For the last ten days or so I’ve made playing without looking my Prime Directive. It’s quite a challenge for me but I’m already seeing very important benefits.
I decided to reinstall my one minute changes app to wipe the scores and start again at zero. I’m doing Perfect Fast UNSEEN changes for all of the chords I thought I ‘knew’. At first it slowed me down dreadfully. I think my mental processing capacity was taken up with a screaming internal argument that went something like this,
Grown up me: ‘Fret an F chord’
Underconfident Child me; ‘I have to look!’
‘No you don’t, just take your time.’
‘I can’t play like that. I gotta look!’
‘No you don’t - Oh you did. (sigh). Start over. Fret a G’
‘I have to look.’ and so on, and on, and on.
While that crisis of confidence was happening in my head there wasn’t much space left for learning. I made it a rule that I’d not look unless the chord sounded wrong and I couldn’t fix it any other way. You can imagine how slow my changes became! Even the really simple ones dropped from 60 per minute to around six. The first time I tried F to Dm I scored TWO.
Eventually though, I began to convince that scared part of my personality that he could do it. I noted that at least half of the time I was fretting the chords correctly and that improved quite rapidly the more I practiced. After a week or so I was back on the app playing songs without looking and was delighted to realise that in some cases it was easier than before. I stuck to songs that I already knew quite well and forgave myself the bum notes as long as I was having fun. I think that forgiveness helped me relax and enjoy it all?
This morning, I woke up to the realisation that a week of sitting up straight, eyes front, and making daily measurable progress has caused a subtle but very significant change in my attitude. When I sat hunched over, twisted to the left, trying to see what my fingers were doing, muttering and cursing, tense and frustrated, looking like a little boy with a man’s guitar, I was TRYING to learn to play it. Trying and trying and trying and never actually succeeding. Maybe I was thinking “It doesn’t matter if you win or lose as long as you keep trying”? That’s a lie that I heard a lot as a child
Anyway, sitting up, alert and relaxed like a grown up I wasn’t TRYING anymore - I was actually DOING it. When I chat to people and they ask me what I did yesterday (in the heatwave when we all pretty much stayed at home) I no longer say “Oh, I’m, er, trying to learn the guitar.” I say “I’m learning the guitar”. And I AM learning, and learning effectively and efficiently. Those mysterious pains have all gone away too.
For me, playing without looking has helped my grow up in a small and very satisfying way.