Practice and Climbing

Everyone wants to be a rock star. You want to be able to strum out a few power chords, make it to the billboards, and be rolling in the dough. If you don’t want to be a rock star then you most definitely want to be a professional athlete. You dream big because that’s how we do it in the land of the free.

And that’s alright. Dream big. Just make sure that you know how you’re going to get from point A to point B.

I’m a very goal-oriented person. I set a goal and I reach that goal. Those are my dreams. But as soon as I reach one of those goals, it's not basking in that glory, but moving to the bigger and better. There is always a goal beyond the goal; miniature dreams that help to shape the overall.

On multiple occasions I’ve heard people exclaim of how good I am at guitar. Immediately following that, they say something like “I’ll never be as good as you.” Those people should be hit. They don’t get it. While I know that I am a decent guitarist, it is seldom that I am satisfied with where I am at. My ability isn’t good enough and it never will be. I'm not saying that that will make me famous, but I'm saying that that's what it takes to be good.

I try to practice a couple hours a day. On top of a rather busy schedule and many other hobbies, that's a lot of dedication. And it's constantly pushing forward, not backing myself into a creative rut. That's how I get better. When you’re intentionally writing and learning at your skill level, you can’t get better. You have to push yourself every day. If I see a new technique that I want to learn, then I write a song that utilizes that technique. Then I practice for hours until I can use that technique at will.

See, the problem is that no one in music wants to work at music. Music has never been, nor will it ever be, straightforward. You cannot hold your skill to a scale to see how good you are. Consequently, not too many people seem to ever see their ability on that scale. There is what one can play and what one cannot and that's wrong.

In addition to playing guitar, one of my many other hobbies is rock climbing. 3-5 nights a week I go to the gym to climb for anywhere from an hour to 4 hours. The motivation I see with people who climb far surpasses those in music. I believe it’s that people have lost the ability to push themselves to do anything uncomfortable and uncertain.

At a climbing gym there are different taped climbs that you can do of varying difficulty. The scale at Reading Rocks runs white through black; easy to hard, respectively. People can see how good they are doing and everyone seems to be driven to climb bigger and harder.

And on your way up, you may fail. If you’re not falling at some point, you’re not trying hard enough. It’s great to get to the top, but if you get to the top of something you had previously fallen on, you can say that you have gotten better. Time and time again I see kids in the gym beating themselves up working on one move or on one climb. Until the make it. Then they move on to something harder.

No one in music wants to do that. They use the same 4 chord progressions, the same time signatures, the same keys, and the same bag of tricks every time. Nothing new.

So you wrote a new song? What makes it anything more than filler? The radio is full of filler and that's why it is dying. If you’re thinking “that song’s great!” then you’ve got it wrong. It’s only subjectively great when you give up trying.