Skills and Techniques-Finding a Daily Rhythm for Practice

Good morning, friends. Welcome to the Wednesday livestream from Dulcimer Crossing, where we are wanting to help you play the music you love on the instruments you love. As you can see, I play and teach on hammered dulcimer and mountain dulcimers and guitars and many more. But at Dulcimer Crossing, we wanna we provide you with 247 access to the to the lessons that are available for you when you may not have a schedule that works with other people. We also provide the thing sort of like this.

There's the ability to add another lesson if you want to do that. We have, mentor level coaching that goes along with, the lessons that are firmly already already created, and we have monthly workshops. I wanna just give a shout out for the monthly workshop coming up this month, and that is let me get to that place so I can share my screen. There we go. This month coming up is Timothy Seaman, who is a music educator from Virginia who has got 2 compositions.

He's gonna jam it all in in 1 hour. We got 1 hour coming up on June 8th, Thursday. We always do our workshops on Thursdays. He's gonna be teaching these as bilingual tunes, one for for hammered and mountain dulcimer. And our schedule for the rest of the summer is also here as well.

So that is one of the monthly workshops that's coming up. I can't wait to talk about today, finding a daily rhythm for practice. This is how we nurture a musical life. And this is one of those questions that comes up for a lot of people. This week, I was able, I was asked by Erin May Lewis and the crew she has put together hosting a youth dulcimer club, which meets every Monday night, on Zoom and has been going since the beginning of the pandemic.

Youth spread from Canada all across the United States are playing dulcimers, and there are some adults who are there who are encouraging and supportive. We have a time where we we, work on a tune. Well, we let well, actually, we join, and all the youth have a chance to play a tune or 2 that they wanna share with us, something that they've been working on and get feedback and, and support from everyone. And then the host teaches a tune, and then there are breakout rooms in which the the youth are paired up with adult mentors and have a chance to go through something, get some tips, and then they come back at the end. And sometimes they show us what they worked on, which happened this week.

But when I invited 1 of the youth, at the beginning, would you like to play something? He said, no. I haven't really been able to play for a while because it's been baseball season, and he's been focused on baseball. Well, I get that. We have seasons of our life where we are full there are things that take our attention.

I'm a church musician in the seasons before Christmas and, that whole season and in the lent Easter season, it's very busy with things that mean other things have to get out of the way. Now the times before that, there's a lot of preparation for that. But then there's these big parts of the year where those things are not happening. And how do we have a musical life when we aren't full of all the things that happen? We're coming up to that time when a lot of people make a shift in their rhythms this summer.

Yeah. Every magazine you can think of has a summer reading book list, you know, the or, they there's all kinds of suggestions for what you can do at this particular time, because a lot of people make a change in rhythms. When you have children in school or you are a child in school, the school rhythm is really important. If you're someone who works the soil, the springtime is very busy with planting. And once everything's planting, you you gotta do some weeding, but it's not as intense.

And then the harvest time comes. That's more intense. And then there's the planning season of the winter. There are just so many different life rhythms we have that we're already involved in. How do we find a rhythm for daily practice?

Now practice might feel like a bad word also. I know that when I I begged to take piano lessons from when I was 4a half, and they made me wait till I was 6. We had a piano at home, and I begged. And the common wisdom at the time was you need to have children learn how to read English before they read music. And you have to read music in order to play music.

Well, I think I knew that wasn't true. I could I could, sing. I could bang on things. I could do different things. I could bang on the piano.

It never sounded like what I wanted it to, and that's the first thing. Why would I practice something so that it can sound like I want it to? The other the flip side of that is there's a tension in being an artist of any kind. There's a way in which we're always aiming for that which we can't quite reach, but there are moments when we get glimpses or there are those times when we reach the pinnacle and we can just bask in this thing that took so long to get to. But it's gonna take a practice.

A practice in in art is any any one of the arts is something that you pay attention to so that you don't have to pay attention to it. You've watched chefs cut up things really fast. How did they do that and still have all their fingers? They had to learn some techniques, like make sure there's no finger sticking out, that you've got your knuckle there so your knife can slide up and down against your knuckle. And you slide it back like this.

That's how you can do that. Make sure your knife is sharp. Make sure you pay attention to what you're doing as you're doing this. And so you watch the the photos of people who are doing this. They're not looking around and talking and and answering other people's questions.

They're busy doing the work. They're focused on it, but they've worked at it enough. They've repeated it enough that they don't need to think about every single action. They have now clumped it into chop. Get the stuff, line it up, sharp knife, cutting board, fingers with knuckles out and chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, and then scrape it, put it away and get the next thing and chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop.

Now there are some recipes if you're someone who works in the kitchen that you don't have to go and open a book or get out your recipe card. You know what they are because you've done them enough. There are new ones where you have to pay attention and you have to compare this what you already know. But you have enough of a practice that if I'm gonna make something that's gonna bake in the oven, it's probably gonna have something to make it rise. It's gonna have an egg or some soda or something.

There's gonna be some kind of a grain or a nut flour. I'm gluten free, so there's not many grains that I can have, but I'm gonna have some kind of a ground up something. There's gonna be some seasonings to go with that. There's probably gonna be some kind of shortening, which is butter or in our family is Crisco, but next door, aunt Mabel had fluffo, and she made the best pie crust. So it made me think, wonder why we're using Crisco when aunt Mabel uses fluffo.

But there are some basic core ingredients to what we're doing. When we're playing music, there are some basic core ingredients that we need to become comfortable with so that we don't have to think about them all the time. I have summarized my practice and what I recommend to my students with the 5 finger practice regimen. This is in the dulcimer crossing blog. And let me share that page again because I'm gonna show you how to find it.

So that later on, you're gonna say, he talked about that and I can't remember where it is. So member or not, you can get to the blog, Dulcimer Crossing. Click on blog, and then actually, you don't have to click on the blog at all. You can do that and then look at all of our 300 and some blog posts. But I want 5 finger regimen.

I'm gonna search for that and it's gonna show me this blog post. Now, if I just do 5 finger, let's see what that tells us. Oh, it gives me some other things because I refer to this. Or if I just say regimen. Oops.

I'm gonna try it again. Regimen. There it is. I'm gonna click on that and it's gonna bring me to the blog post. Now, here's what I recommend.

Number 1, tune up. Doesn't matter what instrument. It'll always be better if it's in tune. And a lot of times, we don't wanna take the time to do that. Maybe we don't our tuner's out of batteries.

We our phone isn't with us because many of us have a tuner on the phone. Some way of tuning up, whether it's tuning the instrument to itself or to an outside standard. Then warm up. Something to play that you can be comfortable the same way if you're a good chopper in the kitchen, you can chop. Something you can warm up with.

Then play the hardest thing you're working on because you're fresh. Our tendency is to go play the things we like. And when we do that, we play and play and play, and then we say, oh, look at the time. And we, you know, check our watch. And how about that?

I don't have time for the hard thing anymore. But if we take the hardest thing that's kicking us around them a bit, then do something familiar. That's always something that used to be hard once. That can help refresh your confidence. It's like, yeah.

Yeah. I'm not really so bad. I can do some things that this was making me doubt just a minute ago, and then memorize something. When I've memorized something, it can become my warm up, and I don't have to come back to it, to music or anything like that, written, printed music. So that's what I suggest as a 5 finger regimen.

We have all these words that we use. I always my motto is we don't work music, we play music. And yet, in every art, there is a practice or a discipline or a regimen, which can all sound like work. Right? I know that practice can sometimes be one of those words that brings back memories of the egg timer my mom put on the piano and set it for 20 minutes.

And I had to play until that thing binged. And she and I go through my stuff and I'd you know, I had all the things. And I would be a little I would be far too incurious to go look for things I hadn't been assigned by my teacher or to go back and review things. I was not interested in reviewing. This do the familiar thing, that wasn't anything.

I thought you always gotta be pushing and doing the hard thing, and then the hard thing makes you feel so bad. I didn't even wanna play anymore. And I'd reach over to that timer and go try to speed it up. Mom would call from the other room and say, add 10 more minutes. So practice can sometimes feel like a chore.

Right? Discipline is another one of those words that has been so associated with corporal punishment that a lot of people can't deal with that word. But you know what a discipline is? It's something that a disciple follows. So if you're a disciple of music, you follow a discipline.

And the discipline is can be put your hands on your instrument every day. Get it out and do something with it every day. That's a discipline. Maybe you can't do it every day. Get it out and do it 3 times a day on the days you can.

That's another discipline. This is also called a practice when you do it that way. The fact that I order my life so there's room for music in it can be very regimented, which sounds has very negative connotations in this free free spirit world of music. But you know what? If you're not playing daily, if you're not touching your instrument daily, if you're not doing things over and over again in repetition, you won't remember it.

And so finding ways for this to work. For the baseball player, one of the adults said, well, now that baseball season is over, I bet you're gonna have some more time. He said, yeah. I will. And I I ask everybody, how's it going, and what are you gonna do?

And and, he said his thing was next week, I'm I'm gonna work on something that I can share next week. Well, that is terrific. I just asked somebody. We have a new oh, that's what I wanna share you share with you about, a new, dulcimer community on the Internet, and I'm gonna put it into the chat here. Oops.

I gotta go back to those for crossing on my Facebook page to let's close that for now. Let's close that. Let's close that. Let's close that. There's a lot of things in here.

There we go. There's a new dulcimer community that we are forming on the on Facebook, and it's called I can't find today's livestream. Okay. Well, it's called the let's just go back to it. There we go.

Dulcimer Community, Mastering the Art of Dulcimer, a community of lovers of the dulcimer. In a few weeks, this is where these Wednesday live streams is gonna be sent to rather than the Facebook page. One of the things we discovered is the Facebook page, on Facebook is making it more difficult for people who are members of the page to see the content on the page. So we wanna make this available. So we're planning to send this to that community.

And right now, for some reason, I'm not able to see Hang on. K. We're going to that profile. You know? See the page.

Here it is. No way it isn't. Well, if you are typing into the chat, I'm sorry that I can't see today's video to know live. That's where I wanna go. It's not showing it today.

Alright. Well, we're gonna move this into the pay into the group where it can be found by people. And if you would like to join the group, just send me an email, steve@dulcimer crossing.com, and I'll send you the link to do it join it. It's a private group because we all know that private groups are better for, security and not being hijacked. They're not immune, but they're better than, public groups on Facebook.

And we wanna keep the focus on dulcimers and the community that we know and love and how we create that community with each other. Now that's the other thing that the youth dulcimer club has built into it is a community. There are people who are supportive, and there is accountability just by people saying, what what do you got to share? Would you like to play something? And I always ask the group, the adults in the group, if they'd like to play something.

And sometimes they're really scared to do it, and it's it's important for kids to see that adults are afraid to do things too or nervous about it. And sometimes when that happens, it is so exciting to see the child beam when they make a suggestion and the adult uses it and it works. That's that's a cool thing too. So we've got the 5 finger regimen. My suggestion is if you can get 30 minutes a day, but maybe don't have a block of 30 minutes, but you can do 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the middle of the day, 10 minutes at night.

That's 30 minutes. But the fact that you're repeating the 30 minutes or the 10 minutes over and over again helps everything you're learning become sticky in your brain. And that's what we need for for us not to have to pay attention to every little detail because it's really difficult when we work on something and we really get it in our fingers, and then we walk away. I'm currently working on a project of gathering up the tune ideas and tunes that I've created, which have just been kind of left under bushes. So it's like an Easter egg hunt.

And there are there sometimes there are a voice memo. I use a voice memo to to play a tune or to a tune idea. Sometimes it's, something that was saved in a sound file. Because I was working on something, I quick captured the sound file on my computer, and it might just say idea or it might have a name already. Sometimes it's the first I've written down the first half on a slip of paper.

Sometimes it's something I've started to write the tablature for in the computer, but I don't remember which hard drive it's on. I don't remember which computer it's on. I don't remember the name of it. There's I'm gathering all these up because I don't know about you, but there are times when I feel uncreative, and it just feels like nothing's ever happening. I call that the desert time.

And in the desert time, it can be very difficult to believe that it's ever gonna rain and that the flowers that are just laying there are ever gonna bloom again. And every time I get to the desert, I think all creativity is passed. It's over and done. And then the rains come, and there is that season. If you've ever lived in a Mediterranean climate where it's wet one season and dry one season, you know this more than if you live in the season where there's a lot of wet and it's more of a cold cold in the heats heat things.

But during the wet season, things bloom that look dormant for so long. In the in the Hebrew scriptures, there's a the desert shall blossom and bloom like a rose, And I had no idea what that was. And I asked one of my professors, what is this? He he says, oh, you've never been in the desert. And I said, no.

I've not been in the desert. He goes, in the when the rains come, the whole place bursts alive with color. It doesn't last long. And I had no idea this was happening. I just thought it was one of those magical things that was written down somewhere.

But it turns out it's actually a part of the rhythm in places that I don't know about. Well, music may be a place I don't know about. And I'm here, and I'm thinking, I'm not remembering this. I how do I remember this? Well, gotta do it a lot.

Right? How many times have you gone to turn on the gas for your gas grill and you can't remember which way to turn the handle, or it's time to brush your teeth and you can't remember which way to turn the toothpaste tube, or it's time to turn on the water and you can't remember which way to turn the handle. Well, if you're old like me, you've probably figured out a few things, like lefty loosey, righty tighty are symbols of how the world has been organized so that I'm not tightening it trying to get it loose. I'm not loosening it, trying to get it tight. A little phrase.

Those kind of things are things that help me with my daily practice as I have this rhythm for this. Now the other thing I can do, I've got the 5 finger regimen. I'm trying to find regular practice times that are part of my, part of my daily rhythms. I'm gonna there's gonna be a click here. Hang on.

Okay. I just turned my microphone over to a different pattern. What was that first thing to do? Tune. Because if it doesn't sound in tune, it's gonna be it's not gonna be inspiring at all.

So now What would you call this? I would call that an exercise. Now, where did that kind of an exercise come from? From me, it came from trying to play a piece of music that had something in it that I just couldn't get. And so what I did was take that hard piece out of the piece of music I'm trying to play and turn it into an exercise.

Now that's not exactly an example of one of those, but Blackberry Blossom is a song which really is a fingering exercise. And I call this the neighbor's exercise when I created the exercise. These three fingers stay together and move as a group, and then it turns upside down. And I could do that all on the same string on the middle string, or I can go to the middle string doing it all on the melody string. I know that because this is an exercise I created.

It's in Dulcimer crossing. It's called neighbors, and there are several different permutations of the exercise. But that exercise came because I was trying to play something that I couldn't. I would always get tripped up, and it would make my practice, my discipline, my regimen feel awful. So what did I do?

I tuned up. I made that into a an exercise, and that became something I'd warm up with. However, first, my warm up was something that was familiar, and this exercise was the hard thing. This hard thing became an easier thing. The easier thing became something I could memorize.

I didn't have to get out paper in order to do that. I was just me and my dulcimer, and that memorized thing became an a warm up exercise. So when I pick up my dulcimer, one of the things I'll do is warm up by playing one of these exercises. I could also warm up playing chords. I could also warm up playing a song.

It's just something that lets me get my fingers ready to do something that's not sleeping, brushing my teeth, typing, washing dishes, mowing the lawn. It just lets my hands know I'm here doing this now. That's the focus, which is a part of a daily practice of music. And so those are some some things that I, I highly recommend. If that's something you would like some help with at crossing, that's what we're here for.

We have things that are prepared for you, and we also have resources. And I want to share let's go back to that. Okay. I'm gonna go back to the the blog where we were before, and I'm gonna click on those from across which gets me back to the home page. Then as a member, I'm gonna log in.

So I click on members or membership site is here, brings me here. There's a reminder of what you can do. Workshop members get access to the live events archive, And what we're doing today is going to be archived in this section. All these are all of going on 4 years of, Wednesday live streams that are archived in an evergreen way for you. And they're grouped here by the themes of learning, theory, skills and techniques, performing, technical considerations, tools, genre, live jams, tune time.

Last week, I did bogus basin for our tune time, and instrument specific things that are grouped. That's the way we've organized this one. Today's lesson is going to be under, skills and techniques. So that is up here when you log in to Dawson Crossing as a way to help you revisit the things that you might have heard, and you're trying to remember what it was that he said. That's the way to do that.

Alright. Well, thank you for joining me today. If you oh, there is one other thing I wanna remind you of. If you are, if you're not quite sure you wanna dip your your toe all the way into the water, but you are interested in some things going on in the dulcimer world. Here's the other thing I wanna remind you.

Registration is open, but only until Saturday for the largest online festival, the Quarantine Dulcimer Festival, which takes place all on Zoom on the beginning of June. A registration closes at 7 PM EST on May 27th. That's Saturday. So, that's Saturday? Let me confirm that.

Yes. It is. And there are some room in, not some classes are full up. I've got a class that's full up. But there's room with a lot of teachers, And you click on the register button.

Let's get there. Click on that register button, either place. And there's a tutorial about how to do it, but you can, search by let's see. Let's search by fingerstyle. I wanna see what happens.

Oops. That didn't bring anything up. Let's see. Aaron May. Search by Aaron May.

Oh, I shouldn't have clicked here to check out. That was my problem. This is gonna show us no. It's not showing this. Let's use Eulberg and see if we can find anything.

This is how I check to see which course is there. It's coming. Yeah. It shows everything that, connects with the classes that I'm teaching. You can search for your favorite instructor.

I'm gonna search now for fingerstyle and see what it says. Yeah. Here's all here's different fingerstyle. These are both guitar, Irish bouzouki, and guitar. That's where now if I put finger picking oh, let's see what picking does.

Let's do a flat picking. Yes. I can whoops. Now I gotta get rid of the 3. There are some fundamentals for all of these things.

So you can you can search by name, you can search by theme, you can search by instrument, But they're very affordable, 1 hour classes that you can use to dip your toe into the water. And, I encourage you to take advantage of all the things that are available, because we live in a resource rich time. And if you want, Dulcimer Crossing to be one of those resources, reach out to us. If you wanna join the face group, the the special Facebook group, send me an email, Steve at Dulcimer Crossing, and I look forward to seeing you soon. Bye.

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Skills and Techniques-Finding a Daily Rhythm for Practice

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