Back to the Woodshed

Up here at the Shackteau in St. Rose, I get all the time I want to play my banjo and to work on our “relationship.”  And believe me, our relationship needs constant attention. 

As a perfectionist (aka obsessive-compulsive), I am always driven to find “the right way” to do something.  I’m not sure I always know what the right way is, or even how to determine what it is, but it usually involves “received knowledge” of some kind – in other words, I do what other people tell me to do.  I let them define “the right way” for me.

As a banjo player, this emotional imperative has not been entirely counter-productive.  It’s led me to listen to lots of bluegrass music, practice a lot, collect a bunch of tablature and instructional materials, which I’ve devoured.  I thought doing these things would be a part of doing banjo “right,” so I did them.  Of course, I’m not a total robot; I did have lots of fun in the process, I learned a lot of technique and loved getting to know the bluegrass tradition.  But this emotional imperative has had an unfortunate effect on me as a musician.

You can’t really be a musician if you care too deeply or single-mindedly about “getting it right.”  The difference between a dabbler and a musician is that the musician surrenders himself to the void, the uncertainty of what lies ahead.  The dabbler learns how to parrot what others have done, which he tells himself is the right way to do it.  It is safer and ultimately more superficial and limiting.

To be a musician, you have to honor your instrument, take it seriously, practice hard and smart.  But you also have to trust your own instincts, and let your authentic self (as incomprehensible and unpleasant as it may be) express itself in your playing.  You have to be willing to walk away from what you think is the right way.  If you are a perfectionist, you have to train yourself to not care so much.

It’s not easy to walk away from this mind set.  In fact, it can be the most difficult kind of spiritual test.  Those not plagued by a rigid compulsion to get things “right” are lucky in some ways, but they don’t have the opportunity to fight this particular fight, and by fighting grow.  Their battles take other forms.

Any practice is an opportunity to know yourself through the process of doing.  A crucial part of any ritual activity is simple repetition, nothing more lofty than that – coming back again and again to something trains your mind and body, or better, cultivates a mutually beneficial relationship between being and doing.  That forces you to let go of your compulsive thinking.  In other words, any practice is meditation.

Last night, after a few days of rainy grey weather, my solar batteries got low.  So I shut off everything – computer, internet antenna, etc. – and sat down with my banjo.  I played without accompaniment or tablature.  My dog was snoozing to my left.  The only light was from an oil lamp a few feet away.

I started simply noodling.  Noodling for no real reason, no rationale.  Noodling for 3 hours.  Sometimes I wondered whether I was playing something like JD Crowe played it.  Sometimes I wondered if I should position my hands differently.  But mainly I ignored that stuff and just interacted with my banjo.  I experimented with different sounds, different rolls, different times.  I resisted the impulse to get out my metronome, or my tuner.  I used my own ears to tune the thing, to keep in tempo.

I’ve never played better.  You know it when you’re hot.  You know when you’re in the pocket.  And I was.  My fingers started to dance with the strings and frets and notes, but with precision too and with soul.  I listened in my head for tunes whose melody I knew – shortnin’ bread, fisher’s hornpipe, on top of old smokey, blackberry blossom, blowing in the wind, clinch mountain backstep … one after the other they came out of me, and I played with them, tried out different things, picked out the melodies and tried to fit them into roll patterns or melodic phrases.  There was no “right way” but the way I was playing something.  As a result, when I put the banjo down I felt I knew the neck, knew what sounds would emerge from different places on the instrument better than I ever had before.  It was cool, as Butt-head might say.

So two pieces of advice, for myself and for people who are engaged in making music and who might be blocked for some of the same reasons I’ve described.  With a few adjustments, these might have some relevance to other arts as well, who knows.

First, make time to noodle, to fool around, to work your craft with the least number of additional items and equipment possible.  Pare it down to the minimum.  No computer, no books, no sheet music, no capo, no tuner.  Just play, play what comes to you; encounter questions and answer them; work out technical problems by playing, not by consulting forums on the web; find your own way of doing things.  This isn’t to say that others don’t have things to teach you or that it isn’t worthwhile to work at something that at first doesn’t feel natural.  It’s just that for those of us who already spend too much time being OCD, it’s important to just let go and play – on a regular basis.  Every day would be good.

The second piece of advice is to really listen, to have melodies in your head as you play and to follow that melody – respect the melody.  This means choosing songs to play that you really know from listening to them.  If you know the melody really well, you can figure out how to play it, and not only that you will be able to improvise on it.  Improvisations based solely on chord progressions are often not as strong as those rooted somewhat in the melody.  But you can’t do that if you aren’t completely familiar with the melody in your head.  If you can’t hum it silently to yourself.  It’s important to become the melody; that is, to really embody it.

All these things, as we now know, affect the structure of the brain.  The more we listen, the more developed the neural centers connected to listening become.  The more we play, the more our brains change to become good at playing.  And play is at the heart of musical improvisation.

This is what I think of when I hear the word “woodshedding.”  To woodshed is really to just spend lots of time over an extended period bonding with your instrument.  Infants bond with their mothers, puppies bond with their humans, and banjos bond with their players.  Banjos are like anyone else: they want above all to be known.  And they’ll repay the effort you make by knowing you back.  And what could be sweeter than that?