“Most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them.”
-Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
“If I had eight minutes to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.”
-attributed to Abraham Lincoln (though he never said it)
In our quest for badassery, it’s important to work not only on the task at hand––in this case our time & feel––but also to work on sharpening our tools.
There’s a real danger in failing to dig in and learn how to use your tools properly.
If you don’t know basic keyboard shortcuts and you’re trackpadding up to the menu bar each time you need to copy & paste…
You’re not using your tools well.
If you have to take your eyes off the road to adjust the volume on your car stereo…
You’re not using your tools well.
If your multi effects pedal has every effect imaginable, but you can’t immediately add a wah sound when the bandleader asks for it…
You’re not using your tools well.
On the other hand, we guitarists tend to be what Gretchen Rubin would call overbuyers. We’re too invested in our tools and don’t spend nearly enough time putting them to use.
We’re the sort of people who buy new shoes in anticipation of taking up running.
Or we buy a whole suite of organizing products just to try out a different system of productivity.
The guitarist’s world is replete with shiny whiz-bang gear & gadgetry, a never-ending parade of new must-have items.
Why spend the day practicing when we can spend three hours online researching the latest and greatest effects pedals?
It’s a tricky balance to strike.
Yes, get your axe good and sharp.
Just don’t forget to cut down the damned tree.
Axe Sharpening: Setlists In Tempo
The axe sharpening we’re doing today is exploring setlists in Tempo. It’ll take us five minutes to learn, but it’ll save us two minutes each day––a solid investment.
1.
Start by selecting Setlist Mode.
You can save songs to a setlist from Basic Mode too, but Setlist Mode is the way to go for anything more than the most basic saves.
Although the different Modes might seem a little confusing at first, the whole showing-only-the-stuff-you-need-right-now paradigm is what keeps the app from feeling bloated and overly complicated.
2.
Set it for 60 bpm, 4/4, Beat 1 unaccented, Beats 2, 3, & 4 silent.
3.
Save this “song” using the button in the lower left.
Since it’s our One-Legged Table exercise from yesterday, we’ll call it “OLT One.”
Hit “Done” and it’ll take you back out to this screen:
4.
Now we’ll change the accents so beats 1, 3, & 4 are silent, and beat 2 is unaccented.
5.
Save it as “OLT Two.”
6.
Change the accents so beat 3 is unaccented and the rest get the silent treatment, and save as “OLT Three.”
7.
Same deal, but with only beat 4 audible.
Now we’re going to name our setlist, which is the least intuitive feature in the Tempo app (at least on iPhone, your mileage may vary).
If you want to skip this step, go right ahead.
1.
Turn your device to switch to portrait orientation and hit these little expand arrows.
2.
That takes you to this screen:
3.
Hit “Setlists”…
…to get to this screen.
4.
Hit the edit button…
…press and hold on the setlist (default name is My Setlist)…
…and now you can name this. We’ll call it “OLT.”
5.
Then hit “Done” to go back to here…
…and then these little collapse arrows to take you back to the app’s main screen:
Phew! Like I said, not nearly as intuitive as the rest of the app.
The good news is that if you have occasion to make lots of setlists, you’ll get good editing their names. And if you don’t, it won’t matter because you won’t need to.
As you might have guessed from the songs we just added to our setlist, we’re going to add a new element to the One Legged Table exercise––moving the “leg” onto each of the four beats in turn.
We’re also going to use Gig Mode:
We’re using Gig Mode because it gives us these big forward and back buttons.
If we hit them with the click stopped, it’ll move between songs in the setlist.
If the click is running when we hit those buttons, Tempo will immediately begin playing the next (or previous) song in the setlist.
Tree Chopping:
Return Of The One-Legged Table
1.
Select OLT One in the setlist. This is the exact setup we used for the OLT yesterday. Hit play.
Use the LEDs to help you find the beat, and begin playing whichever all-eighth-notes riff you’ve been using the last few days (C major scale fragment, eighth note Bury The Click, Peter Gunn, Pretty Woman, Crazy Train).
Once you can play with the visual cues, look away from the metronome.
When you can play it a few times in a row, tap the forward button.
2.
Now repeat that process for OLT Two: use the LEDs to find the beat, play the riff, look away from the metronome.
When you can play it without losing the beat, tap the forward button to get to OLT Three.
3.
Repeat that process with the click just on Beat 3.
When you can do that, run that process with the click on Beat 4.
You’ll find that with each different One-Legged Table you’ll fix some tiny subtle thing, slowly sanding all the rough edges off by some unseen mechanism.
I have absolutely no idea why this works so well, all I know is that it does.
For some reason, cycling through the various OLTs in turn really helps cement a good feel in your playing.
Ways To Use This In The Future
There are several ways to deploy this that’ll help your playing.
The most obvious is to play trickier riffs.
You could also play whole songs, taking one tune all the way through four separate times.
Some advanced practitioners start putting that one click on an off beat, like the and of 3.
You could set the click to cycle through the beats automatically, by setting the meter to three beats per measure (even though what you’re playing is four beats measure).
Because you’re playing in four over this, you would hear the click on Beat 1, then Beat 4, then Beat 3, then Beat 2, and then on 1 again.
You could get a similar effect while moving the table legs further apart by setting the meter to something like 5/4.
You’d hear the click on Beat 1 the first time through, on Beat 2 the second time, and so on.
It’s up to you to be on the lookout for interesting new ways of practicing.
There’s no sign on the door to the woodshed that says No Creativity Beyond This Point.
Let your creativity extend into the realm of your practice.
You’re going to be practicing for the rest of your life.
You might as well have a little fun with it.
Next we’ll talk triplets, and get you set up with some things to work on in the future.
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