Mental displacement

This technique has to do with what I said about imagination so if you haven't read that, read that first. The difference this time is that instead of imagining that we're playing the guitar while doing regular things, we'll imagine we're doing regular things while playing guitar. There are a few differences between the 2 techniques, and reasons why both are important.

Firstly, the aforementioned imagination technique is about dealing with the experience of playing guitar by imagining a situation where we are completely fluent with the guitar, we do this with our conscious mind. The mental displacement technique involves having a guitar in our hands and imagining that it's not in our hands, so in this case we're letting our subconscious mind deal with the experience of playing guitar. They're both important because we want to use our whole mind while playing, this is what the most skilled virtuosos of the world are doing when they play.

Secondly, while imagining that we're virtuosos or at least at a higher level than we are currently, we're creating a situation in our mind that hasn't happened yet. In the situation of imagining that we're not playing the guitar, we can think of anything we want and to do this we can draw on past memories, these can be powerful because we've been there and we know what it feels like which makes that situation easier to recreate mentally, which makes it easier to draw our conscious mind away from the guitar and leave our subconscious to do its work (because it is always working).

Another thing to keep in mind is that we all have our strengths and weaknesses, some people are better at daydreaming and imagination while some others are better at noticing their surroundings, taking things in and remembering them. By learning about yourself you can figure out which approach is more suited to you. If you take the MBTI test and get an S (sensing) then mental displacement is probably better for you, if you get an N (intuition) then you're probably more comfortable with imagination. Regardless, I think both should be worked on but with more emphasis on our strengths, because we want to be strong players.

So now what kind of situations do we want to imagine ourselves in? We want to imagine situations in which we feel the way we want to feel while playing guitar. Think about why you want to play guitar, what feeling are you looking for? Do you play to relax? feel excited? have fun? look cool? Whatever vibe you're looking for, mentally place yourself in a situation that produces (or produced) those feelings. Feelings are what resonate with our whole body and our whole mind, including (and often stemming from) the subconscious, we want our subconscious mind to associate positive feelings with guitar playing. Some of my personal favourite situations are:

- relaxing in a hot bath or in bed
- going for a walk on a sunny day
- playing video games
- snowboarding
- skydiving (I haven't skydived before but I find this one good because it's a situation of freefall where your muscles have nothing to do and can relax fully, but it's also exciting)
- having a cold beer (I do this one because while holding a beer up to my mouth with my left hand, my arm and hand are in a positions reminiscent of guitar playing, which can help get into it more.)
etc.

Remember to not put too much pressure on yourself and that it becomes easier and more effective the more you do it.

Lucid Dreaming

One of the more elusive but extremely rewarding ways of boosting your guitar progress is lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is when, while asleep and dreaming, you realise that you're actually in a dream and become able to treat the dream world as such.
There are several levels of lucidity one can attain, at the lowest level the dreamer realises that they're in a dream but still treats the situation as reality, running from scary elements and avoiding danger as if it would hurt them. At the highest level the dreamer has total control over everything in their dream world, they can teleport, fly, dodge bullets and simply dissolve problems and challenges that might have arisen in the dream situation.

You can probably guess how this relates to guitar, it's like using your imagination during the day except that it all feels just as real as reality, you'll be getting extra hours of practice time in a world you have total control over, which means you could be jamming on a beach in Hawaii or composing melodies with Mozart in the 18th century, whatever you can think of, and you'll still be able to feel your fingertips on the guitar as vividly as in real life.

Sounds good right? It is, but lucid dreaming takes a lot of dedication, practice and perseverence, just like guitar, so if you've learnt how to apply yourself to guitar, those same skills of discipline and hard work can be adapted to lucid dreaming. If you haven't learnt how to manage yourself yet, you can use lucid dreaming as an incentive to do so, since the benefits go way beyond guitar, you can solve personal issues, meet people you've wanted to meet, chill in a UFO, it's great fun once you manage to do it.

Here are some tips to get started:

- Get Paul Scheele's Self Hypnosis Paraliminal CD: Dream Play

- Before you go to sleep, decide what you want to dream about and decide to notice that you're dreaming once you're there.

- Keep a dream journal, every day when you wake up write down anything you can remember from your dreams, whether they were lucid or not, if you don't have time to write it down, make sure to think about your dreams throughout the day so you don't forget them, or get a dictaphone.

- Get into the habit of performing reality checks, these have never really worked for me but many people find them to be essential and you have to know some to be able to verify that you're actually dreaming, so that you don't mistake reality for a dream and thoroughly embarass yourself.

- Read a book or watch movies about lucid dreaming before going to sleep, the dreams you have during the night tend to reflect what you were thinking about while awake, if you happen to have a dream about lucid dreaming, you're likely to think about checking if it's a dream or not.

The world of lucid dreaming is incredibly vast and if you're going to tackle this I recommend that you do a good amount of research, it also helps to figure yourself out and keep a clear mind, good luck!

Learn about yourself

It's easy nowadays to find out about other people's practice methods and follow routines people have come up with to obtain results, but with such a wealth of information at our fingertips, how do we know what will work for us? We certainly don't have the luxury of spending large amounts of time trying everything out. The answer is to learn about yourself, because everybody handles things differently, techniques that worked for other people won't necessarily work for you and techniques that didn't work for others might be just what you're looking for.

There is a very useful, practical and scientific method of personality classification called the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (known as MBTI). This system was created during World War II to determine which wartime job a person should have based on their personality, it states that there are 16 different personality types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and some far more common than others. This system is still in widespread use today within the corporate world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

To determine your type, take this simple online test:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

Once you know your type, take note of your strengths and weaknesses and think about how you can apply these to guitar practice, if you're an extrovert, maybe you should have a teacher or practise with other people, if you're an introvert, it's probably better to practise alone etc.

Meditation

Focus is something that's essential to good guitar practice and playing. By focusing, one can increase the value of any time spent on the instrument, meaning that if you focus, you won't have to practise as much to obtain the same results, this is why some people can do in 4 years what some could never come close to in 30 years.
To be able to practise guitar properly and not be distracted by the thoughts bouncing around your head, you must clear your mind, the way to do this is through meditation.
Meditation is a skill that can be practised on its own but can also be practised with the guitar. The way to do this is to sit down with your guitar and have your fingers do something that doesn't require a lot of thought, like forming a chord or performing a stretch, then meditate.
There are many resources online teaching how to meditate but the number 1 thing I've noticed about meditation is that it's not something you DO, but it's a bunch of things you DON'T do. So when you practice, forget about:

- How good you think you are

- Whether what you're doing is difficult or not

- Whether you should already be able to do this or not

- Everything

This sort of goes hand in hand with the idea of convincing yourself that what you're doing is easy, professed by many great players, except we're taking it a step further and just forgetting about what's easy and what's hard in the first place. Telling yourself something is easy is also telling yourself something else is hard, just forget the whole notion of difficulty.
Also a useful thing to remember is that if you start to think that it's boring, you're not doing it right.

Imagination

Ever wish you had more time to practise? Is everyday life always getting in the way? Common logic dictates that less practise time = less development, this is completely true, so it's in our best interests to practise as much as possible.

Time spent out of the house or away from the guitar doesn't have to go to waste, because there's something more important that you bring with you wherever you go, it's your imagination.

Whenever you find yourself doing a task that doesn't require your full attention (walking/getting a train/listening to your girlfriend(I'm joking, ladies)) just imagine that you're playing guitar. Doing this won't be so easy at first but will become easier and more rewarding with time. One of the best things about doing this is that in your head, you can be as good as you want to be, if you become good at imagining that you're good, you'll become more comfortable with the idea of you being a good player and it will reflect in your real playing. Don't believe me? Hear it from the gods:

Paul Gilbert:
"The high points are playing music and playing in big venues. The low points are the hours spent in airports and minivans. This kind of rock n roll cliche. It's not hard to survive - I just bring some books. I also just visualise playing guitar and I can actually practise in my mind."

Steve Vai (skip to 04:28):


There are all sorts of ways you can use this approach, you can:

- Practise specific techniques (legato, sweeping, chords)

- Practise theory, visualising chords, scales, patterns

- Practise actual music, running through it note by note (if you can do a whole piece in your head this way it'll be a piece of cake on an actual guitar)

- Pretend you're someone else, imagine that you're your favourite guitar player, you're literally in their shoes (except they're now YOUR shoes because you're them). Picture yourself playing their songs the way they would play them, having that look on your face that says "I'm the best thing that ever happened to the world" or "I wonder what's for dinner tonight", depending on the player.

- Practise being on stage, performing all your favourite moves without needing to worry about getting the parts right.

- If you're listening to music, imagine yourself playing it as you hear it.

There's endless amounts of fun you can have with this and the best part is that it'll reflect in your actual playing, you may even feel physical sensations in your fingers/arms/shoulders as you imagine that you're playing which will give you insights as to what you need to work on when you next sit down with the guitar.

Self Hypnosis and Paraliminals

Hypnosis can be a very powerful tool for dealing with anything in life and guitar is no exception. This is an option that isn't usually considered or even known about because people don't know how feasible it is. Self hypnosis pretty much just involves lying down and listening to a track recorded by a hypnotist. I've used it to deal with everything from stage anxeity to musical creativity and it's saved me a lot of work and frustration. You can listen to self hypnosis tracks either during the day, before you go to sleep or while you hold your instrument (playing will usually be too distracting).

Paraliminals are a special type of self hypnosis that play you two tracks at once, one in the left ear and one in the right ear (you have to be wearing headphones), this is significant because each ear is connected to a different half of the brain and each half processes information in different ways. One channel of the track will be geared towards your creative right brain, speaking in images and metaphors while the other will be optimised for your logical left brain, speaking in concrete academic terms.

Here are some self hypnosis tracks and paraliminals that I've found useful:

Self Hypnosis for musicians:
http://www.sambrown.co.uk/

Paraliminals:

The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar

The Principles is one of the only methods that deal with the subject of guitarist muscle tension in any level of detail. Created by Jamie Andreas, if there's any one piece of learning material that you ever need to have it's this book, it outlines an entire process for building solid and flawless technique. This blog that I write can be considered like an add-on to the Principles method. Just like the Principles will help you use any other learning material you may already own, my tips will help you use the Principles.

More information available at Jamie's website:
http://www.guitarprinciples.com/

Posture

We've all been told many times that we need to sit up straight and how important good posture is but why? When we sit up straight it eventually becomes uncomfortable and good posture shouldn't be uncomfortable.

In reality good posture can never be a static position, the reason for this is that posture's number one enemy, gravity, is a constant force acting on our bodies, slowly crushing our internal organs and spinal columns with our own weight. If we want to counteract gravity, we need to produce an equal and opposite force that acts upwards and to do that we need to use our own muscles. This may seem easy but the most important part of this upwards motion we need to produce is that it has to be constant, just like gravity, you need to be doing it all the time, especially when playing guitar. This will get easier with time, since after experiencing the comfort and power of good posture, slouching will become less comfortable than sitting up straight.

Ok so we know what needs to be done, but how exactly do we do it? Where does this anti-gravity force come from? Well you don't need to think about every muscle you're using, just imagine your head softly floating upwards, like a balloon, this'll pull your spinal column straight and take a whole load off your shoulders (namely, your head) freeing up your sides, arms and fingers for relaxed control.

There are a few things to watch out for while doing this:

-Overdoing it, always do about 80%-90% of what you think you could be doing, exerting yourself will defeat the point of being relaxed.

-Lift your head from the point where it connects to your spine so you'll be looking more downwards than upwards, tilting your head back will pinch an important group of nerves that runs along the back of your spine through your neck and you'll feel pain. Like slouching, most people are doing this all the time, they're just used to the pain and tension that it brings.

-Avoid becoming stiff, every once in a while shake off any tension along your back, movement is good for relaxation provided it's not too violent.

Look up The Alexander Technique for a fuller description and a whole list of benefits that this simple exercise will bring to your everyday life:
http://www.alexandertechnique.com/

Breathing

Here it is, the number one habit to internalise, comfortable and constant breathing, it might sound basic and it is, but most players are restricting their breathing when they play. This tendency causes a lot of problems especially for people who want to sing at the same time. If you don't think you have any problems with this, I urge you to examine yourself and really pay attention during tough sections, people don't realise they're doing this because it has come to feel natural.

Here are some things to think about:

- Are you always breathing while you play? You need to make it happen.

- Use your diaphragm and picture your lungs expanding downwards, you should be breathing into your belly, not your chest.

- Breathe in and out through your nose, not your mouth
(more on this: http://www.breathing.com/articles/nose-breathing.htm)

- Is it easier to play on the exhale or the inhale? Practice each one seperately.

- Do you hold your breath during other daily activities? If you have a stressful job or you spend a lot of time in the same position (i.e. sitting in front of a computer) paying attention to your breath and making sure it flows easily will ensure you don't approach the guitar already tense from a tough day.