datamusicata

My pal, Wil Osborn, gave me a book a while back called The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. It’s not one of those new age self help books. It’s a book full of scientific research about how the brain actually functions and it is not only fascinating, but supports what I’ve been trying to convey about how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

It doesn’t tell you step by step how to get there from here, but it tells you how the brain works, how it learns and how it retains memory. Though there are several sites that refer to some brain exercises...check it out from the site above. It does let you know that with work, you can train or retrain your brain...in any direction.

It turns out that what you speak really does impact what happens to you. It turns out that imagining is almost as effective as doing. It turns out that your whole brain IS available to you and that you can retrain any part of it to take over the management of any thing you can make your body, hands, feet, eyes, ears, etc do.

You can read the book yourself, but let me just give you a few directions in which to apply these concepts.

Before you practice a song, try imagining what your fingers are going to be doing; imagine the fret board, the frets, the strings and your fingers placement upon them. Imagine that you are going to be playing each note with no buzzing, fret noise, just clear beautiful tone. Imagine each finger as it touches each string at each place in a chord or scale. Imagine the whole exercise, or if you are learning a song, imagine playing that song.

Long before I ever heard of this technique, I was driving to a radio station in Mendocino to do a live performance to promote a show I was doing at my pal, Peter Lit’s place, The Caspar Inn (www.casparinn.com) . I was listening to a recording I had produced on a friend in Colorado, Thom Bishop. There was a song, the Water Carrier, that he did on Rich Warren’s Midnight Special on WFMT in Chicago. Thom sang and Ed Taussig played some brilliant piano. We had decided to use the track (after getting the generous permission of Rich and the station) on the CD and I had written some strings for it.

It came out so great that I was just listening over and over and then I tried to figure out, in my head, what Ed was playing on the piano. Then I tried to figure out how I would do that on the guitar. I did all this while I was driving to Mendocino from Sausalito.

When I got to the radio station, I played some songs off the new CD, and then, I don’t know why, but I said I’d like to try a new song, and I proceeded to play, with no clams, Thom’s song. Even though I had never played it before, by imagining what I had to do, the fingers just followed what I had imagined they would do. The reason that this works is so simple. The brain can’t tell whether you are doing it, or just imagining that you are doing it.

Now I’m not saying that you can just imagine practicing and then get good. You must first have enough mastery over the instrument to be able to see in your head,what it is you are going to be doing, so yes, you HAVE to practice. But this imagineering, as Walt Disney called it, really does help you do it right, do it faster and do it better. Try it.