A while ago I made a short post on Harp-L, a great harmonica forum that has been around for quite a few years. Harp-L folks love to argue about things, and for the most part they are very good at expressing their passions without getting into too much of a food fight.

One of the latest controversies was triggered by this quote:

“I suggest you listen to your
favorite players and practice there licks and before you realize it,
you will be coming up with licks of your own. What makes a good
player? Is the person having fun? That to me makes a good
player……..”

Saying something like this to a forum of SERIOUS harmonica players is a bit like saying “All you need is Love”, to the folks in the line at the unemployment office. Some of them are going to want to throttle you.

So I have to admit that this person is leading with their chin a bit, waving a red hanky at the bulls of propriety. But there is a fundamental truth to this idea. If learning a new skill is no fun at all, you are not going to stick with it long enough to get great at it.

Plus fun to me implies a different state of being that allows you to pick up on information that you miss when you are “working”. I’ll explain…. Her is my post (with a couple of changes) to the Harp-L on this topic:

“The discussion about having fun vs learning techniques seems to imply that you have to take a stand. You are either for fun or for really learning the instrument.

Why not both?

When you are having fun, you are relaxed. I was an art student, and I found parallels between vision and hearing. There is a “soft gaze” which uses peripheral vision, and there is a hard focus which brings details into sharp focus but cuts out the rest of the picture.

The “soft gaze” for me is always more playful and relaxed, AND necessary to get the “big picture”. The hard focus is concentrated, and I suppose more like “work” and is how I fill in the details.

Focused practice with music is like the hard visual focus, and jamming and playing around with music is more like the playful “soft gaze” that alerts me to all sorts of input that I filter out when I am in the hard focus state.

I need both to be a good musician.

And I think we all find our own combination of these two elements, consciously or intuitively.”

When I find myself getting tense in my life these days one of the questions I ask myself is “Is there any way this could be more fun?” This instantly loosens me up and I find myself picking up on all sorts or new ideas and noticing the people around me more. I get more creative, relaxed, and effective.

Recently I approached improving one of my instructional CD sets “Train Rhythms and Pentatonic Scales” by asking myself “How could I make practicing breathing exercises, pentatonic scales and patterns more fun? – They get boring…”

I ended up hiring a Studio drummer to set me up with some rhythm tracks that he recorded on a 1948 Ludwig drum kit (for that woody human soulful feel) for people to practice the scales and breathing exercises. The exercises instantly became a lot more fun AND effective.

So i think that  it is a good idea to welcome fun into an anything that has become stale, boring.

To quote Dr Seuss:  “If you never did, you should. These things are fun, and fun is good. ”

And:

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself, any direction you choose.”

May the force be with you!