In his
Master Sessions Video,
Stanly Jordan talks about
how
mistakes and
stress correlate,
and if you make
mistakes when you practice,
usually caused by
stress, then the natural
stress
later to occur when on stage or recording,
will make the same
mistake repeat on stage.
The solution, he says,
is simply not to make
mistakes when praticing.
This is easy to achieve, he continues,
all it takes is patience:
never play any faster than the speed
where you are sure you will
not make a
mistake.
This system works of course really well.
I am nevertheless trying to improve upon
Stanly Jordan's thoughts and this system:
The
stress-
mistake correlation is rather a simple
Pavlovian
response of muscle memory systems.
When you practice and make a
mistake,
there is always a reason in the brain to have
caused it to direct the fingers to make this exact
mistake.
Stanley Jordan noticed, that you only make
mistakes
when
stress comes along,
like when the
phone rings, or the cat suddenly snarls,
or the
music you are practicing with - just paced up a bit -, too fast for your fingers.
You are practicing, and you have already made that
particular
mistake, representing a specific piece of noise
that you heard when you first made it,
which you will identify if you ever hear it again,
and you will hear it again, if you are
stressed again,
all else also being the same,
so, don't make the
mistakes when you practice
and you will not be able to repeat them when you are later stressed, he concludes.
But if you can hear the same
mistake the second time,
not having followed
Stanly Jordan's instructions to avoid it,
it means, from
Stanly Jordan's accord of years of experience,
that it takes only one time, not two, for the
mistake to occur,
for our muscle memory systems to record this
mistake
with accuracy and be able to repeat it when conditions
so demand.
And this recording,
Stanly Jordan does not suggest how to prevent in full.
Mistake will continue to occur forever,
much less thanks to
Stanly Jordan,
and hopefully even a wee bit less with this.
While
Stanly Jordan points out the correlation
between
mistake and
stress,
and despite his otherwise usual infinite attention to detail,
in this case he is missing, I beleive,
some very improtant relevant details:
The individual mistake which occurs at a particular
timepoint in the
music,
occurs with
stress occuring at that same point in time,
and the timing of the surrounding split seconds
are all that is relevant.
You are not generally
stressed for appearing on stage
and will overall make more
mistakes.
Muscle memory records this particular
exact
mistake (as I claim, with a single occurance),
as a result of the
stressoccuring,
which can not possibly be unrelated to the content of the
music itself.
This is why the
stress finds its way to occur
at that particular instant in time in the
music.
It is only when you recorded the
mistake more
times than the non-
mistake that the the misake will occur without
stress.
This will happen if you are stubborn to repeat a
mistake 'until you get it right'. You never will.
To quote Stanely Jordan: slow down until you always
get it correct,
and speed back up only as fast as you can always keep it correct, until you get it right.
But
Freud tell us, that when your are
stressed
is when your subconcious takes over,
which is why you make
mistakes only
when you are
stressed.
He is not wrong of course, and none of this
contradicts any of the above.
But it tells us something new and useful:
Who says that if the subconcious takes over
bad things will happen?
Maybe with some understanding, we can harness it?
After all, this is what psychologists have been
doing since
Freud anyway,
and
musicians since the first time caveman shot his arrow
from inside the hollow echoy skeleton of a mamooth,
or something like that.
Stress, first and formost, causes the quick and agile
subconcious systems to act,
faster than what it would take a more controlled operation.
Freud calls this
Pavlovian
response, when extreme: a
trauma.
Meaning to say:
you will automatically and uncontrollably forever be
stressed,
without any logical reason,
by that which happened to have occured in the time vicinity
of the
traumatic event.
I must add that if the
traumatic event itself is very short
and can be stamped with a single timestamp,
then the potential variety of correleted surrounding events
for the systems to record is very small.
But our subconciousness is partly many millions of years
old and partly a mere two million years in early
stages of development.
It encompasses many primitive and ancient systems, and
this happens to be one of them.
The way our subconciousness knows to tell degrees of
traumatic events apart is simple: it doesn't.
it responds
traumatically, or
Pavlovianly,
to the event, to the dgree of its illtemper.
Much like Staley Jordan says Staccato and Legatto are
merely digital words in the language to describe
two randomly selected
numbers from a scale of one to ten
in a convenient but ineffetive method -
in my view -
traume, a simple pavovian
response and the
stress-
mistake
correlation -
are dgrees of similar behaviour of similar systems
in our brain.
The new trick I am trying is based on
harnessing denial as a tool.
I am trying reverse psychology on my muscle memory
systems.
I am trying to train myself so that
whenever I make a
mistake,
I immidiately stop everything, as if in panic,
and follow this rule as religiously as practical,
especially if I was recording until a second ago.
I am trying to make my subconciousness deny the
mistake
ever occured, with a long thought process to match
and fight the muscle memory recording sequence,
by mimicing extra
stressthe second I noticed
the
mistake had occured.
From the elevated excitement from the beafed up evnt of the
mistake, I expect to help eliminate, at least to a dgree,
the recording of the
mistake.
It is also hard for such a
mistake to be recorded in muscle
memory because there is no correlation sequence.
If there is absolutely no note in history that has ever
been recorded by muscle memory to follow the
mistaken note,
then the
mistake itself is at the far end of this muscle
memory sequence and its recorded strength must be very weak.
Since
Stanly Jordan's system already insures
that if I combine the two systems it is statistically
improbable to make the same
mistake twice,
and as the first and only recording is very weak,
it is less likely that such a
mistake,
having been more lighly recorded,
will reoccur on stage
So whats the big deal,
all
musician stop playing and start over when
they make
mistakes almost all the time.
The
difference is in the detail.
Almost is simply not nearly good enough.
If you practice casually without paying much
attention to these details, and set some other standards,
you might make, according to your set standards,
say 10
mistakes an hour on average,
and for nine of them you will stop and start over,
just like I am describing here.
You are not doing a 90% job at all.
You are merly recording about a
mistake an hour
in your muscle memoey systems,
and having recorded this information over years,
by now your entire
musical arrangment is woven
with recorded
mistakes hoping for the
stressful
event to appear in their lucky recorded moment in time,
or otherwise a competitor
mistake will sprout and win instead.
I can't really say this is a discovry.
My habbits of how to react to
mistakes
are a subject I have been toying with for some time now,
and every time I put on
Stanly Jordan's master video
again I make sure I am by the computer when the part
where he talks about the
stress-
mistake correltion comes
on, trying to dig yet another minute detail from his elaborate description of vast experience.
This is also why it is hard for me to measure or report
how well this
theory at all works.
This is how I try my best to practice most of the time,
with a very strong conviction it betters my learning speed.
I believe by now I have enough experiemnts to support this conviction.
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| Stanley Jordan |
