Discussing Molly Gebrian (Splinter Discussion of "Molly Gebrian 7 Months Later")

Maybe this post can bring together both Sidokar's and ShiroKuro's ideas

On conclusions: There was the "scientific" observation of I think a phys ed. prof. and snowboarding. S/he was trying to perfect snowboarding by focusing on feet and the board; and only succeeded after shifting focus on destination. The CONCLUSION presented was that to succeed, we should not focus on how to use our body or on the instrument, but only on the sound we want to produce. This became advice in one of the videos. So:

In my experience, strings players are usually taught heavily to focus on the body and the instrument, so they may have too much of that. In this case, switching your focus on the desired sound may counterbalance this. In my case I had almost no training on instrument/body; I was sound-oriented in the proposed ideal way. Without the body and instrument awareness, I did awkward things that produced the desired sound but was not sustainable. For someone like me, the counterbalance is to focus on body and instrument. When I responded in the YT video, MG agreed with my conclusions.

The thing is that anyone trying to learn from that video would see that THE way to progress is to switch to focusing on the desired sound, because that was the CONCLUSION presented. I could only give the counter-argument because of my experience. Hopefully it might help someone else if they read that exchange.

Yes - there is experimenting. But your experimentation will also tend to base itself on underlying premises. You'll tend not to try this or that if it's contrary to the premises presented by someone with the title of expert, and where the ideas are labeled scientific. If you can forego bot the title and the label, and be as skeptical until proven as if it was given by the mailman down the street who happens to play piano or viola, maybe that's a good way to go.

I went down these routes a few decades ago. I even pretended I was a kangaroo (cf Havas).

PianoMonk As for the “five hour thing” and time wasted after that…

Listen to the title track from John Coltrane’s album “My Favorite Things”. That group did 50 takes of that song, with the recording session going from early evening to the next morning. The take used on the album was the 49th.

What she said was the brain could not learn more after ~5 hours (I'm pretty sure she said 5 hours). Different situation from doing takes.

PianoMonk A small interjection here, as I believe twocats' clarification is a good one and deserves fair consideration. Hopefully it wasn't your intention here to be entirely dismissive, although I certainly understand there might be a difference in opinion.

I'll add my perspective as a hobbyist who both practices and has recorded performances.

1. I've not gotten anywhere close to 5 hours of dedicated practice. I simply can't see how that would be productive to me and I don't have the energy for it. I think you need to be real dedicated or a professional to be able to approach that and I'm sure some people can do it.

   As a lifelong learner in other domains, I have no trouble at all in believing that there are practical limits to returns on investment after 5 hours. We can debate over the number of hours or the merit of the scientific studies, but I expect there is certainly a ceiling.

   As an upper limit, few of us would benefit from practicing 24 hours a day, for example, brains certainly require sleep for durable learning.

2. On the other hand, I have gotten close to 50 takes and I have often chosen the 49th take. Often for me it's a choice between the 2nd take OR the 49th take. My early "good" take is usually very pure and my later "good" take usually has a bit more spice to it. I used to favor the 2nd take, but sometimes I feel like the 49th take is closer to the vision of I want to achieve.

All of this to say, is that I suspect that comparing 1 & 2 is more like comparing apples and oranges.

Hoping we can have a healthy conversation.

navindra Hopefully it wasn't your intention here to be entirely dismissive, although I certainly understand there might be a difference in opinion.

Disagreements are always fine as long as things are said in a respectful way. But PianoMonk there's no call for rudeness. It shuts down the conversation and brings down the tone of both the thread and the forum.

navindra Hoping we can have a healthy conversation.

Thank you, I hope so too!

twocats Rudeness???
I think a lot can be learned from "Takes" as well as "Practice". You obviously don't and felt it necessary to dismiss my "take" on "takes" as not being relevant to MG's philosophy, or whatever it is. My comment of "whatever" is me running out of the mental capacity to defend my comment about Coltrane's recording session.

PianoMonk Rudeness???
I think a lot can be learned from "Takes" as well as "Practice". You obviously don't and felt it necessary to dismiss my "take" on "takes" as not being relevant to MG's philosophy, or whatever it is. My comment of "whatever" is me running out of the mental capacity to defend my comment about Coltrane's recording session.

Yes, rudeness (and I'm not the only person who feels this way). If you didn't have mental capacity, you didn't have to respond right then or at all.

MG is a neuroscientist and the 5 hours was referring to practice and the brain's capacity to learn new things. It's also not a philosophy, there are scientific studies that show this or she wouldn't have mentioned it (there are probably some people who are outliers but most people are going to have this limitation).

Repeated takes by professional musicians who already know the music or can improvise it on the fly isn't about training the brain to learn the music, it's more about finding a take that has the right magic. It's about creating art, not developing a new skill. As @navindra said, it's apples and oranges.

@keystring's post said it well.

PianoMonk So... once a musician has a piece "worked up" it's not possible for them to learn anything more about it? Have you ever actually worked with other musicians in a recording session? Improvising over, let's say, a 2 - 5 - 1 section of a song using various scales or modes, and working on which of those is best suited to what one wants to convey, is most certainly, in my humble opinion, a learning exercise.

Wading in here - what I'll write may make sense or no sense.

What I learned predates Molly Gebrian's recently discovered material by 15-20 years from where I began. I am not following what she presents as such. Her ideas mesh with some of the things I learned, but there's less. The goals I've seen so far also seem to differ at times. She seems to be looking at what she needs at this time for what she herself is doing and applied in a manner that suits her needs. (Discussed recently somewhere here - hence her encouragement to tweak for your own needs).

Ok, so when I work on music, I may apply things I know to shape the piece. In a "classical" context where you're not changing notes or find better chords, you might choose to stress or bring out this or that note, put rubato over here in this way, do this or that with the pedal. You may want to coordinate something between your hands and feet. You're using what you have and know, like an internal dictionary that you possess. What you describe seems a non-classical application, and here you must possess a dictionary of chords, progressions, scale types - whatnot. As you develop things you are learning, keeping what works, discovering things. Maybe I see this as a kind of free-flow. I've done my variant of that and the clock stops. Suddenly its an hour later and you don't know how that happened.

There's another kind where I'm forming that dictionary. A lot of it is also like I'm playing "from the surface of my mind" without that deep an awareness. I have had to learn to hear not just when a note starts, but also when it ends and flows into the next note. When I play a melodic line that seems predictable, am I actually hearing it or am I inserting a note that seems right but isn't that note? My way of pedaling was to press way down and lift way up, because of my first poorish instrument. To change that around needed inordinate, moment-by-moment concentration. Any moment I thought I was still doing it, but had gone into freeflow. For THIS kind of learning and focus, that only lasts a short time.

I think we have different kinds of learning, different kinds of practising, different kinds of goals. Might that make sense?

PianoMonk Have you ever actually worked with other musicians in a recording session?

Yes - bands, gigs and latterly 25 years in recording (pop/rock) I’ve never encountered anything in a studio setting that would resemble 'learning'. Pro bands with big budgets (lazy, fun, wasteful of expensive studio time), orchestral sessions with fluent readers (tight, up to 20 minutes of recorded music in a 3-hour session), pop sessions with musicians booked for their particular style - often non-readers but superb players culled from a mix of ‘name’ bands. It’s an expensive affair and everyone is booked for their ability to deliver. No one is learning anything. For my sins and too many 2,5,1s, none were ever dissected.
The penultimate take is often the best. Producer: “…that was great, let’s just try one more!”

Nightowl If you look at how this conversation flowed, I think you will find that no one objected to dissenting opinions about Molly Gebrian's methods. What caused this recent hubbub was the response of "whatever.." following this entirely inoffensive statement (twocats).

The "whatever" might not have sounded rude to some of you, but it did to the person it addressed. I've stated it above:

rsl12 If people are offended by a joke or criticism, It's not nice to shrug off their feelings, or to restate the joke/criticism in a more emphatic way. Please use manners and show some consideration.

I don't think it's too much to ask.