Fiddling and Your Talent

The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle, says that greatness is not born, it’s grown. Brain biochemistry involving myelin explains how this is so.

As we learn a new action, as we repeat a new action for better control, we are building myelin around the nerve sheath. This build up of myelin allows the nerve pathway to transmit signals faster and more often.

From there Coyle explores high achievers, hot beds of talent development, and world class coaches. (The student that gave me the book said I reminded her of the description of such a coach. She said it was the faraway, vacant look I get just before I say something.)

The book has changed the way I practice and the way I teach. It didn’t introduce any new element for me. It raised the frequency of certain focused techniques I use to learn music. It made me lead students through certain kinds of drill more often than I used to.

I wrote a piece on practice tech: The Top 10 Practice Techniques. The use of rhythms in practice, which I wrote about in Fiddle Practice Techniques, is specifically discussed in the book as a staple of the Meadowmount string camp.

To generalize this as a philosophy of learning, here's what Coyle says. He calls it “deep practice.” It's not about doing something the easy way. Not about the path of least resistance. Those sheaths are already well developed.

Putting good focus and concentration in a way that almost struggles with the material is what builds new pathways, new myelin wrapped conduits.

My experience with deep fiddle practice has revealed the ultimate in drilling down to the smallest constraint that prevents me from playing a passage well.

It’s the note. Yes one pesky note can throw off a passage, and therefore, an entire tune, since the passage is repeated every time you go through the tune. Some tunes will repeat a passage four times every once through the tune.

I first tuned into this while playing the B part of Tam Lin an octave up in third position. Coming from the high D on the E string, the part sounded solid until I got to the cadence, or resolution. Suddenly it was mushy and unclear.

The problem turned out to be one renegade note, the C on the D string in third position. It was not clear and consistent, nor reliably in tune.

When you discover a single recalcitrant note like this, there is a simple practice technique to fix the problem. Play the shy note with long bows and listen closely to the sound. Get very well acquainted with the note, how it sounds, what it feels like. Make sure it’s in tune.

Then approach the note from another note and be sure that you get the note sounding just the same, in tune, with the same feel of the note in your hand.

For the icing on the cake you can tweak it a little bit sharp and flat, just to hear the sound and feel what your hand experiences. Now, you are definitely wrapping myelin around that note. With a little time and effort it becomes one of your notes.

Here’s an interesting side note on playing long tones. I heard this story from Pauline Oliveros. (I wrote about this in Tip No. 9 in The Top 10 Practice Techniques. (Link above.)

When she was in California, in her earlier days, she and Terry Riley and Morton Subotnick experimented with playing very long notes. I believe they were not the very first musicians to do this. But, they did it a lot as a musical study.

The ironic benefit was that Pauline could play faster, with greater accuracy than before.

It’s deep practice, deep hearing, deep kinesthesia.

Now, let’s go wrap some myelin!

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