A Little Bit Better

I woke up this morning and ran scales on my bass. I've been doing this for about a week now, just jumping on it in my first minutes of wakefulness, and I like how it starts the day.

I'm still taking my time, progressing up the major scales, slowly getting my basic skill set back.

But today I realized that I was just playing the scales... I wasn't taking the time to understand the notes that built them. The fretting is great for bringing back muscle memory, and the work helps rebuilt hand strength and dexterity. Yet... if I don't know what I'm playing, it's just going through the motions.

I started over again, this time going slowly, saying each note out loud as I played it, finding the commonalities between the scale structures. I re-ran the scales in different ways that I'd learned while I was at SIU. There was a period of time that I was pretty strong in sight reading and understanding the building blocks of music. These days, I'm still mentally counting frets. Paying attention to the notes and taking it slow still helped, though.

I worked... and worked... and worked... and then I went to the gym.

I took yesterday off, and apparently my body used the time to rebuild itself a bit, because I was able to hit some goals I haven't been able to achieve since I'd gotten back from the holidays. Not saying I'm going to the Olympics anytime soon -- this is a very slight, incremental improvement. But shit... I'll take anything.

While I worked out, I listened to Strapping Young Lad's The New Black. I hardly heard it, though...  I spent the whole time mentally running the same scales, paying attention to the notes. I visualized the fretting, and after a half hour or so I was able to silently name the notes up and down the majors from E to C, where I stopped.

I came home and, just to try something out, I picked up my bass. And I played the fuck out of those scales.

When it comes to music, learning your scales is the most fundamental of exercises. It's the pathway to learning everything else.  But interestingly, there isn't an analogy to scales in writing. Of course, there's structure, grammar, spelling, etc. But that's a bit to the left. Those are rules, not exercises.

The closest comparison to scales I can think of is kata in martial arts. There may be something similar in other sports... would those be drills? I've never been a sports guy, so I wouldn't know.

Also... Directing? Editing? Not really, or at least none of which I'm aware. All of those are run by rules and inspiration, not exercises. For instance, there's a "grammar" to direction, but I'm not sure that going out and shooting wides, OTS and ECUs counts as the directing version of a "scale." And do improv and breathing exercises and whatnot count as the actor's version of "scales?" I don't know.

It's interesting to me that music has this unique bridge between a very physical activity - sports and martial arts - but is considered an art. Like a physical activity, it relies on muscle memory.

As Hagakure tells us, we should be better today than we were yesterday, and better tomorrow than we are today. For a long time, I only applied this concept to writing and producing. Now I'm seeing that it's possible to apply this basic concept to every area of my life.