Face Time

How much time do you spend with a harmonica in your face?

I have to admit that when it comes to the simple things in life, I am mostly a slow learner. It’s embarrassing. One way I keep from getting too hung up about this is listening to people I admire talking honestly about how they got good at what they do. They all talk about failure and struggle, being embarrassed, and just picking up over and over again to get back in the game.

Yesterday I listened to the first part of an interview with Kim Wilson at Dave Barret’s Bluesharmonica.com. He talks about his early days. He did simple, focused things to get ahead. He hung out with great musicians, jumped into playing situations even though he was not really ready, and treated the people he admired with a lot of respect.

But the main thing he talked about was spending a lot of time with a harmonica in his mouth. I believe he called it face time. If he didn’t that’s what I ended up with in my mind. I plan on listening to this interview a lot, because it is one way I can hang out with a great harmonica player.

Kim’s point was so simple it is easy to forget. Repetition, also called rote learning, is the oldest, deepest and most powerful way to learn anything. It may be humble, but it damn sure gets the job done.

Rote learning allows you to absorb music on an intuitive level in living color and surround sound (not to mention all your other senses – touch, taste, smell, your 6th sense….)

There is plenty of evidence that using the imagination to practice your moves in great detail is also a super powerful way to grow your skills and confidence.

But you have to feed your imagination the right information first, and that brings you back to rote learning, humble repetition. Your well-fed imagination becomes one more way to increase your repetitions even when you don’t have your instrument handy.

After listening to the interview with Kim, I picked up a harmonica and just played all sorts of things I have been playing for years. Songs, breathing patterns, pentatonic scales, the beginning of one of Big Walters instrumentals.

It felt good. And it made me wonder why I don’t get more face time with the harmonica, why I would think about practicing when i could just BE practicing.

It’s a good question. If it gets a harmonica in my face, it’s a great question…..

Bye for now…..