Or having a student who is dead tired at 3:00 am

Well I had my first lesson with Greg on Thursday and it certainly won't be my last, if Greg doesn't give up on me of course I guess that the awkward hour helped with my Skype connection that was working much better than when I tried with Eric (again thanks to Eric for the help in testing my setup before the lesson).
Now I have a lot of things to digest and try and practice, there is no substitute to hard work.
I think that the first thing to do when you get your stick (second actually after drooling and figuring out how to tune the thing) is to get a lesson asap. Is much better to start with your right foot than to unlearn / relearn things; old habits die hard.

Back to practice, cheers, Daniel.

I just had a lesson with Greg this past Wednesday, and thought I'd post my enthusiastic take on it here.

The quick and dirty summary would be this: a Stick lesson with Greg is like a guitar lesson with Robert Fripp- I doubt if you're going to find another player who has spent more time with the "where" and "how" and "with what" to play notes.

Unfortunately, the above paragraph probably ALSO explains why I'm certainly in the top 3 of Greg Howard's "worst students ever". (I WOULD have said I was the worst ever, but that might sound like bragging... ) in short, I'm a guitar player (someday I will stop being ashamed of that, but I will do that outside of this forum! ).

As Greg pointed out in the Skype lesson, a lot of guitar players playing the Stick have a certain "delay" or "disconnect" between the hands, and I proved that to him several times during the course of a half hour. But Greg remained patient with me- in fact, I'm not certain he could have been MORE patient, and that's the sign of a great teacher- which Greg is.

Not to give away any of Greg's trade secrets (and I believe that Greg has mentioned this before on this very forum), but it was very revealing, to ME, to realize how little I use motion from my elbows- if at all. After getting off the phone with Greg, I picked up that cursed guitar, and noticed that, unlike a lot of players that really flail and strum with a lot of elbow action (think any song off the first Ramones album!), my right hand elbow stays pretty locked, which is probably because I fingerpick most things on the guitar, whether it be classical or jazz or folk. When I DO play with a pick, the movement is all about the wrist and fingers- which may work ok on a guitar, but not so much on the Stick.

More motion equals more energy equals more dynamics and, paradoxically, more control. Listen to anything Greg's recorded and you can hear all that for yourself- and that level of musicality is there because he's focused on those "little things" that a comparative cavemen like myself overlooks. Just this morning, I ran through a few tunes from my latest cd while wearing my "post lesson with Greg" hat, and the old brain was kicking out observations such as "nope, that's not the right way to play it", "geesh- could I try to make that a little more sloppy?" and "clean up on aisle seven!"

Will I have another lesson with Greg in the future? You bet, if he'll agree to it. Chances are good, though, that it will be a while before that happens- I'd sure like to get down the basics of what our first lesson was about before assaulting him visually and sonically.

Greg has a clear and streamlined way of teaching- much like his music, there are no wasted notes and no wasted motions. If you haven't had a lesson with him yet, download Skype (which worked really well on my 4+ year old Mac) and give him a ring.

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the kind comments (a lot to live up to). I think you're too hard of a critic on yourself, though (perhaps the right balance of modesty and self-awareness is one reason why your music is so "musical", whereas some of us - myself included - tend to enjoy being "flashy" a bit too much). I must say, it's an honor to have all of you as students, and to have your trust as a teacher, especially those of you who are professional players, that's a real kick for me.

I was really glad to see the software worked on an older machine so well.

And to Daniel, I was really feeling for you as the lesson got later and later. Hope we can find a time that works better for you.

Don't let him ruin 'your thing' though Jeff!

digitalkettle,

Nah- lessons aren't going to ruin "my thing"- my thing has been ruined for a LONG time!

As someone who gave guitar lessons 24 years ago (the numbers don't add up, because I SWEAR I'm 25 years old... ), I was always VERY aware of- to the point of paranoia- that fine line between an individual's expression of who they were with an instrument, and techniques that could help or hinder that expression. And that paranoia multiplied by about 100 when it involved someone just starting out on the guitar; the worst feeling in the world for a young player is that feeling of "I'll never be able to make music on this thing".

There's the story about Gershwin deciding he needed to study with someone, and he went straight to Ravel. Ravel, bless his heart, refused, saying "why would you want to be an imitation Ravel instead of the great Gershwin you already are?". Believe me, Greg Howard's lessons stay far away from the sacred "personal expression" area- I know, because I gave him a chance to work over mine! I believe I said something at one point like "feel free to offer any suggestions about my music, like if you think it needs more of a death-metal-bluegrass sort of feel or whatever". He said "no, I don't do that, these lessons are just about technique".

.... and what in the world is that smiley supposed to be? He's green, for pete's sake- creeps me out a little. Oh, well- he looks happy....

Anywho- I've always let my compositions dictate what techniques I've used. And when I find myself with a musical idea that requires something I don't have, I work on it until I can play it. And if I can't figure out a way to play it, I figure out a way to cheat ("creative arranging techniques", I like to call them). Lessons with Greg will just give me more creative ways to "cheat" in the future.

Jeff

I think you totally nail it there, Jeff. It's something I try to keep in mind but often fall short of:

- instruments and technique can get in the way of your ideas (especially guitars!)

- getting a teacher is kind of like a mini-apprenticeship in becoming more like the teacher
...so I beg, steal and borrow in every direction (a chimera?)

David,

nah, guitars don't get in the way of ideas- I started out on the guitar, and will never stop playing it. I tend to agree with Chopin- "the only thing more beautiful than one guitar is two guitars". Sorry, Greg...

Neither does it get in the way of Stick technique (although some might think experience on the guitar gets in the way of "proper" Stick technique, I'd like to think that experience on the guitar goes far towards "im-proper Stick technique", and that can be almost as much fun! ). I think that Emmett has done quite well for someone who started out on the guitar... The same could be said of Steve A., Bob C., Tom G., Matt R. and Glenn P. and the list goes on.

I think the only thing that might lead to Tylenol-sized headaches is if you have your heart set on playing something on the Stick that is EXACTLY like a guitar- like "Johnny B. Goode" or something like that. Then again, I guess Don Schiff has played that on the Stick, so what do I know?

For the record, I can also offer that playing piano music on the Stick carries with it some landmines. After a show once, a piano player was asking me about the Stick, and asked "where's middle C?" I replied "well ,there's one here, and one here and one here..." She thought I was joking, but when I actually played the notes, she got this mortified look on her face and said "that's just not RIGHT!" She was dead serious, too.

In the end, instruments are tools, and if you play what you play with heart and soul, you're going to have fun and find out a lot about yourself.

.... that little green guy is starting to grow on me....

Jeff

That would be me

Hi Jeff,

There's always the risk, when trying to teach something that people come to primarily because it is different and unique, that a technique concept can be perceived as too dogmatic, or even "the right way to do it". People should play the way they want. My job is to make suggestions, especially when presented with problems like "my wrist hurts" or "I have no independence skills".

If I hear someone lacks dynamic or tempo control, or has great difficulty integrating repeated notes into a melody line, I'll work on large muscle movements. If I hear them running up and down scales instead of paying thoughtful solos, I'll work with them on thinking intervallically instead of in "positions."

So my references to the problems of guitar vestiges in lessons are sometimes a challenge to the student, especially to the student who sees The Stick as an extension of what they already know as a guitar player. Many of my favorite musicians are guitarists. it's one reason why I wanted to play The Stick instead of keyboards, the added expression (Glenn plays both, so he comes to this from a different perspective than most of us).

I addition to the endless supply of wonderful "musical ideas" we can glean from guitar, which are great sources of inspiration, and many technical elements, especially expressive ones like slides, pulloffs, bending, there is an underlying basic technique of activating the note that is completely different from the guitar process. It's not just fretting like you used to do, and it's certainly not just putting the right hand on like the left and applying the same guitar technique to that hand.

I don't want to get too deep in specifics on this, and I'd rather read what other people have to say.

Maybe this is my big blind spot as a teacher. And if I'm wrong about this, I'd love to see how, so that I can change that. My goal is to be the best teacher I can.

The guitar is a cultural icon. How we hear and think about music has been changed by it forever. It's hard to filter this out when taking on this new way of making music, but I think a certain amount of filtering has to be done in order to get to the essential "Stickness" of it all.

Thanks for the discussion. It's really helpful to me, and I hope others will chime in on this subject.

Well, Greg, if your goal is to be the best teacher that you can be, you can cross that one off the list. I could tell, halfway through our lesson, that you were as good as any teacher I've had on other instruments- and WAY better than most of them.

Likewise, I recall nothing "dogmatic" in any of your comments (although, in the hours before the lesson took place, Greg insisted that the Stick be tuned up before the lesson started- the nerve!!! )

.... man, I REALLY like that green guy...

There are definitely "intersecting areas" of technique with the guitar and Stick, and with the Keyboard and Stick, and even the drum and Stick; as someone who started life as a drummer, I certainly had some fun, in my first few days as a Stick player, pretending I had four drumsticks (DrumSticks?!?!) on my left hand, and three on my right. As someone who plays sax (and plays it well), Greg, it would be interesting to hear of any saxophone techniques that you've found helpful on the Stick; I'm thinking that the arm/hand positions might be similar?

Things get tricky any time the discussion of technique is brought up, so I'll offer that, although I don't know the approach of the other Stick teachers, I'm perfectly comfortable with Greg's take on things. What I picked up from the lesson was taking the approach of getting the best possible note in the most mechanically efficient way. I know for certain that if I could only play the Stick by tapping my nose on it, Greg would come up with the best way to do that. Hmmm.....

Jeff