Green Belt: Level 4 Guitar Lessons

Your Attention Channels

Playing an instrument is hard. Playing an instrument well is very hard, and requires a great investment. Why not invest some time in learning how to really concentrate, and open up the creative channels between your ear, your fingers and your heart? Otherwise, without the ability to concentrate and focus we are doomed to mediocrity at best, and constant disappointment at worst.

Rather than trying harder to concentrate, why not identify and remove distractions? Let's group these distractions into two broad categories: external and internal distractions.

External Distractions

External distractions are those distractions outside of us. The TV is an absolute killer of concentration... turn it off. You can't play while working your day job, changing a diaper or driving, so you have to make time in between these other necessary activities to play guitar with full attention. Make quality time early morning or at night when winding down to play.

Internal Distractions

Now that you have made quality time to practice and eliminated unnecessary external distractions, we turn our attention to eliminating internal distractions, or are those that go on in our minds and and steal creative energy away from your purest musical intent.

Before you can eliminate the excess noise in your head, you first have to identify and isolate each signal and assign each signal to its own channel, just like the channels on a multi-track mixer. In no particular order, here are 16 of some of the common signals I hear on my neural channels, which must be controlled:

• Track 1: What I was doing before I sat down to play
• Track 2: What I need to do after I'm done playing
• Track 3: What my left hand is doing right now
• Track 4: What my left hand is going to do next
• Track 5: What song to play next
• Track 6: How well my right hand is keeping time
• Track 7: That tone I'm trying to get
• Track 8: Audience's interested in my playing
• Track 9: What I want to say musically
• Track 10: Attacking that troublesome stretchy chord without losing the beat
• Track 11: My options for muting the strings and rebounding from mistakes
• Track 12: What the rest of the band is doing in the moment
• Track 13: The self applause for that really cool voicing I just love to play
• Track 14: That fly in the room
• Track 15: The self loathing for the mistake I just made
• Track 16: I wish I could afford that new Taylor guitar

Now that I've identified each source of noise, I have full control over each channel discretely and separately. Those channels that are positive and reinforcing my musical intentions I can amplify separately and discretely, while those channels that are negative and distracting, I can switch off entirely.

If you think this visualization is a bit hokey, then at least give it a try before you dismiss it. You'll be amazed at what is really going on in your head when you truly listen to yourself think. By strongly visualizing your control over both distracting channels positive channels in this way, you gain remarkable control over your thoughts in any situation, you spend more time "in the zone" and years of mediocrity and frustration melt off your total experience.