What We Should Play
From the book by Guillermo Cides
You arrive home with a ten-string instrument you don’t know how to play. That requires courage.
I am sure that you went through that.
Even so, the Stickista is, first of all, a brave man!
You could have seen it played in a concert, or have heard discs or watched videos. However, nothing is compared to have it hung in diagonal on your chest, there,
waiting, and you don’t know where to begin.
Ah! What a fantastic time that was! You are sailing through the challenge of ignorance, desire and audacity,
but at the same time you are trying to remain calm and go on. What a time!
I think there is something about starting to play a new instrument. But let’s continue. Your girlfriend (or boyfriend) stopped paying attention to you because you couldn't answer his/her question: "How does your new instrument sound?" So s/he has gone.
Then you begin your journey through the desert, with very little water, guided, roughly, by the sun,
not knowing for sure where you going to arrive. This period that I named the solitude of the Stickista, does not seem
to offer too many choices, or, at least that is what we thought. Anyway, I am going to share with you my experience with it.
Often, when I start a class with a new student who begins with the Stick, after he has just hung his instrument, I ask him to play some song.
The student replies in astonishment:
- Yeah, but I don’t know how to play. That’s why I came.
However I insist and the student begins to play, examining notes and finally outlining some timid and incipient melody. At the end, he is surprised at what he could do by himself,
before I began to help him.
All we can play the Stick. The complexity is not in the instrument, but in ourselves. It is not complicated to fulfil
your tasks or learn its positions and its technique. It demands only discipline and insistence.
One musician can guide another on this first part of the journey; he can teach harmony or show chords or some secrets passages, one more obscure than another;
he can teach exercises to train better your fingers, but what basically he should do is to convince his student
that he already can do it from the beginning. This period of attempts and falls will probably never totally end. There will be days of practicing alone, days of test-and-error in the best style of Pavlov,
days of discovering and adapting to the distances of the instrument and even to your own fingers.
It is very usual to suddenly find yourself "caught" by an exercise, like a human loop, or like an Indian mantra, repeating again and again a circle of exercises, not being able to stop.
That's a good way. At least this is the first part of it.
Don’t forget that you are using your two hands and they are trying to go each one in different directions, and moreover, they are united by the same rythm that is supposed to be common for both.
You also concentrate a part of your mind on the musical design, trying to make it sound good to your ears.
These tasks cause you to spend a great time hooked to a single idea.
Your girlfriend or boyfriend asks you whether you have learned nothing else than the piece you play for hours.
My advice: record and listen to what you make. In the middle of all these tasks, the critical part of our mind is not
one hundred percent awake, for this reason, it is good to use it while listening to what you have recorded during practicing.
It is possible that you will see that you must adjust your "tempo" section in the beginning, but don’t be hopeless.
There seem to be many different things, and there are, but you go the right way.
Now is time to make mistakes. Later on I will briefly summarize all the elements we must keep in mind.
In my intuitive and solitary beginnings, I discovered something peculiar: when you attempt to decipher a multi-rhythmic exercise, it seems that your mind arrives at one saturation point.
This is similar to what happens in the papillae of your tongue or with your pain capacity: there is a limit,
when you reach it you become saturated, and your papillae do not taste anymore. It also occurs to wine tasters; there is a point in wine-tasting when they already cannot feel the taste.
Your mind seems to say:
—OK, that's too much. Give me a second to process all this.
Therefore, it is necessary to stop for five minutes, hook off the Stick and forget for a while what you have been doing. Later, when you return to your exercise,
you will see that everything seems to organize and the exercise goes as if you always knew how to play it.
I have verified this several times with different musicians and myself.
When a student is finally ready to “talk” with his instrument, when he has learned its vocabulary and he can already build long phrases, then I insist on my first command and I ask him which song he would like to play.
Here, it is when one is back to the desert again: nobody will be able to tell you which song must be played on your Stick, except for yourself.
In an attempt to find it out, will appear your music, which will be as different as each musician that plays it.
One of my greatest pleasures in these teaching years has been to see the musicians play what they should play.
Could you show me how the Stick sounds?
Guillermo Cides
© Copyright 2005
www.stickcenter.com/Cides
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