The concept of economy is a no-brainer, few will question the logic behind it.

If you move less, you will get to your target faster.

The question is not its effectiveness but how to achieve it.

Many people try to achieve economy simply by trying to make the body move less.

If you’re plucking strings, try to make the fingers move less. If you’re fretting notes, try to keep the fingers close to the strings.

This method works to a certain extent, but it involves too much self policing – you’ll have to constantly watch your fingers to make sure they move in small motions.

It’s simply ineffective in virtuoso situations, where events often unfold so quickly you don’t have time to think, let alone monitor your actions.

There’s a better and easier way to achieve economy – play in such a way that economy occurs naturally and automatically.

The trick is to focus your movements at the point of action.

I’ve written about this before and in the AOV for Guitar.

To gain natural economy, simply focus your movements at your fingertips and you will automatically get small movements in your fingers.

This is what most natural players do, they move their fingertips when they play.

But sometimes this natural instinct can be superseded by other factors. For instance, if you’ve been taught to move the fingers from the knuckle-joint.

Moving from the knuckle joint transfers the focus from the fingertips to the knuckles which automatically results in bigger movements at the fingertips.

As I’ve said before, I’m not in the business of converting people.

If you’re playing from the knuckles and it’s working well for you, you should keep on doing it.

But if you’re dissatisfied with your speed and comfort level when you play, you might want to re-evaluate how you play and try to focus your movements at the fingertips.

The logic behind moving from the fingertips is simple.

Imagine you’re trying to scratch an itch. How would you do it?

Would you scratch by moving your finger from your knuckle-joint or would you scratch with your fingertips?

Or imagine you have to reach out with your hand to grab an object, maybe a cup of coffee from a table, would you reach out from your shoulder joint or would you reach out with your hand?

The point is, we tend to focus our action in that part of the body that’s directly involved in performing the action.

If we have to grab a cup of coffee, we reach out with our hand. If we want to scratch an itch, we scratch with our fingertips.

It is important to note that no action occurs in isolation.

When you move one part of the body, other parts will naturally move in sympathy. That’s just how our body works.

But the primary initiator of the action must always be the part of the body that’s directly involved in performing the action.

In the case of plucking, it’s the fingertip because the fingertip is what’s plucking the string.

Focus your movements right there, at the fingertip, and you’ll get natural economy.

Having defined our set of basic elements, let’s move on to the concept of the optimal way

The concept of the optimal way is central to the AOV.

In everything we do, there’s an optimal way that gives us maximum returns with minimal effort.

Take a mountain spring. If you put all kinds of obstructions in its path, dam it up, and divert it, it will not run optimally.

The same is true of our body. If we put all kinds of obstructions within it, tense it up, force it to move in rigidly prescribed ways, it will also not work optimally.

To achieve virtuosity, it’s critical we find the optimal way, the way that encounters least resistance and that utilizes our resources to the max.

The problem is, it’s impossible to define what the optimal way is.

Not only does it differ from person to person; within the same person, it differs from technique to technique.

On the guitar, playing scales will have a different optimal way from playing tremolo. The hand positions are different, the ways of plucking different too.

So how do we find this optimal way?

Through practice. As I’ve mentioned before, practice is self-exploration, finding out what works, what doesn’t. It’s basically getting the body to teach itself.

However, for practice to be effective, you have to do three things:

First, make sure all the basic elements we’ve talked about earlier are in place.

Second, make sure there’s no bias in your approach. In other words, don’t start with any preconceived ideas about how to perform the move.

And third, trust your instincts. Your instincts will tell you if you’re on the right track or not.

The optimal way explains the many contrasting styles and approaches between different players. Segovia, Williams, Yepes, Barrueco – you can’t find four players with more different approaches and yet, each one of them has found a way to make it work, and achieve incredible virtuosity in the process.

The optimal way means you have to take responsibility for your own learning. You can’t base your playing on someone else’s playing, you’ll have to find the way that works best for you.

The great thing is that when you do discover the optimal way that works for you, you will know it right away.

Because it feels so right, so completely natural. It feels like you were born with it. There’s no strain, no struggling, no need to keep checking whether you’re doing it right or wrong, you just do it and it’s done.

I’ve stressed the importance of skills in virtuosity.

In a way, finding the optimal way is finding the skills to work with your body. It’s understanding all the latent potential within it, and working in a way that optimizes all its possibilities.

Going back to our friend, Cook Ting, when you find the optimal way, you wouldn’t be hacking away at the ox anymore, you wouldn’t have to sharpen your knife every three days.

Because you know all the best places to cut and because those places offer so little resistance to your knife, you never have to sharpen it and nineteen years after you bought it, it’s still as sharp as the day you bought it.

The AOV is a compilation of the basic elements of virtuosity which I had identified over years of playing and teaching.

But as I wrote in my last post, you don’t have to take my word for it, you can identify your own list.

In that post, I suggested two ways of identifying these crucial elements.

Here, I’ll share a third.

Instead of focusing on our playing and on the playing of others, we’ll approach the problem from a more academic standpoint. We’ll approach it from the point of achieving goals.

What are the goals we’re trying to achieve in our pursuit of virtuosity?

It’ll be hard to list every detail, so we’re narrow them down to the most essential elements.

Which are speed, power and precision.

These three elements are at the heart of every human pursuit and sport.

Watch any martial artist, athlete, sportsperson, and you’ll see the same striving after these universal goals. (There’s a fourth element, endurance, which doesn’t concern us so much here.)

And among these three elements, speed is at the top of the list.

Why? Because the other factors are actually subsets of speed.

Power, for instance, is dependent on speed – if you can move faster, you can create greater momentum and this increases your power.

And if you can move faster to your destination, you can usually locate it more accurately, so precision too is a function of speed. More about these points later.

The thing about speed is, it’s a great rationalizer. It forces you to become lean and economical in your execution because you don’t have a choice. It’s either that or be left behind.

In thinking about speed, one way to approach it is to think of cars.

If you were to build a car, how would you build it so it’ll run faster and more economically?

The obvious would be to:

1. Make it light, build it with light materials.
2. Reduce moving parts to minimize resistance.
3. Lubricate moving parts to reduce friction.
4. Eliminate unnecessary components.
5. Put in a more powerful engine.

That’s just a list I made up. I’m sure real car builders have a more extensive list.

The point is, there’re basic things we can do to make cars go faster and there’re basic things we can do to make ourselves go faster too.

With that in mind, what are the equivalents of those factors we just listed above for cars, factors we can apply to our playing?

1. Lighter – we can lighten our touch.
2. Reduce moving parts – we can reduce movements in our body
3. Lubrication – looseness in our body so there’s minimum resistance.
4. Eliminate unnecessary components – eliminate unnecessary moves, unnecessary notes even.
5. Put in a more powerful engine – develop more power in our fingers.

I must confess that I didn’t derive my list of basic elements by looking at cars, I discovered them from years of teaching, trying to find out what works for my students.

But using the car model is a good way to help us define the parameters we’re dealing with. It’ll help us focus on the real issues at hand, the concerns facing all performers, which are speed, power and precision.

I’ve been writing about the basic elements in virtuosity.

To me that’s the way to go – identify these basic elements, work on them, absorb them into every part of your playing and let virtuosity occur naturally to you.

The AOV is basically my list of those essential elements, and came from my own personal experiences – years of playing and teaching.

But you don’t have to go with what I wrote. You can draw up your own list of essential elements.

There’re two ways to do this.

You can do it by analyzing your own playing.

Every time you feel you’re playing well, take note of what’s happening in your playing, the sensations at your fingertips. Try to identify what these sensations are and memorize them. Use physical terms to describe those sensations, terms such as light, heavy, soft, hard, flexible, etc.

Do the same after your performances too. If it was a good performance, ask yourself why it was good, or if it wasn’t so good, ask yourself why it wasn’t so good.

In other words, do a post-performance analysis.

Focus again on physical sensations, what you’re feeling in your hands and fingers, on your rhythmic control, and on anything else that you think made a difference.

Start to catalog these sensations. If you keep on doing it, you’ll begin to notice the same sensations recurring every time you played well, and when you didn’t play well, you’ll notice those sensations were missing.

Especially when you experience a breakthrough, try to remember what it feels like at your fingertips and replicate that feeling and you’ll be able to reproduce the breakthrough every time you play.

The second way is to watch good players play.

Watch their comfort level, their rhythmic control, the economy in their fingers, but especially watch their physical demeanor.

Make a list of all the things that impress you about their playing.

Perhaps it’s their speed, or perhaps their power, or their clarity or control.

List all these qualities down and ask yourself how they achieve these qualities.

For instance speed — how do they get so fast? Look at their movements, try to find clues that will help point you to how they achieve their speed.

Or power, try to discern what it is in their playing that enables them to play with such force and clarity, even at great speeds.

It’s important to note that you must do all this without any preconceptions.

Don’t superimpose your own bias into their playing. For example, don’t try to explain your own particular approach through their playing.

Be completely impartial, open yourself up to new ideas, even to those that may contradict your favorite points of view.

Watching others play is one of the best ways to learn.

But it has its limitations too.

You wouldn’t be able to know what they’re feeling at their fingertips. All you can do is interpret what you see.

That’s the problem with teachers who don’t play. They watch others do it and they try to draw their own conclusions based on what they see. Sometimes they get it right, but more often than not, they get it wrong.

For instance, watch this video of John Williams playing tremolo. (Go to 1:51 in the video.)

When you see this great virtuoso play, it’s quite clear that he’s bringing his fingers upward as he plays and there’s minimal follow-through in his fingers. This totally flies in the face of those who will argue that you have to push in your fingers toward the palm as you pluck and exaggerate the follow-through.

Theory and practice often diverge and none more so than this theory of the follow-through.

It brings me back to the first way, through practicing.

That’s the best way to find out whether something’s just theory or whether it actually works in practice.

Practicing to me is self-exploration. You’re trying out different options, you’re searching for the best way to do something and you’re embedding specific moves into your muscle memory. And you’re experiencing all this at a physical level.

If you do it long enough, sooner or later, your body will know exactly how best to perform what it is you’re practicing and in the simplest and most efficient ways possible. (I should add that to derive maximum benefit from it, you should bring to your practice the same lack of bias as you bring to your observations of other players. Don’t try to impose any preconceived ideas of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ to your playing.)

No amount of thinking, theorizing, or arguing your point of view will give you this kind of deep personal knowledge.

When you achieve this level of mastery, this is the time that you should try to identify these basic ingredients that I’ve talked about, the basic elements of virtuosity.

And I’m positive you’ll arrive at the same conclusions as I did years ago, and come up with the same set of basic elements that I wrote about in the AOV.

I wrote in my last post that virtuosity is about knowledge and skills. If you want to master a task, you must know how to do it.

In other words, like uninstalling the old lock, you need instructions on how it’s done.

But where do you get these instructions, where do you gain these skills and knowledge?

The answer lies in a few places.

You can be like Cook Ting and gain this knowledge from constant doing — over nineteen years of carving oxes until you know every detail of the ox’s anatomy and you’re able to slice through effortlessly where you want to go, even with your eyes closed.

Or you can be like Cook Hii and have an expert in the field teach you.

Or you can just go to Youtube and watch others do it.

All these are important sources of information and knowledge.

But nothing can substitute for real practicing.

Practice is important because it puts you directly in the driver seat. You’re no longer just discussing it, talking about it, theorizing how best to do it, you’re actually doing it and experiencing the sensation of doing it.

And sooner or later, if you keep on doing it, the answer will come to you in a flash of insight, and you will understand how it’s done.

When that happens, you’ve made a breakthrough.

The breakthrough moment is what most of us live for. It’s like finding a nugget after years of digging, it makes all those years of toiling worthwhile.

And when it happens, you know straightaway you’ve found it. That you have the nugget in your fingers because it feels so right and it sounds so good.

You feel a lightness in your fingers, you feel as if your fingers are on fire, as if they have a life of their own. And the notes just ripple out from your fingers effortlessly.

These are key indicators that you’ve arrived at virtuosity.

You can also use these indicators to determine whether you’ve achieved the breakthrough too.

If you’re still struggling through the task, if it feels hard, if your fingers feel tight, if you find yourself rushing through the piece, or if it sounds choppy and uneven, those are clear indications that you haven’t experienced the breakthrough yet.

If you’ve followed this blog, you’d have probably guessed that I do have a slight preoccupation with the subject of mastery.

As a guitarist, the difference between mastery and non-mastery are obvious.

If you know how to perform a technique, it’s easy, but if you don’t know how, it can be hard.

Like playing the tremolo. If you know how to go about it, it’s easy, but if you don’t, it can be very hard to do.

But I’ve never been interested in mastery purely from the standpoint of playing the guitar.

My interest in it extends beyond the guitar, to its everyday applications in our daily lives.

As I’ve written before, even the simple act of uninstalling a lock requires a certain amount of mastery and can be hard to do if you don’t possess the necessary skill and knowledge.

And that to me is the essence of virtuosity.

Not showy technical displays or cheap tricks, but knowledge – knowledge at a deep and personal level.

When I first decided to use the word ‘virtuosity’ to describe the AOV, I knew it would probably conjure up associations with cheap showmanship and flashy technical displays in some people.

And they may be right.

I must admit that that was part of the original intention — to write a book on how to attain a flashy guitar technique.

But that was just a small part of it.

My main intention was to distill virtuosity down to its essence, to a few simple principles, and enable anyone applying those principles to achieve virtuosity in whatever they do.

In other words — to define the essence of virtuosity, not as a performance sport, but as principles we can all live by.

Try this simple exercise.

Take your guitar and using your i finger, pull the third string gently. Don’t pluck it, just pull it gently, as if you’re going to pluck it.

You’ll feel a slight resistance in the string, it seems to be pushing back.

But a string is a dead inanimate object. Where does this energy come from?

From you, of course, you’re creating that pushback in the string from your pulling.

The point is, there’s latent energy in everything. We’re surrounded by hidden energy, even in objects that supposedly possess no energy of their own.

You can say this energy is dependent on external forces. In this case, the string is dead until you pull it, so that energy is derived from you.

Precisely, but that energy, even if its original impetus is from you, is very real.

The true art of virtuosity is in knowing how to recapture this latent force and use it to drive you forward in your task.

That’s the basis of my last post, on creating the automated engine in your fingers, in this case, recapturing the spent energy in one stroke to propel you to the next.

This contrasts with the conventional approach of just focusing on finger strength or body strength to accomplish what you want to do.

For instance, if you want speed, just try to make the fingers move faster, or if you want power, just apply more force.

For me that approach is a dead end because our energy is very limited. If we have to rely on our pure energy (you might call this brute force) to accomplish what we want to do, we’d be severely hamstrung.

To recapitulate, the real skill of a virtuoso is in knowing how to harness the energy around us to do our work for us.

This means we have to be extremely sensitive and responsive. For instance, when we pluck, we must be extremely sensitive to the string and to its built-in reactions to our actions.

And we have to respond to it, and not just treat it like some dead inanimate object that has absolutely no contribution to make to our plucking.

To me, this is the true source of effortless power and speed, when you can harness the power and energy in nature to do your work for you.

Of course, you have to put in the original effort and you have to know how to recapture that energy, but once you have that automated engine going, you’re on a roll. It’s easy street from then on.

I’ve written about the automated engine a number of times before so I thought I’ll elaborate on it, for the benefit of those who don’t have my AOV for Guitar.

The concept is central to the AOV and it’s the key to effortless speed.

What’s this automated engine?

Imagine your fingers and thumb working together as a unit.

Each finger has the ability to propel the next one forward as if there’s an internal engine in them.

When one finger plays, it pushes the next one forward, when the next one plays, it pushes the next one forward again, and on and on, in a continuous ripple effect.

The effect is almost like dominoes falling, each piece knocking the next one down, or like winding up a toy and just letting it go.

The process is completely automated, you have no sensation of having to exert effort. You just play and the notes play themselves, almost miraculously.

There’re two basic underlying principles behind this technique

First, the technique of grouping.

When you play a bunch of notes, group them into larger groups and play these groups of notes in one motion.

At all cost, don’t try to play each note separately, you’ll never be fast that way. Play the notes in group,  in one motion per group.

The logic behind this technique is simple.

If you have a row of bottles to knock down, will you knock them down one by one individually, or will you knock them down with one sweep of the hand?

Or if you have to shop for groceries, will you go to the supermarket every time you have to buy an item, or will you wait till you have a few items to buy and you buy them all in one trip?

The answers are obvious.

In the same way, if you have a series of p i m a m i arpeggios, don’t try to play each note separately, group them into groups and play each group as a unit.

That’s easy to do for regular arpeggios but what about scales, where there’re no clear patterns?

You group them into groups too, but in this case, you’ll have to group them according to the phrasing. And when you play the scale, play it in groups of notes rather than each note individually.

But what happens when you have irregular arpeggio patterns? Like in Etude # 1 by Villa Lobos?

In this case, apply the second principle, make each note propel the next one forward. By doing this, you’ll create the same effect as grouping, tying each note to the next, creating a chain of notes again.

When you play one note, use the energy released in that note to propel you to the next note, and then do it for the next note and the next after that, continuously, in an endless repeating cycle.

When you do this, you’ll feel as if the fingers are all working together, each one pushing the next forward.

Let’s try it with Etude # 1.

Play the first note (low E) with p, feel the release in the playing. (Check out my previous post on releasing energy with the stroke.)

Use the energy in the release of that note to drive your i finger forward to play the next note (middle E on D string).

As soon as your i finger plays the E, use the energy released in that note to push your p forward to play the low B.

As soon as the p plays the B, use the energy released to push your i finger to play the g string.

And on and on, in a continual cycle, each note pushing the next finger forward to the next note

This is the key to the automated engine. You harness the energy in each note to propel you to the next. That’s why there’s no sensation of effort because it all happens right at your fingertips, without any conscious input from you.

To make this happen, three things are essential.

1. Your fingers must be super light, loose and relaxed.
2. The plucking of each note must be the release of that note,
3. You must focus all your movements at the fingertips, in other words, there must be extreme economy in your fingers.

These are of course the necessary conditions described in the AOV and AOV for Guitar as a precondition to achieving virtuosity.