What’s In a Word? (or “repetition bears repeating!”)

When it comes to making music and to improving our abilities, whether on guitar or another instrument (or voice), we can often find our attitudes towards words, rather than the activity of making music, plays a huge part in our progress. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the following list and make a note as to which words evoke a positive response and which evoke negative reactions. And do yourself a favor and be honest about it!

  • Music
  • Creativity
  • Work
  • Practice
  • Original
  • Repetition
  • Freedom

Chances are likely that for most of you the words “work,” “practice” and “repetition” gave you more of an initial negative vibe than the others in this list. Rest assured that this is normal and that I don’t mean anything negative by “normal” since I’m sure if that word had been in the list you’d have had a negative reaction to it, too! That’s also normal, by the way!

Let’s face it – as much as we all know in our heads that the best way to learn and to improve is through smart practice and repetition, the idea of doing so leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a lot more fun to noodle around and improvise a solo over a backing track or to play a song we’ve got down totally cold because we’ve played it so often.

Hold on, what was that? We’ve got it down cold because we’ve played it so often? And just why did we play it so often? It’s probably because we liked it a lot or because we were incredibly motivated to do so.

And just what does “playing it so often” really mean? Notice we didn’t say we “practiced it” or “repeated it endlessly” or (horrors!) that we “worked on it a lot.” No, we “played it.” Funny that we have no trouble playing a song but yet we have no end of trouble getting motivated to work on some song. And interesting that in this case, as is always the case with making music, “playing” and “working” mean essentially the same thing. Whenever you practice a song or work on a line or phrase or repeat a particularly tricky rhythm until you’ve got it into your head and hands, you are playing music.

To be fair, getting past the connotations of words like “practice,” “work” and “repetition” is only the first step to making your practice more efficient and to helping you progress in your goals to become a better guitarist and musician. But for many players it’s a huge first step. So much so that just the simple act of getting over that initial negative reaction to practicing can lead to a significant increase of your practice time. That, certainly, is a move in the right direction.

So how do you, in practical terms, get yourself over this initial step? It pretty much comes down to one of two ways: you either fool yourself into practicing by calling it something else or you learn to not react negatively to words like “practice,” “work” and “repetition” (or to work through that initial reaction in a matter of heartbeats). There’s no right or wrong to either approach. It’s more a matter of what’s going to work best for you as an individual. It’s also quite possible that you’ll need to do both depending upon the occasion and your mood at the time.

Using the first method, essentially calling everything “play” definitely has more appeal but it also has an essential drawback, that being it’s easy to lose the focus and purpose of your practice. As you’ve read in the many articles in our Practice topics here at Guitar Noise, practice becomes a lot more effective when you work toward a specific goal. As you’ll also read in those articles, it’s good to have a number of goals going on at once and it’s also good to incorporate both review and “fun time” in your practice routine.

We use this approach in the many Guitar Noise song lessons, slipping essential elements of music theory and guitar technique into them in such a way that you may not even realize that you’ve picked up that vital information while learning to play a song. And while that’s good it’s also a bit slow when it comes to putting that information foremost into your brain.

Let’s face it. One of the things that makes it hard to get a lot of aspects of music and music theory into your brain is that you only really go over it while reading a lesson or practicing or (possibly) hanging out with other guitarists and musicians. When was the last time the conversation at the family dinner table (assuming anyone even has either conversations or family dinners together or does so at a communal location like a table anymore!) dealt with walking bass lines or the use of a dominant seventh chord? As much as you might practice privately, the working aspects of music takes up a very small percentage of your day to day activities.

So why not put it first, at least for the times that you are actively working on it? If you can get into the idea of “work” meaning “playing music” (which in turn should mean “having fun”), it’s nothing at all to get caught up into repeated playing a phrase, a scale, a song over and over in such a way that it can turn into one of those that you may one day use to avoid practice one day in the future!

And, as is often the case with our articles here at Guitar Noise, there are added benefits! If you can get yourself so that you’re not in the habit of letting your initial reactions to connotations direct your approach to life, you’ll probably find yourself in a better mood more of the time. It’s mindboggling how we allow certain words make us anxious or angry or sad. There’s a huge trap in connotations and folks in advertising and all sorts of media and art use them all the time to get you to think in certain ways. You might find your life a lot more pleasant when you’ve developed the ability to not let a word’s connotation dictate the way you react to it.

That’s just a matter of practice, work and repetition!

Peace