Level Up Your Musical Patience
The truth is, patience isn’t a simple thing to conceive when practicing something difficult. You’ve probably discovered this while trying to learn a certain guitar riff or a measure on the piano. So how can we turn an “obstacle” into a beneficial skill or discipline of learning?
Transform the idea of it in your head.
Instead of imagining patience as a barrier to overcome, think of patience as a learning skill to master. Instead of thinking “Damn, I don’t have the patience for this”, think “Before I move forward anymore here, I’m going to use this time to exercise my patience.”
Patience is one of many critical learning skills. It’s actually a lot like a muscle. If you think you “don’t have the patience for this”, it actually means you simply need to pay more attention to getting better at using patience for what you’re doing. The more you use patience, the more you gain patience.
After you’re done reading this, pick up your instrument, and try this…
Set a stop watch, or some other kind of timer. Take a certain measure of a song, and play it at a ridiculously slow pace. Keep playing it over and over as long as possible. If you find yourself wanting to stop and go to another song or piece of the current song, it means you are nearing the limit of your current level of patience. The moment you hit this limit is your time to make a conscious decision. Instead of stopping, challenge yourself to keep going. Think of it like a game with a score board, and each time, you’re trying to beat you last top score.
Here’s another aspect of this that you can use to get really good at indulging in this “moment of patience”. While you repeatedly play this measure, put all your mental focus in concentrating on each single note. Focus on what root note, what scale, what rhythm, and what kind of feelings this combination of notes can emanate.
Another trick that will help you along is the idea of toying with the measure. Play around with the notes, bending them, trilling them, or spacing them out in odd and weird ways. This lets you really open up and zoom in on what is normally just a few seconds of a few notes. On a side note, this can also be responsible for coming up with new, original pieces of music. The next time you go to normally play the song, you will notice your ability to play it (or at least that measure) will feel a lot more precise and clean.
At the same time, you will have likely graduated to the “next level” of patience. Congratulations!
This is only one way of building patience as a musician, one that I have personally adopted myself through the years. But I’m actually curious about what your method is. Share how you level up your patience attribute below!
A frightened musician
Dear musiciansDojo, I am a drummer and have taken private lessons for years. Although I do not play guitar, your blog posts do apply to musicians all around! Thank you!
My central question is on the fear of studying music performance at a university or conservatory.
I have recently been contemplating on whether to study at the University of North Texas. As this is a predominately jazz school, I am also looking to study in the field. My only concern is studying with the professor at the university. You might be familiar with his name, Ed Soph. He is notoriously known for attempting to bash and discourage and degrade drummers. There are true witnessed events of him stopping student performances and yelling out, “Are you really that bad of a musician?”
My concern is going through such an intense and extreme program as such. I also know though he is one of the best jazz drumset professors in the world.
When contemplating this subject, what do you have to say?
gemarrs
Dear Frightened Musician,
It sounds to me this professor, during normal training, is someone who uses a certain recoil tactic on students. Whether he is aware of it or not, the tactic (as I’ve discovered from other people using it on me concerning other areas of life), involves getting the student motivated to breakthrough any barrier that is in front of them by getting them riled up in a negative way. This is meant to make you think to yourself “I’ll show them”. It’s a mechanism that only certain people have the instinct to follow (unless the person normally not armed with this instinct is made aware of this tactic and chooses to follow suit anyway). Under the condition he does this during an actual official performance, it sounds like his career might be at risk under the supervision of his superiors (at least after a point).
You have a conscious you choice here.
If you choose to be taught under this instructor this is what I suggest: Stay aware of the teaching method used here. It’s simply his method of instilling passion into how badly you want to improve and master your playing skills. Don’t take it personally against the instructor. Keep in mind the point behind their method and keep your mind focused on this point: To keep your emotional drive active and healthy so you are always being driven to improve every practice session. Some people develop an ability to take this negative feedback and translate it into a positive message inside their head, ie “Are you really that bad of a musician” = “I know you are a hell of a lot better than that, now show me what you’re really made of!”
Otherwise, if you are concerned to a point where you have considerable doubts about being able to keep your head together under these methods, feel free to go to a different instructor with different teaching methods. If you find you won’t be comfortable and in turn it hinders your progress, then going a different direction is probably going to benefit you more.
I’ve always believed, personally, that every student should have passion instilled in a positive light. They need to be able to have confidence by their own means that they have the ability to master their instrument. That’s just me though.
Good luck, and feel completely free to keep me updated!