[haiku url=”http://lyricworkroom.com/aotd/aotd4-3.mp3″]
As we’ve established in previous lessons, mindlessly memorizing chord shapes or just absent-mindedly skimming a textbook isn’t going to earn you mastery.
Practicing and studying on a shallow level may let you memorize and play advanced-sounding things, but it also stunts your growth over the long term. Memorization of songs really just trains the fingers to wiggle around on your instrument in a predetermined pattern until eventually that one pattern becomes automatic and thoughtless, taken over entirely by your unconscious mind. Cognitive psychologists call that automaticity.
Memorizing a song or a lick until it’s automatic may be necessary for performance, but beyond that it doesn’t offer us much improvement of skill.
What will get you far is to take a fundamental, basic technique that will be useful to you in many situations later on. First you study that technique until you understand everything about it. Then practice that useful process until it becomes entirely fast and accurate and automatic.
Jazz players, for example, work hard to be able to quickly identify a chord, determine which notes comprise it, and identify what scales and what notes will sound good over that chord. At first that process is slow and mentally difficult, with lots of mistakes.
Eventually, after hours of practice, the process becomes so fast and accurate that it’s fully automatic–the jazz player can just glance over a lead sheet, scanning the chord names, and sense myriad melodic possibilities for a new tune or an off-the-cuff solo.
With the mental math of breaking a chord down in her head now incredibly fast, accurate, and automatic, the jazz player is then freed to work deliberately and consciously on other skills–like different rhythmic patterns, polyrhythms, her vibrato, whatever needs work. As more and more skills become automatic, her musical instincts become so powerful and complex that she can improvise long, complex melodies seemingly from thin air–yet they’ll sound beautifully composed.
Another example is the lyricist who trains herself to distinguish between perfect rhyme, oblique rhyme, trailing rhyme, assonance, and other sound relationships that appear often in songs. With all of those relationships deeply understood, and the subtle differences between these rhyme types internalized, she could then begin learning different rhyme schemes and poetic forms.
Having mastered those structures, next she might focus on using vivid sensory imagery in a lyric, focusing on each of her senses in turn. When one sense is thoroughly exercised, she moves on to the next. On and on–as she focuses hard on each individual skill and cements it to the point of mastery, she can build and build on that foundation, stacking skills and skills and skills until she doesn’t have to consciously think about any of those techniques while she’s writing a lyric–because the right techniques automatically come to her when she needs them.
That way, she can focus on artistic choices and creative work–instead of being limited by technical deficiencies.