Philip Hii – guitarist

I was having dinner with a musician friend the other day, and the conversation turned to the subject of when is an optimal age to start playing the guitar.

The friend said something to the effect that anyone who starts playing the guitar after age 14 should really give up as it’s already too late by then.

I, of course, had to differ with him on this viewpoint.

I know many players, mostly ex-students, who started playing at age seventeen, eighteen, even twenty, and who managed to get to a high level of playing.

But it is true that when it comes to learning, children do have a slight edge over adults for a number of reasons.

Children tend to be hands-on. They are less prone to theorizing and questioning than your regular adult, they just play.

They’re also not concerned with doing things right, or following proper procedures whereas older people tend to get bogged down with extraneous concerns, questions of what’s the right way to play, what’s the right position, etc.

Children are also not afraid of making mistakes, of doing things ‘wrong.’

If there’s one thing that stands in the way of learning, it’s the fear of making mistakes. If you’re afraid of falling, you’ll never learn to ride a bike.

Children are well-known, for instance, for learning languages quickly. Why? Because they’re not afraid of making fools of themselves by saying things wrong, or using the wrong words.

Whereas we adults, we tend to get overly self-conscious about doing things right because we don’t want to humiliate ourselves in front of others.

On top of that, children generally have more time on their hands to practice (unless they happen to have a soccer mom as a parent) so they practice a lot more than your average adult who usually have have more commitments and less time on their hands.

In a nutshell, kids are able to learn faster and more effectively because they’re not saddled with the usual baggage that adults have to contend with.

But there’s another reason why people who start earlier tend to be better players.

That’s because they have a head start over someone who started later.

If you start playing the guitar earlier, you’ll generally clock up more hours playing the guitar than someone who starts later than you.

This is the 10,000-hour rule revealed by the great purveyor of common sense truths and half-truths, Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers.

In the book, he asserts that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill or to achieve success in any field.

As anyone involved with the teaching of skills would say, “Duh!” (And Mr. Gladwell had to take 336 pages to reveal this awesome fact.)

10,000 hours is just an arbitrary figure thrown out by Mr. Gladwell and the researchers he cited.

But we all know the actual number of hours needed to master a skill depends on the complexity of the task.

If it’s flipping a hamburger, it’ll probably take less than ten minutes, if it’s in playing a Bach fugue on the guitar, it could take more than 10,000 hours.

Coming back to the person who started playing at age ten, if the person practices on the average, one hour a day, by the time he reaches thirty, he would have practiced 7605 hours (365 x 20 + 5 leap year hours).

Now, if a person starts playing at age twenty, and practices three hours a day, he would have practiced 10965 hours by age thirty. (356 x 3 x 10 + [3 x 5] leap year hours)

You decide who will probably end up a better player.

I’m oversimplifying the case of course, but you get the idea.

And I did not take into account the first factor, that of approach.

This is an even more critical point than that of the second– that of merely clocking up hours on the instrument – because if you have the wrong approach, it really doesn’t matter how many hours you practice, all those hours would be of little use.

As I mentioned earlier, children tend to learn faster simply because they’re freer in their approach.

They don’t have any of the baggage that afflicts older players (unless they happen to have an overzealous teacher), baggage such as doing things right, following proper procedures, they just play and that’s why they’re able to develop such a free and natural technique.

But older people tend to get bogged down with extraneous concerns, concerns about doing things right, concerns about rules, about following the strict dictates of their teachers religiously.

Under these strict constricting conditions, it’s no wonder many find it hard to play or develop dexterity on the instrument.

The basic premise of the AOV is that virtuosity is a natural instinct, all of us already have it within us, and all we need to do is release it.

And the way to do it is not to impose any strict rules on the body but to free it up, to allow our body to teach itself.

I’ve found that if you approach playing the guitar this way, you will naturally develop a very free and relaxed technique, and whether you’re ten or twenty or even thirty, you will get all the speed and dexterity you want within one year of learning to play the instrument.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you do not develop this facility within that first year, you would probably never develop it – unless, of course, if you bring yourself back to a more natural and freer approach, the one advocated in the AOV.

In my last post, I mentioned two essential factors of speed, which are relaxation and alignment.

In this post, I’ll bring in a third factor which is trajectory.

Proper alignment is critical in good playing – you have to make sure that the different elements in your your body are balanced with one another.

But positioning is only half the picture.

You’ll have to also make sure that these elements do not interfere with each other when they move.

This applies especially to the right hand.

You’ll have to make sure that when you move your thumb, that it does not interfere with the fingers and vice versa.

The best way to achieve this is play the thumb in circular motion (mirroring the circular motion in the fingers) when you play. Instead of pushing your thumb towards the fingers, move it outwards and back in a circular motion. (To do this, you’ll have to position your hand so that it’s balanced and centered and not tilted one way or another.)

This ensures that movement in your thumb does not interfere with the fingers. In fact, it’ll complement them. The thumb and fingers will work together as a unit rather than fight with one another.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that good playing is mostly a result of good optimal conditions in your body.

If you have good conditions in your body, good technique will happen naturally to you.

But if the conditions are not there, you can practice all you want and still not achieve that good technique.

These three factors – relaxation (or looseness and lightness in the body), good alignment and a smooth and conflict-free trajectory are crucial to creating those conditions for speed and for good technique to happen to you.

Speed is an important part of virtuosity; in fact, most people seem to think of it as a key defining quality of virtuosity.

That’s not true, of course, virtuosity is more than just about moving fast.

For me, it’s about attaining a deep level of understanding of a task, achieving a mastery that enables you to perform it efficiently and with least effort.

But speed is important, not in and of itself, but because it provides a good indicator of your level of mastery.

If you have good speed, it’s likely you also have good technique, otherwise, you would not have had that speed in the first place.

The thing about speed is that it’s a completely natural part of the human condition. We were all born with it.

Yet why is it so hard to attain it sometimes?

I’ve found that the problem can usually be attributed to two factors.

The first is tension. (By tension, I’m referring here to the nonfunctional excess tension caused by stress or tightness in the body, as opposed to functional tension, which is an essential part of effort.)

This is no secret. We’re all familiar with the negative impact of tension on performance.

Yet, despite this, I’ve seen all too many players trying to play with their hands clenched in a claw, seemingly oblivious of the tension this is causing to their body.

Or players who are so intent on making their hands follow some arbitrarily prescribed rules on hand positions, and who seem to be equally unaware of the tension these rigid positions are causing to their hands and body.

And then they wonder why they can’t develop speed.

Under these conditions, no matter how hard they practice, they will never get speed because the conditions for speed are not there.

If you leave the handbrakes in a car on, no matter how hard you pump the gas, the car will only move sluggishly. That’s what tension does to you.

The second factor is alignment, and this is an even more critical factor.

To enable your body to work freely and optimally, it’s crucial you align your body properly, so that the different parts of your body working together and not against one other.

Take for example, the right hand.

It is important, when you position your right hand, that the thumb and the fingers work together.

When you pluck with the thumb, that plucking motion should not interfere with your fingers. Likewise, when you play with the fingers, that plucking action should not get in the way of the thumb too.

I’ve seen players, when they play with the thumb, the plucking motion in the thumb would impact the whole hand, causing it to rock out of position. And the same happens with their fingers too. When they pluck with the fingers, the plucking action would also cause the hand to move out of position.

This is a relatively simple point, and yet the impact it has on your playing can be disastrous.

So as you work on speed, don’t ignore the big picture.

1. Keep your hand and fingers super loose with minimal tension.

2. Align your thumb and fingers properly, so that movement in one does not impact the other.

Coming back to what I said at the beginning, speed is an inherent part of the human condition.

This has always been the bedrock of my philosophy and is the basic rationale for the AOV.

To tap into your natural speed, all you need to do is free up your body and allow it to function naturally.

Don’t impose any arbitrary conditions on it, don’t try to force it into any rigid and unnatural positions, allow it to work naturally, and you will find that you will have all the speed you need.