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One of my major sources of happiness in life,
and I have noSoul to thank for.
Not like I wasn't in love with the guitar since
the beginning of time.
But I have tried talking to it many times,
it it never responded nicely.
The first time after noSoul,
it was almost too easy.
I saw Stanley Jordan's instructional master sessions
video one more time, just to remind myself that
he is one of the only ones I encountered who speaks
noSoul directly from his soul,
probably without even knowing it,
which I would dare not claim.
I only refer to his didactic system for practicing
with no mistakes, which I probably even improve a bit.
This improvement, albeit ever so slights,
hints to me that Stanly didn't know noSoul,
conscious or not.
It goes like this,
learning a single new rhythm is very simple.
All you have to do is follow Stanley's instruction,
but with extreme obedience and without neglect.
You will know the rhythm, quickly, and you will
have learned it without having made but one or two
tiny mistakes through the entire process,
mistakes that you are likely to never hit on stage.
Stanley's system works so well without any modifications,
it feels almost like magic.
You put your fingers on the fretboard and say to yourself:
I wanna do this little thing which I have never done before.
The time it will take you to learn a new magic trick
is very small, maybe a less than a half an hour
for a four note measure to become fully automatic
in your fingers at comfortable playing speed or better.
But if you neglect if the minutest of his instructions,
it might take a day to do the same.
His video is so casual its not inviting you to be
obedient,
which present a possible 'this doesn't work at' result
if you are careless.
With noSoul, you do not need a soul to be obedient
to Stanley.
It simply makes noSense not to obey pedantically,
causing you self harm in your learning speed
and so your playing quality later.
I don't even like his music and never listen to him,
except in this instructional video and
Eleanor Rigby which I came across for my Beatles collection.
My claimed improvement from conscious noSoul awareness
is actually quite minor, and while I feel confident about
it, I have no way by now to measure its success,
since my confidence combined with the love of guitar
playing, will not let me go back to lesser quality
playing for the purpose of verifying this system
is at all helpful.
My body and brain are the lab for noSoul
but only in the the same way that Nature
was a lab for Darwin to conduct experiments
regarding the theory of evolution without placing
any test tubes in his garden. (he did that too, I'm sure).
Gauss said that collecting statistics is true-representing
enough for all practical purposes, and no further
test tubes are necessary to prove a scientific theory.
I just played the Hunger rhythm about a thousand
times in the past hour.
From a noSoul perspective,
this is like a kid trying to paint a blue dot over and over
with semi translucent paint, each time making a deeper
impression upon the paper.
If he errs and put some red paint,
each new attempt will have some red paint in it.
This is because muscle memory unit, are not memory
like we have in computers at all.
I just want to think of them as the flip flop of the brain
because it is a convenient model.
But there is no such thing as free and available space in human memory, just like it never runs out,
and for the same reason:
A brain
flip-flop is created by the same muscle process
it drives.
At first you make a conscious thought, if you are human,
and it takes a very long time, relatively speaking,
to act in accordance.
But you acted, and so the muscle sequence created
a new flip-flop or several, and that means you will have
to consciously think less next time to do the same,
but at that second time,while thinking less,
the net impression left in the flip-flops is better
and more accurate, mostly because there are by now twice
as many flip-flops busy sharing their efforts making
you play better tunes, and by some shear logic
you know from Darwin these structures were developed
a long time ago for the purpose of bettering the chances
of primitive beings in their struggle for existence.
My improvement, if at all, and if you care about guitars,
is as follows:
Stanly uses stress as the focus point,
and by minimizing stress during practice,
which is easy to do without a stage set or a recording,
you can avoid more mistakes.
All this is true and works well.
With noSoul, you can still eliminate more of the few mistakes that
you will inevitably make every once in while.
Train yourself for an automatic response which is quite
opposite what your are supposed to do on stage.
Simply stop playing immediately as you hear
a mistake of yours, and usually you can even
feel the stress about to make it occur,
and stop even earlier.
But do stop solid, immediately, then wait a while,
then start over, just like you may have used to in the early days.
Why is this important, and what's with noSoul?
A muscle memory chain of musical notes works
by correlating each note to the next, in conjunction
with listening and integrating a collection of systems
quite a bit more complex the the minimal requirements
displayed by the noSoul model.
While this can be deduced obviously from experience
while practicing, noSoul guided guitar training makes use of this fact.
If the error is inside the sequence, chances are it will be
much better remembered, and so repeated.
My experience tells me that using this method
made significant improvements in my leaning speed
and leaning abilities.
So much so that even when recording,
I prefer to give up a recording to prevent the first
mistake from ever being registered in the flip-flops.
My single most critical error is a single note I am playing from my first flip-flop sequence ever, way before
noSoul but with Stanley's no mistake philosophy
already well absorbed in my subconsciousness and fingers:
I play this one on the first string way too loud,
and noSoul has yet to tell me how to correct this flaw.
It sort of improves with time, but mostly because I am learning
that volume can also be controlled by the distance
from the fret, as opposed to the power of the hammer,
and so I can correct the mistake by leaning new motions
to lower the volume, in those places where this mistake
lingers.
Its like that boy, trying to paint that blue dot with red,
but blue is so strong it takes many layers of red
before the blue is unnoticeable,
and it will never go away forever,
but maybe you can make it so that you are the only
one alive to tell about it, because only you can still
hear the corrections of the mistake, because
only you have spent so many hours in conversations
with that particular error flip-flop community
in your schizoid brain.
Quoting Stanley Jordan speaking noSoul straight
from the heart, describing the mistake/stress
Pavlovian association, comparing practicing to the
performance, and questions:
"How does my mind know that this is the time to get it wrong?
when I was at home I got it right"
He gives a detailed answer.
Brain Muscles
It is interesting to see how brain muscles are composed
into task groups by experimenting with the guitar.
Turns out a sequence to be remembered has a large starting
section not at all related to the muscle activity,
and it is the bigger part of the reusable
sequence to be remembered.
This I deduce from the following experience:
I first played with the left hand only, for more than a year.
Only then I started playing with the right hand.
For this, I was looking for new simple melodies again.
Trying a new melody with the right hand is almost as hard as
it was with the left hand in the beginning.
With the left hand its of course very easy.
What is most interesting however,
is that my right hand can learn the sequence much quicker
by having the left hand first know it really well.
Then the right hand seems to only need some fine tuning
in the positioning of the fingers on the strings - just the part
that comes natural for the left hand and is the direct
muscle control part of the sequence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_consolidation
