Posted by Rick Denney on February 13, 2004 at 15:05:56:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Low register dynamics posted by can you... on February 13, 2004 at 14:52:31:
If the thinking gets in the way of the doing, that is analysis paralysis. But doing without thinking may mean doing the wrong thing. So, I try to think separately from doing. I don't think about impedance when I play--I think about tone and music. But I have in my mind a subconscious understanding that comes from thinking at other times, often as a result of trying to explain things (even to myself) on Tubenet.
I used to race cars in my younger years. Track time was extremely limited and I had no money, and thus it was quite difficult to gain experience. I made up for that as best I could by thinking through scenarios, and training my responses to those scenarios. Thus, I could program my automatic reactions (such as steering into skids or balancing a four-wheel drift or not automatically lifting the gas when going into oversteer, etc.) without even being in the car.
Arnold Jacobs was, of course, exactly right about this. Based on my second-hand knowledge, he would not let his students waste time thinking about mechanics when they were studying music. He would address mechanical issues separately, away from the instrument. But that doesn't mean he didn't think about it, or that he didn't want his students thinking about it. He just didn't want them thinking about it while playing music. Pat Sheridan said something similar. He described the usual process of mentally drawing a red circle around a trouble spot in a piece of music, and in so doing programming ourselves to miss it every time. He said when he had a trouble spot, he worked it back to the underlying funamental, such as a scale that would not lie under the fingers, and worked on it as a fundamental drill away from the music. When he mastered the fundamental, he'd go back to the music, but only then.
Rick "who plays music because he likes music" Denney