I’ve been staying in balmy South Texas since yesterday, doing what I’ve done these past nine or so years, adjudicating at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College Classical Guitar Ensemble Competitions.

I’ll have to say I’m simply amazed at how many good young players there are these days. But that’s not why I’m writing this post.

I’ve noticed with increasing alarm, attempts to influence the competition by stacking it with judges from a particular quarter. I first noticed it a few years back, when there were attempts to skew the results of one competition. I successfully resisted those effort and the prize was awarded to the deserving performers.

Today, I had to withdraw myself from the results of the competitions, again because it was clear that the results were skewed by the presence of two judges who seemed to be overwhelmingly in favor of their buddy’s group.

The choice of first place was given to a group who is admittedly good, but whose sense of musicality is overshadowed by a far better group. If it was a close match, I would have gone with the decision, but the more deserving group had so much more musical polish, incredible sense of rhythm, and great dynamics.

And the ‘winning’ group? They were good but they played with the mechanical precision of a robot and was slightly more expressive than a robot too.

The bias was actually quite brazen. One of the two judges openly said he was hoping the rival group to his buddy’s group would ‘crash and burn’ in their last piece because, as he said, it was ‘a difficult piece.’  When a judge openly expresses the hope that a competitor he was judging would ‘crash and burn,’ we have a problem.

So why does this concern me?

Some might say, lighten up, it’s only a guitar competition. True, but some of these competitors came from long distances at great expense to themselves. To deprive them of what they have worked so hard for simply because they don’t have buddies in the judges is wrong.

To me, there’re two solutions to the problem.

First, from the competitors’ viewpoint:

Before you invest all that time and money to enter a competition, spend some time to research that competition. Go back several years and find out who the winners were and check the judges roll to see who awarded them those prizes. If you see a direct correlation between the judges and the winners (friends, old classmates, buddies, students, students of students, anything that presents a conflict of interest) that competition is tainted, don’t waste your time. (How do you find out these relationships? Some of them are obvious, some less so. You’ll have to do some networking.)

From the competition organizer’s viewpoint:

1. To preserver the good name and integrity of your competition, require that all judges disclose any potential conflicts of interest. This would include the aforementioned list—friends, buddies, students, students of students, and anyone posing a conflict of interest. Here, you have to trust their word and integrity .

2. If they have friends, buddies, students, or students of students (and anything that presents a conflict of interest) competing in the competitions they are judging, require them to recuse themselves from the judging. This is the least you can do for your competitors who have come at great expense and have invested much time preparing for the competitions, and who are expecting a fair and transparent competition.

I don’t think anyone will argue with the fundamental logic and fairness of what I just proposed. Yes, I know this post will not win me many new friends, but when it comes to fairness and transparency, I guess I would choose fairness over popularity.

In most things in life, there’s a basic underlying principle that holds the whole thing together, a critical element that seems insignificant until you remove it, and then you suddenly realize how crucial it is to the entire structure.

It’s something we can call the ‘cornerstone principle.’

As it so happens, just such a principle exists in guitar playing too.

It has to do with when you release your effort after you pluck.

Do you do it at the point of impact (with the string) or do you do it after the impact?

For many people, releasing the stroke at the point of impact is a completely natural reflex, they don’t think too much about it.

As soon as they pluck the string, their finger automatically relaxes. It’s the same reflex that tells us to relax our grip on the hammer as soon as we hit the nail too, otherwise we could seriously injure ourselves.

Yet I’ve found that sometimes, this perfectly natural reflex can be superseded by other concerns.

I was not immune to its effect either.

I was a free-stroke player for many years. When I first started playing rest-strokes, I found the technique unwieldy and clumsy. No matter how hard I practiced, I was unable to match the light effortless rest-strokes of my teacher, Karl. Unfortunately, Karl was not much help. He was from the old school and didn’t believe in saying too much when he taught.

So I was left to my own devices.

It took one year of experimentation and practicing before I realized what my problem was.

I was focusing too much of my attention on the ‘resting’ and not on the ‘plucking.’ In other words, I was making the ‘resting’ the target of my stroke rather than the ‘plucking.’

To clarify, there’re two main parts to a rest-stroke, the plucking and the resting on the next string.

Instead of focusing on the plucking, I was slamming the finger onto the next string because I was so focused on ‘resting’ my finger there. The plucking was occurring almost like an afterthought, something that I happened to do on my way to the resting.

Let me explain with a small exercise.

Pluck the g string with the i finger. Focus your effort on resting the finger on the next string.

When you hit the string, don’t relax your finger. Instead, keep it going toward the next string to rest on it. In other words, make the ‘resting’ (on the next string) the target of your stroke, not the plucking.

Because you’re not relaxing the finger on impact, the stroke will feel heavy and tense, as if you’re just slamming it against the next string. The unreleased tension in the finger will also make it much harder to execute with precision at high speeds.

Now try it this way.

Pluck the g string again with your i finger. As soon as you hit the string, let go all tension in your i finger, allow the finger to relax instantly.

(It’s important to emphasize that the plucking and the release should occur simultaneously – the moment of impact (the plucking) must be the moment of release.)

And let the finger follow through to rest on the next string. Allow that motion to occur naturally.

When you play this way, you’re making the plucking the target of your stroke as opposed to the resting. As soon as you’ve accomplished that target (plucking the string), you automatically let go all tension in the finger and allow it to ‘rest’ on the next string as an aftereffect of the stroke.

The sensation is quite different in this stroke. You will feel the release in a very physical way and it will feel much more relaxed and controlled.

The rest-stroke is not the only place where we can misplace the target of our stroke, it also occurs when we overemphasize the follow-through in free-strokes.

As I mentioned before, the follow-through is a natural part of the plucking action. It’s something you don’t want to suppress, but neither do you want to exaggerate it too.

The reason is that when you focus too much on the follow-through, you shift the target of your stroke from the plucking to the follow-through. This means that you will not relax your finger on impact with the string, instead you will continue it toward some imaginary point in the palm to effect the target of your stroke, the follow-through.

The result is an overly tense, heavy and less precise stroke.

The great thing about focusing on the plucking is that it not only produces a more relaxed stroke but it also increases precision. That’s because we tend to hit with greater precision what we focus our attention on – if you focus on hitting the string, you will hit it with greater precision – this is another crucial point but it’s for another post.

The point of release in a stroke may seem a small insignificant detail but like the biblical stone that the builders rejected, it is the cornerstone of an efficient and relaxed technique. I know, I had to learn it the hard way.

When I was a student in NZ, I worked in a deli on Dixon Street in Wellington one summer –  as a cook. My job was to cook spare ribs and make the salads.

On one of my first days on the job, I was given a big slab of pork ribs. Without thinking, I reached out for the cleaver and started hacking away at the meat.

Hearing the commotion, the boss, Martin, came into the kitchen. When he saw the mayhem, he motioned for me to stop. Then taking a small paring knife, he showed me a white part of the meat, right between the bones, and sliced right through it.

Effortless mastery.

It was one of my first lessons in life virtuosity. Sometimes you don’t have to hack your way through life. Take time to find that sweet spot and you’ll be able to slice your way through effortlessly.

These days, whenever I find myself stymied, I ask myself if I’m using a cleaver again to solve life’s many problems. And often, I find if I just take a little time to figure out the situation, I can usually find that sweet spot where I can slice my way through effortlessly again.

A few years after the incident, I was doing a masterclass in Malaysia and I happened to mention that episode to the students as a way of explaining virtuosity. After the class, during lunch, one of the students mentioned that he had heard the story before. I thought he was mistaken, I had never told that story to anyone before. Then another student said yes, he had read about it too in an old Taoist text.

After some prodding. I found that the text was the book of Chuang Tzu, one of the earliest Taoist texts. I didn’t think too much about it until a few years later when I happened to stumble onto the book (in a translation by Burton Watson) in a bookstore. I quickly searched for the story and sure enough, there it was, the story of Cook Ting.

The similarities were striking.

With one small difference. Cook Ting took nineteen years to learn how to carve the ox, I took two minutes to learn how to carve the spare ribs.

Why the difference? Well, besides the obvious difference in complexity between the two tasks, (an ox has a lot more places to cut than a slab of ribs), I had a master butcher teach me where to cut, Cook Ting had to learn it through trial and error.

The tremolo is a particularly tricky technique to master.

To play it well, you have to play a perfectly even stream of notes with three different fingers on one string. Add to this the gap caused by the thumb-stroke and the problem of masking it, and you’ll see why the tremolo has often been called the true test of a guitarist.

In a sense, the AOV was written for the tremolo. Everyone of the principles contained within it is essential to mastering the tremolo.

There’re several problems associated with playing the tremolo.

The first is that of speed. To create the illusion of a smooth continuous tone in the tremolo, you’ll have to play those notes extremely fast.

You achieve it with the principles of looseness, lightness, fluidity and economy. Each one of these principles is crucial to attaining speed.

First, looseness. To get the relaxation needed, you need to be extremely loose in your fingers, hand and body. There must be no sign of tension anywhere. A loose body is like a well-oiled machine that’s operating with minimum drag and resistance.

Second, lightness. You must move so lightly it feels almost as if you’re not exerting any effort. Again, pure common sense – the less effort you exert, the faster you can move.

Third, fluidity. Your movements must be smooth and continuous. There must be no break in the flow of your finger movements. This enables you to maintain the momentum you need to create that self-propelled engine I wrote about in the AOV for Guitar.

Fourth, economy. There must be no wasted motion in your finger actions. Wasted motion means wasted effort means wasted time.

When you have these conditions in place, you’ll find that speed will automatically result.

But speed is only half the picture. You’ll have to play with enough force to make the notes speak clearly and audibly.

The key to doing this is in the principle of release. This enables you to effortlessly capture the power inherent in the string. I’ve written about this earlier in my post on power.

To briefly recap the technique, first pull the string lightly, feel the springiness in the string and then release the string. Let the release be a complete letting go. The finger should relax completely as it releases the string.

It’s important to mention that because the notes in the tremolo are occurring so fast, the pull and the release will occur almost simultaneously, they will feel as if they’re part of the same motion.

There is one more crucial element to the tremolo and that’s rhythm, another key component of the AOV.

To play the tremolo evenly, you’ll have to produce a steady stream of notes all evenly spaced apart. This is a rhythmic problem but unlike the other more common rhythmic problems of keeping time, this is something you can’t control consciously. The speed at which the notes are occurring precludes that. What you have to do is develop reflexive control in the fingers, make them play at perfectly timed intervals unconsciously.

The only way to achieve this is through practice, doing the tremolo over and over until the fingers learn how to do it automatically.

I’ve included a few exercises in the AOV for guitar to help you develop this unconscious control but any tremolo exercise will work. Just keep on doing it over and over until you feel the fingers relaxing and beginning to adapt themselves to the strokes.

For your practice to be effective, however, you’ll first have to put in those basic conditions described in the AOV first – looseness, lightness, economy, rhythm, release and fluidity.

Learning is experience

Everything else is information.

Albert Einstein

We’re awash in information, this is after all the information age and you’re surfing the greatest repository of information since the invention of thinking. (including some on this site, if I may say so myself.)

Reminds me of that other great quote I read.

Overheard from one portly rich man: “I wish I can hire someone to work out for me.”

That sums up the problem.

Information in itself is useless. It will not make you lose weight, or make you smarter, or turn you into a phenomenal guitar player (although my hope is that it will, with my extra powerful words and insights).

Unless of course if you happen to turn it into experience, in which case it is worth more than gold.

I have a good friend who is a real estate mogul, he told me it all started when he read a book on real estate investing over twenty years ago.

In that relatively short time, he was able to parlay the book and the information within it into gold, literally.

I am sure there were thousands of others who read the same book and left it on the shelf to gather dust. (And I would be one of them.)

In which case, all that information in that book were just so many words, completely useless.

Why is it so hard to turn information into experience? Because it involves a great deal of effort.

We can read and be knowledgeable about all the techniques on real estate investing, but it takes a great deal of effort to put that information into action.

We can read about how to lose weight but it takes a great deal of effort and time to put all those nice advice into practice and shed some pounds.

We can read about how to get a good tremolo but it takes a great deal of effort to turn that information into a rippling tremolo at your fingertips.

There is one bright spot in all this, however.

If you are successful in turning information into experience, you’ll be one of a rare breed, the select few, the chosen ones – because the majority of people will not.

Here’s another powerful quote I read, I forgot from where:

It’s easier to sit on your butt than to turn information into experience.

Effortlessness is an integral part of my strategy to guitar playing. In fact, it is the defining principle of my life.

But words have their limitations and the term ‘effortless’ is full of ambiguities. I’ve had at least one YSA (Young Smart Aleck) come and tell me he doesn’t practice because he’s doing it the “effortless” way.

Well, there’s a huge difference between effortless playing and not playing at all.

One describes a state of mastery, the other describes a state of general laziness (to use a politically incorrect word).

It got me thinking; how do you distinguish between effortless and no effort?

Here’re a few key differences that come to mind:

I’ve been reading The Little Book of String Theory by Princeton Professor Steven Gubser.

In this extremely well-written book, he manages to explain some pretty heady stuff in easy-to-understand layman’s terms.

For a natural-born skeptic like me, however, it’s hard to believe all the information in the book. I have a hard enough time believing in five dimensions, let alone ten. But I also have a hard time understanding how a 300-plus ton piece of equipment can stay up in the air and yet every summer I get into one to fly to Asia.

One paragraph in this fascinating book caught my attention.

On page 132, Professor Gubser wrote, “Long lists of objects cry out for a unifying theory with fewer elementary objects and a deeper level of explanatory power.”

He went on, “Chemistry’s periodic table receives such a unifying treatment through atomic theory. Helium, argon, potassium, and copper are all as different as they ever were in chemical reactions. But atomic theory reveals that they are all composed of electrons in quantum states of vibration around an atomic nucleus composed of protons and neutrons.”

This seems to me to be the perfect analogy for the principles espoused in the AOV.

On the surface, the different techniques on the guitar – arpeggio technique, scale technique and tremolo technique – may seem completely different and unrelated to one another. But at the basic level, they’re all unified by the same basic principles.

In fact, one can go further and add that on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be much in common between the martial arts, sports, or the classical guitar, but at the fundamental level, they’re all unified by the same goals of achieving speed, power, precision, and endurance.

I’ve never been curious about how things work, as long as they work, that’s good enough for me.

Part of my reluctance to find out how things work is my fear of upsetting the equilibrium.

Mostly, it’s because of my fear of triggering the centipedal effect.

I’m acutely aware of the element of magic in things, afraid that if I mess around with it or try to understand it, it might lose that magic.

That was the way I held my guitar playing. I was afraid to rock the boat. Over the years, I just practiced and followed my instincts, and it seemed to work fairly well.

But all that changed when I started to teach. I found if I wanted to teach, I had to first find out what I was doing and understand it before I could try to impart it.

Without conscious decision, going with my instincts again, I found myself doing something that’s best described as reverse engineering to try to understand what I was doing.

What’s reverse engineering?

It’s taking apart something to find out how it works and then putting it back again and/or building something like it.

Like my other instincts, I found this approach worked the best, especially for understanding something as complex and as nuanced as the human body and human performance.

I know there’s another way, a ‘scientific’ method if you will, where you study something, the body for instance, in great physiological detail, and you come up with precise theories about how it works and you propose precise rules on applying those theories.

For instance, right wrist positioning. You can study the tendons and the carpal tunnel and derive basic assumptions about how the tendons should traverse the carpal tunnel in a straight line and come up with the rule that the wrist should then be held straight to enable the tendons to stay in this straight line. The presumption is that this will avert possible future complications with carpal tunnel syndrome.

It sounds good in theory but in real life (unfortunately we have to deal with real life), it also means you have to hold up the hand to keep the wrist straight. Now, for some people, this will pose no problem because when they relax the wrist, it will still stay in a straight line, but for some people including me, when we relax the wrist, it physically drops. To hold it in a straight line would necessitate holding it up artificially, exerting unnecessary tension on the wrist and worse, locking it up as a result.

Approaching it the reverse engineering way, instead of going into details about body physiology, and postulating theories and imposing them on the body, I approached it from the body’s perspective. I based it entirely on body sensations and on results — the only criteria being whether the position felt natural and comfortable and whether it was producing the results I wanted. Nothing else mattered.

I tried playing holding the wrist in a straight line and allowing it to drop naturally. It was clear that allowing it to drop naturally was more comfortable — it allowed me to play with much greater comfort and freedom resulting in better facility. From this, I derived the basic assumption that relaxation should take precedence over everything else and that such things as positions should be determined by a player’s physiology and not enforced externally.

I applied reverse engineering to the other techniques.

From the tremolo, I derived the importance of a strong forward drive in your fingers by creating an automated engine in the fingers. To arrive at this principle, I analyzed the sensation in my hand and fingers at different times – when I’m not warmed up, when I’m fully warmed up, and when I’m playing at an optimum and I try to identify the key differences between each experience. It became clear to me that the critical component in the technique was the sensation of the forward drive in the fingers. That principle became the cornerstone of my overall strategy to speed.

From the left hand, I learned how essential it is to be constantly on the move, to always stay ahead of your action, not to wait but to start moving before you have to act.

I found validation of this principle from other areas of life. For example, the simple act of catching the bus. If you want to catch a bus, you must start going to the bus stop before it is due to arrive. If you start moving only when it arrives at the bus stop, it’s too late. Yet that’s what many guitar players do in the left hand. They wait until they have to play before they start moving to the frets. That’s usually too late and it’s the cause of most left hand inaccuracies and fret buzzings.

Finding validation from other areas has always been and still is important to me. The last thing I want to be is some lone voice in the wilderness crying about some new startling idea or prophecy.

And validations I found aplenty, in books by great martial artists, in videos of the great players, and in ancient philosophy books. They all seemed to confirm my findings.

Once I understood the basic principles behind each technique, I found I could apply them to other techniques. For instance, I applied the technique of the automated engine to my arpeggio and scale techniques and was able to reap the same benefits.

The AOV is essentially a compilation of all the principles I learned in my efforts at reverse engineering.

I do not pretend it’s the definitive word on the subject. But as I tell my students, take what I offer as a small part of the universe of performance. It may not present the full picture (although I’m fully convinced it does), but try them, test them, and if they work, great, if they don’t, just discard them, you won’t offend me.

And I say the same for my books. If you bought my books and feel you haven’t benefited from them in any way, feel free to return them for a full refund within thirty days.

To ring in the new year, I’ve also decided to make available the student price of the AOV to all. This price of US$8 is for the pdf file alone, and does not include the printed hard copy when it becomes available.