It’s been clear to me for a very long time that if you take a look at the four components of a singer/songwriter’s performance – stage presence, voice, songwriting, instrumental skill – instrumental skill comes in last in importance. That is, while better guiter playing is a Good Thing, adequate guitar playing is more than good enough to deliver a stellar performance, if you’re good enough at everything else. On the other hand, if you can’t manage your presentation on stage, you’re pretty much toast; if you can’t sing, you’re pretty much toast if you’re not trying to be funny. And the importance of each of those is magnified if you don’t write your own material.
So I’ve spent most of my time focusing on the first three. I’ve been writing, steadily, for more than 30 years, and I’ve been in songwriting groups which have really improved my writing at crucial times in my life, with people like Dave Dersham and James O’Brien. I’ve been performing my own material, steadily, for more than 10 years now, and I’ve gotten fabulous advice from the likes of Steve Rapson and Fishken and Groves (whom I hired as private performance coaches for a while), and I’ve done my best to take the advice I’ve gotten. And I’ve been taking singing lessons for more than 10 years now, and I can tell that I’ve made a huge improvement in that area.
But the weak link always emerges, eventually. For many years, I’ve subscribed to the “ignorance is bliss” school of guitar playing; if I can’t play it, it probably isn’t worth my playing. And while I’ve gotten better over the years, by trying new things, I’ve been feeling, for a while, that I’ve hit a wall. In fact, I feel like my writing has suffered, because I can hear things – lots of things – I can’t play, and I don’t even really know where to start trying.
So I’ve recently tossed guitar lessons on the top of the pile. I’m taking lessons from Ray Gonzalez, who comes highly recommended from other people in the community. And guess what? I’m doing just about everything wrong. The angle of my pick is wrong, the position of my left thumb is wrong, the position of my fingerpicking fingers is wrong. I strum in the wrong plane. You name it, I botch it. My technique is a mess. It’s no wonder I can’t play what I hear; Ray told me this past week that one of the things I do wrong is so wrong that he doubts that he could teach it to anyone if he tried.
Now, it’s not that I don’t understand how to fix these things, now that they’ve been pointed out; I’ve been a musician since I was 12, and this is the third instrument I’ve taken lessons for, and frankly, at a high enough level, there really isn’t a whole lot of difference between them. It’s about gaining control and insight over very fine muscle mechanics, maximizing your economy of motion, and committing it to muscle memory. Especially if you’ve taken singing lessons, you know exactly what that feels like. So sitting there with Ray, I can make most of the adjustments he suggests, and at home, I can make the others.
No, the problem is that I already have a lot of muscle memory, and it’s wrong, and I need it. I’m a performing musician. When I get on stage, I need to be paying attention to the most important dimensions of my act – how I relate to the audience, how I manage my voice – not the least important. My guitar playing has to be almost completely below my level of awareness. I can’t be thinking about it at all. And I can’t take off three or six months to hide in my living room and shed the old habits in favor of new ones; I’d go nuts, and I’d get out of the habit of booking, and it would be a Very Bad Thing. My only option, at this point, is the hardest one: learn the new techniques while continuing to perform with the old ones. I’ve done this before, and it really, really sucks, but it’s kind of the only way forward.
I doubt that I’ll try to fix everything at once; that would likely be suicidal. And I haven’t figured out which of my myriad problems I want to tackle first. I need to play through my whole repertoire, and note where all the problems loom, and figure out what’s the biggest problem today, and start there. It’s complicated, and it’s plumbing, and the payoff is going to be far, far down the road. But the alternative is not to get any better, and when you really think about it, that’s not really an alternative at all.