[this is the final lesson of our free Metronome Boot Camp series. you can get the rest of it here.]
The Zen Nippon School of Chick Sexing is one of my favorite educational institutions.
There’s the fun name, of course, but their teaching method is what makes me such a fan.
But let’s back up a minute. What the hell is chick sexing?
Chick sexing is the practice of determining a chicken’s gender when it’s still only a day or two old. Farmers are looking for the egg-laying hens, but at that point the hens and roosters look identical.
It would take you or me another six weeks before we could tell the chicken’s gender, and when you’re trying to raise hens to lay eggs, you don’t want to spend your money feeding and housing roosters.
If you can tell the difference between hens and roosters early on, it’ll save you a significant amount of money. So: chick sexers.
The chick sexer “reads” the chicken’s butt by glancing at it for barely a second, and then proclaims it male or female.
Professional chick sexers have a 97% accuracy rate.
But if you asked a chick sexer to explain to you what it is that she saw in those two seconds that led her to believe that a particular chick was a rooster, she wouldn’t be able to tell you.
Sexers arrive at that 97% success rate using only their intuition. Or perhaps phrased more scientifically:
They are using pattern recognition at a subconscious level.
Today we’re going to start training you to do the same.
The Zen Nippon School of Chick Sexing Method
In order to train this subconscious pattern recognition, a student works alongside a teacher. The student picks up a chick, looks at its butt, and ventures a guess.
“Male?”
“Nope, female.”
They pick up another one.
“Female?”
“Correct.”
Then they do it again. And again. And again. Thousands of times per day, for two years.
Whether the student is right or wrong, the teacher provides no additional information. There’s no “look at how the bump in the vent is slightly larger, indicating a male.”
There’s only “correct” and “incorrect.”
Constant testing combined with immediate feedback.
It’s a technique at the heart of Gabriel Wyner’s amazing Fluent Forever method of language learning. Here’s Gabriel:
“Practice alone doesn’t work. What’s needed is testing and immediate feedback. If you want to learn the difference between German’s biete (offer) and bete (pray)… then you need to hear one of those words, guess which one you think you heard, and then find out the answer. Every time you go through this cycle, your ears get better.”
It’s true. You can train your ears to hear subtleties that are currently inaudible to you.
And being able to hear those subtleties is the first step to being able to execute them well.
The Universal Exercise
The Universal Exercise dramatically transformed my playing, and by extension, my entire life. It’s my desert-island pick for guitar practice. If I had to pick only one exercise for improving my guitar playing––and I could only use that one exercise for the rest of my life––this would be it.
Not long after I started using this, my favorite piano player remarked “I don’t know what it is you’ve been doing this summer, but from May to September your time & feel has gotten so good. I keep turning you up louder and louder in my monitor mix.”
The Universal Exercise is a simple loop of testing and immediate feedback.
You pick a short musical phrase, record it to a click, and play it back.
Identify something that needs improving, re-record it, and listen again.
When your attention isn’t consumed with playing the music, you can better hear all those subtle areas that need improving: that note that buzzes, the uninspiring vibrato, how you should have let that note ring longer, the general clankiness, even your note choices.
There is so much information embedded in the music we play, but we’re far too busy playing it to hear it all. There’s just too much to concentrate on.
The Universal Exercise gives us a window into everything that needs attention. It lets us know what we don’t know.
Record it to a click. Listen back. Notice what’s not great.
Re-record it, focusing only on that one aspect you just identified. Listen back. It’s a little better, but still not great.
Re-record it again, listen back, find what needs improving.
It’s a simple process for improving your everything.
Nothing Will Make You Sound Better Faster Than Working On Your Time & Feel
Because this is Metronome Boot Camp, we’re going to use the Universal Exercise to improve our time & feel.
Looking at your waveforms against the grid lets you see clearly where you’re ahead of (or occasionally behind) the beat.
You can see where some rhythmic division or technique caused you to rush ahead.
The repeated testing and immediate feedback train your ears to hear things you couldn’t before.
Seeing your waveforms land ahead of the beat teaches you what rushing sounds like, so you can stop doing it.
You’re training pattern recognition at a subconscious level.
Setting Up The Universal Exercise––Overview
There are so many variations in gear & software. The Universal Exercise is going to look different at your house than it does at mine.
But if you focus on a few key things, you’ll get the most out of this.
The most effective UE setups all include the following:
1. Easy setup.
If it takes you ten minutes of futzing to get setup, you’re not going to use this enough. Whatever you use should be wicked quick to set up.
At home, I run a Tele -> Line 6 POD HD500 ->MacBook -> GarageBand.
But that’s only because the Tele & Line 6 are already set up, and I only need to connect one USB cable.
When I’m on the road, I’m far more likely to play my acoustic into the MacBook’s built-in mic.
Ease of use far outweighs sound quality.
2. Not too spendy.
Don’t use this as an excuse to buy more gear. You don’t need it. The industry standard recording software, a shiny new interface, and headphones endorsed by a rap mogul won’t make this one iota more effective for you.
If you’re a Mac, use GarageBand. If you’re a PC, use Studio One Free.
Use whatever headphones, built-in mic or super cheap interface you can get your hands on.
Do what you can with what you already have.
3. Visual feedback.
This exercise isn’t something I created––it’s been around for decades. People used to use a tabletop cassette recorder.
They’d record themselves playing along with the metronome, rewind it, and listen back.
You could still do it this way, but the biggest thing you’d miss out on isn’t the convenience of the recording software. It’s the visual feedback.
The harsh truth is that most guitarists rush. But they don’t know that they rush. And rushing makes your playing sound shitty.
I certainly didn’t know it before I started using the UE. But when you’re confronted with a brutally honest visual representation of your playing, it’s pretty hard to avoid noticing that your waveforms are consistently ahead of the grid:
…or that you pick up speed when you’re playing divisions.
Use the visual feedback in the editor window to train your ears.
4. Loops.
With the loop function engaged:
…recording & playback automatically start at the beginning of the loop. This makes putting in a lot of reps incredibly easy, especially when combined with…
5. Keyboard shortcuts.
When you’re doing something a hundred times per day, the amount of time you spend trackpadding and clicking adds up quickly.
Learning the keyboard shortcuts makes putting in that many reps so much easier. I’ll lay them out for you in the detailed breakdowns below.
Detailed Setup––GarageBand
1.
- Create a new empty project.
- Select Built-In Microphone and Built-In Output.
- Plug in your headphones, and then select “I want to hear my instrument as I play and record.”
(If you don’t plug your headphones in, the internal mic & speakers will cause feedback pretty quickly.)
2.
- Adjust the tempo to something reasonable:
- Enable the Cycle, Count-In, and Metronome buttons.
- Hide the library:
- And pull up the Editor window.
- Adjust the horizontal zoom on the editor window so that the highlighted cycle fills up most of the screen.
- Toggle off the Catch Playhead button (so the screen doesn’t scroll on playback).
3.
- Pick a short phrase, record four bars of it to a click, and play it back.
- R starts recording.
- Space bar stops it.
- Space bar again starts playback.
- ⌘-Z deletes it.
- Repeat.
- Repeat.
- Repeat.
Testing. Immediate Feedback.
Detailed Setup––Studio One
[I’m not smart enough to use a Windows machine, so I don’t have one. Please let me know in the comments if this looks or behaves differently on your computer.]
1.
- Create a new song. Name it & set the tempo to 70.
- In Preferences > General > Audio Setup, you’ll choose Windows Audio to select the built-in mic & output as your Audio Device.
- In Preferences > General > Keyboard Shortcuts, choose the Logic keyboard mapping scheme:
- Click Apply, and then OK.
2.
- Toggle on the Metronome & Count-In on the transport bar along the bottom.
- Then click on Metronome Setup.
- Set Accent and Beat to Logical 1 & Logical 2, and check the box marked Precount.
3.
- Create a new track by clicking on the + in the upper left.
- Make sure Type is set to Audio and click OK.
- Make sure your headphones are plugged in, and click on the Record Arm button.
- Under View, pull up the Editor window.
- Drag this thing:
…over to the end of bar 4:
- And make the Loop active by clicking here on the transport bar along the bottom.
4.
- Pick a short phrase, record four bars of it to a click, and play it back.
- R starts recording.
- Enter stops it.
- Enter again returns the playhead to the beginning of the loop.
- Space bar starts playback.
- Control-Z deletes it.
- Repeat.
- Repeat.
- Repeat.
Testing. Immediate Feedback.
What Do I Practice With This?
You can use anything.
- Little snippets of songs.
- Picking techniques.
- Improvising.
- Writing.
- Arranging.
- Vibrato.
- Bends.
- Singing.
- Harmony.
The list goes on and on. Hence the “universal” in Universal Exercise.
When you’re ready to seriously upgrade your playing by getting your time & feel together, I hope you’ll check out our FREE two week course Metronome Boot Camp.
See you out there,
Josh
