I’ve been playing guitar since my teens and have loved every minute of it. It’s given me the opportunity to meet new friends, to make cool music as part of various bands or alone in the comfort of my front room. Playing music is one of those life-affirming activities that gives me a huge buzz each and every time I pick up my guitar.
A few years ago, I took up Tai Chi, specifically Practical Tai Chi Chuan, which as its name suggests is a very practical martial art, focused on self defence techniques. Part of the training involves the performance of the slow, graceful actions that most people think of when Tai Chi is mentioned. You know the kind of thing, the exercises that you’ve seen people doing in Chinese parks as part of a large group, all moving in perfect synchronization.
After studying Tai Chi for a little while, I began to notice certain things that it has to teach anyone wishing to learn guitar. Things that practitioners of both arts need to develop in order to achieve the highest level of skill.
It Takes 10,000 Hours to Master the Guitar
It is a widely accepted fact that the time it takes for a person to develop a skill to the point where they can be considered an expert, is 10,000 hours. Whether the skill is playing a guitar, flying an airplane or using a spear in Tai Chi, all of these skills require 10,000 hours worth of practice before they are mastered. I think this is a useful thing to bear in mind when embarking on the learning journey. If your expectations are too high, you can easily become disheartened and give up. Whereas if you go into it with your eyes open you’ll stand a much better chance of seeing it through and mastering your chosen skill.
Relaxation is Key
Everyone knows that relaxation is important in Tai Chi; it’s famous for being the martial art that people take up partly as a form of meditation and relaxation. Apart from the very real health benefits that relaxed exercise brings, the martial side of Tai Chi demands relaxation so that the practitioner can respond quickly to any attack and feel the nature of the threat through the forces being generated by the attacker. If one is not in a state of relaxation then one cannot “listen” in this way and will not feel the nature of the attack. Maintaining a relaxed body during the highly stressful scenario of a fight also preserves energy and increases the endurance of the fighter.
The parallels with playing the guitar are less immediately obvious here but if you pause to think for a moment, it makes perfect sense. How many times did your guitar teacher tell you to relax? Do you remember when you first began playing and the effort with which you had to press the strings down against the fretboard? It seemed impossible to keep the effort up for a whole song, never mind an entire live performance.
Well, the reason that you now find this so much easier is that your technique has improved and you are much more relaxed when playing. It is possible that your muscles have become stronger and have increased stamina but I think this is a relatively minor factor compared to having a properly relaxed technique. I know this because a few years ago I took an extended break from playing the guitar. Any advantage I might have gained from building up my playing muscles would have been completely lost, but when I picked up my guitar again I found that I could play almost for as long as before without having to stop through fatigue. Solid technique wins over brute force most of the time. Relaxed fingers also move faster than tense ones, which means you can play faster when relaxed.
Practise Slowly to Improve Muscle Memory
In Tai Chi, one practises the movements very slowly and precisely in order to ensure the muscle memory is built up in a correct and accurate way. If practice is rushed, mistakes can easily creep in to the movements and the techniques, when executed at full speed in a fight situation, would not be effective.
This is exactly the same for the guitar. Practise at a higher speed before you are entirely comfortable with a particular piece at a slower speed and you’ll be locking in the little mistakes and imperfections in your playing forever, or at least make it a real pain to “unlearn” them later on. Always practise at a speed you are comfortable with until you’ve absolutely nailed whatever you’re learning. Then, and only then, should you increase the speed.
So, applying the principles of Tai Chi to your guitar playing will yield big rewards in the future. And you’ll be able to use the title of Tai Chi Guitar Master in your Stage Name, which is no bad thing.
