I’d like to think I look forward to my weekly guitar lessons. I mentally class them, however, as akin to a visit to the dentist. Why is that?
I carry a legacy of self-taught guitar from my teens: I know the common chords; I can play lead riffs up and down the fretboard on the blues scale. Fingerstyle blues doesn't leverage much of this: the action congregates at the top of the fretboard near the nut, where the frets are spaced wide apart, where reaching scale notes - melody notes - demands contortions of the wrist, the thumb, and overspread fingers.
I have found that I do not have good motor control across all my fingers and that moving them independently on and off the strings is a new challenge for my motor cortex.
The right hand is no longer wielding a pick; instead the thumb is meant to lay down an independent alternating bass while the other fingers pick out melody and harmony above it. There are a great many moving parts here.
Fingerstyle is said to be deceptively difficult. Not much of what I previously knew carries across beyond the chord shapes.
So my ordeal by fire proceeds as follows. I am asked to play my homework assignment - for example, a scale in E with alternating bass, or a blues in A with melody lines. I have practised assiduously for a week, but Rome was not built in a day, and neither is a clean chord change under scrutiny.
There are mistakes - sometimes at high density. A piece may be signed off by my tutor (relief!) and then I am asked to work - really work! - bar by bar on the piece I have just mangled, under his judging, observant eye.
I know myself to be a perfectionist. I concentrate and sweat, and there’s a dampness in the eyes (not quite tears of frustration and humiliation). I stumble through the piece.
“And again.”
My travails are not over. There will be a new piece to address in the coming week. I am shown it, and then invited to “have a go”. Yes, quite.
My instructor has become weary of my muttered mantra: “I haven’t seen this before - it will be much better next week.”
I am not good at reading music, at matching notes to fretboard positions and fingerings. And the tablature beneath the stave is simply one more damned thing to process in real time. Half an hour passes both quickly and slowly.
I leave with a curious sense of euphoria, reflecting that for the next six days I may practise upstairs at home, over and over again, without anyone watching over me.
