re not going to want to keep doing it. No matter how mentally tough you might be; there’s no point in grinding yourself in to dust just to say you worked – at least that’s not what I believe. Conversely, if you enjoy what you’re doing you’re going to want to continue to do it, and in the words of the jazz pianist Hal Galper, “There’s so much to do and to improve upon, and improving in one area will most certainly lead in improvements in other areas no matter how subtle. So, just pick something and work as hard as you can as long as you can, and if you need to move to something else, do so, just keep at it.”

With all that being said, I struggled a little more on violin today. I did right about 40 minutes of bowing on the D and G strings and found it much more difficult to not hit adjacent strings than I did on the E and the A strings. I’m guessing it has to do with the angle of the attack, but further study is needed. Violin is where I took the most breaks too. I had lunch, did some laundry, exercised the dog, and even watched a little TV. Not ideal in terms of productivity, but I’m taking it as a lesson that it’s time to move on to something a little more involved on the violin. I still need to really focus on bowing, but I think now I can start trying out the chromatic scale in first position on all the strings, going very slowly to focus on bowing and train my ear in proper intonation (I’ll have my tuner app opened on my phone to help with this). Eventually, I’ll be doing this to a metronome, but one step at a time. Also, I tried vibrato a little, and I find it exceptionally more difficult than vibrato on guitar. It’s as if the skills don’t transfer at all (or maybe I’m doing it wrong on guitar too, that is a possibility). Not to mention, trying to bow smoothly (or even at all) while trying to move my wrist is significantly more awkward than patting my head and rubbing my stomach. Though, I know it’s a coordination issue and will just take time. I’m not worried, just impatient. I find the vibrato on violin to be so beautiful and mastering that will be a huge, giant, enormous step in enjoying the sound of my playing. I think a lot of the distraction today came from the lack of dopamine after the novelty wore off, and a lack of sleep I seem to be accumulating lately. Even now I feel the bags under my eyes and my brain working at less than full capacity. That is definitely a problem that needs to be fixed in the near future for fear of wearing down and getting sick or just a general lack of productivity. Either way there is motivation to address the issue. All in all, though, I would say today was better than yesterday in some ways and worse in others which is better than being worse than the day before. That’s my only goal just improve ever so steadily day by day. Until next time…