Soft Hands, Warm Heart

I've spent a lot of time both practicing technique on the guitar and thinking about it. The reason for this is that I have had to wrestle with technique my whole life as a guitarist. This started when I was sixteen and my mother came home with a rented bass guitar from the music store. I actually wanted to learn drums, but as my mother explained, drums cost $12 a month to rent, but a bass guitar was only $8 and we simply couldn't afford the extra cost. This was 1966 and money was scarce. As my mother explained "they're both in the rhythm section!"

There was some real benefit in starting on bass guitar: that is pretty much going to guarantee a strong left hand. But the real problem was that I was fifteen years old and, in terms of mastering the classical guitar, I was about eight years too late. Yep, if you don't start young it is an uphill battle. But at this point, I just wanted to play in a band and that was pretty easy. In a few weeks I was rehearsing with my first band and we played our first gig a few months later. I don't recall what songs we played, but I do remember that we cleared a modest $6.70 (Canadian) each.

I didn't actually start to transition to a classical guitarist for a few years. I wasn't even aware of classical music until my late teens and never heard a classical guitar until I was nineteen or so. Then, of course, there was a distinct lack of teachers. I have told the story a few times of going to Spain in 1974 to study with José Tomás, one of the great maestros of the instrument. I went from being a hack guitarist to being quite good in the course of one year as I discovered when I auditioned to enter the McGill School of Music a few months after returning from Spain. Tomás was a great teacher, but like many great guitarists (musicians in general), not very articulate. I don't remember too many things he said about technique, but I do remember him demonstrating many things on his guitar.

He was a calm and relaxed player, but I didn't fully appreciate the benefits of this until years later. As I struggled to become a better guitarist I strained and wrestled with myself, sometimes losing my temper in frustration at not being able to do what I wanted to. Well into my career I saw a really relaxed player, Alvaro Pierri, student of Abel Carlevaro, the great Uruguayan pedagogue. The first time I heard him play I wasn't impressed. What he did seemed too low calorie, not very heroic. He played without much effort. Later I realized that this was his great strength: he played with little effort!

How many players are like this? Not many, to be honest. Abel Carlevaro himself, of course, whom I saw in concert in Toronto many years ago. It was really technically perfect and without struggle and strain. We might contrast this with Julian Bream, a very great guitarist and great musician who nonetheless, plays with great strain--his concerts were like an heroic struggle with the guitar. For even more extreme examples we could look at Eliot Fisk, who plays the guitar as if he hates it and wants to beat it to death. Sharon Isbin is almost as bad.

There is another category of guitarist: those who achieve technical perfection but at perhaps too great a cost. Both John Williams and Manuel Barrueco tend, in my view, to be robotic. Clean, even, precise playing but with perhaps a bit less warmth and charm than the music deserves. I'm sure I will get a great deal of pushback on that!

Now let me get to my title: I have mentioned before the benefit of practicing with "soft" hands. Shaping everything for a perfect result, but without straining and struggling. I employ this more and more in my practice. Another element is to practice slowly.  You don't have to go to extremes: one hears of famous guitarists practicing the Aranjuez before a performance at one-quarter tempo with a metronome. But you do have to practice at a super comfortable speed so that everything is easy and pleasant and comfortable.

These are things that are so obvious to great musicians that they never even mention them. I recall a clip of Isaac Stern talking about practicing: he said that it can take two hours of good practice, to make up for an hour of bad practice. What is bad practice? More and more it is obvious to me that it is practicing with strain, tension, awkwardness. Instead you have to practice with ease and grace. I sometimes find myself still trying to remove an awkwardness in a passage months later because I failed to make it smooth and comfortable when I first learned it.

The Italian concept of sprezzatura comes in here: this is the art of making something look easy. Well, it is not just that. You make something look easy by actually making it easy. Everything can be easy if approached in the right way--mind you, it might take a long time!