Mental Rehearsing

Lee Baucum · From: McAllen, Texas (Extreme South) The Final Frontier

Our band is working on Mark Chesnutt's version of "Heard It In A Love Song", which has lots of great pedal steel guitar in it.

I've pretty much got the intro, both turnarounds, and the steel ride learned; but, they are a bit tricky ... lots of B & C pedal licks.

I find myself mentally rehearsing the song, when I'm not behind my steel guitar. I do this quite often with other songs when our band is first learning them.

Often times I will wake up with one of these songs stuck in my brain and I will mentally play through my parts before getting out of bed. I find that it really helps me a lot.

Anybody else mentally rehearse songs?
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John De Maille · From: On a Mountain in Upstate Halcottsville, N.Y.

Yes, I've done that a lot. As a matter of fact, sometimes I have a terrible problem of my mind thinking of music as I'm trying to go to sleep. On occasion it will last for hours. I get up some times and play the steel or my acoustic guitar. Time seems to fly as minutes turn into hours. But, mentally working out the tunes has helped me add some interesting steel parts. However, I just wish I could go to sleep when I want to and shut my brain off for the night.

Jim Cohen · From: Philadelphia, PA

I do it often while driving.
Sometimes I'll just move the fingers of my right hand on my leg or on the steering wheel, in correct patterns, just to reinforce the muscle memory.
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Ian Rae · From: Redditch, England

So much of pedal steel playing is mental, tactical, mathematical that I find myself trying things away from the guitar.
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Greg Lambert · From: Illinois, USA

Always , otherwise I'll forget my parts and have to improvise.

Richard Sinkler · From: aka: Rusty Strings -- Missoula, Montana

I do it quite a lot. Just don't like doing it while I am trying to sleep.
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Kevin Fix · From: Michigan, USA

Same here. I can hear these songs in my head and the same time I am rehearsing them in my head. Gets a little scary in there sometimes!!!!!

Benjamin Franz · From: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

If you do a google search for mental practise neuroscience, youâ€™ll find there is quite an amount of research into this.

Dick Hitchcock · From: Wayne, Nebraska

I lose a lot of sleep doing this involuntarily, but I do learn from it. I'm not playing that much anymore, but I keep doing it. Sometimes for hours. Beats the hell out of nightmares!!
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Floyd Lowery · From: Deland, Florida, USA

I'm glad you posted this. I knew I was not the only one to do it. Smile

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Lee Baucum · From: McAllen, Texas (Extreme South) The Final Frontier

I take an early morning walk almost every day. That's a good time for my mind to work on music. I find my mind wandering back to a song when I mute the television during an annoying string of never-ending commercials. It also happens when I'm working on mundane chores around the house.

Fred Treece · From: California, USA

Yes. I am still in the beginning stages of learning pedal steel, and many of my â€œnew discoveriesâ€ are the result of thinking something through when Iâ€™m away from the instrument. I might hear somebody play something and think about how I would play it, or I might be having some small technical difficulty with a piece and just take a little time to visualize how to make an improvement. Teaching guitar has helped my own playing, applying the concepts I preach about.

Bobby D. Jones · From: West Virginia, USA

This is a common thing for me when working on something, That I have to do a precise move at the exact moment. I wake up thinking about it, Shooting a Bow & Arrow, A Rifle or Playing a steel guitar.
I go through all the moves taken to achieve the object.

I was a Police Firearms instructor from 1989-2006. One class in becoming an instructor was about NEURO MEMORY. It was about Doing the same sequences of moves in a specific order, Many times, Till your body will do it without thinking when your body receives the Exciter.

Your brain does not have to process the information, Your body just makes the moves without thinking.
As a musician we use our neuro memory in playing.
The Exciter, Vision, When we look at tab or sheet music, Our body moves bar, feet, knees and fingers move without thought.
The Exciter, Audio, When our ear hears a note of music and it is time to do a phrase or fill. We practice till our fingers, knees, feet and bar move without our brain actually processing all the moves required.
Do we have a PHD Neurologist here that can explain this process better. bdj

Charlie McDonald · From: out of the blue

I'm no neurologist but I've read something about this--The User Illusion by Tor Nortranders, about the thermodynamics of thinking.
(The title refers to a computer, where what you see is not what's happening inside; one is merely looking at the monitor.)

Hooking up a subject's brain with external sensors, a distinction can be made between motor neurons and those involved in perception.
Briefly (and roughly), when an instruction is given to lift a finger, it happens before the signal registers consciously--
that is, I think that I've 'ordered' the finger to move, causing the action, but consciously i'm merely seeing the result.
The action happens unconsciously and the brain 'backdates' the action so that I have the illusion of conscious control (important to humans).

That's crudely put, but it doesn't negate what Bobby said; the brain has already processed the action from repeatedly doing it.
The action happens faster than perception (because of the tons of information* that has to be thrown out in order to reach the desired result).

I sit down to type this (or play steel) and think that I'm causing the movement, but I'm really seeing it--muscle memory, if you will.

There, that should be a little less clear.

Certainly there are worse things than music to preoccupy the brain. The brain at best works musically in a symphony of frequenciesy.
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* a million bits per second, whereas conversation only needs 40 or so bits per sec. Too much information slows the process.

Terry Winter · From: Saskatchewan, Canada

This is interesting in that I have spent a couple of weeks combining wheat and mentally thinking a lot of steel ideas and when I got back to the steel I really had a "need" to get back to playing and my C6th in particular opened up with new ideas...go figure!

Fred Treece · From: California, USA

Jack Hanson · From: San Luis Valley, USA

I have been doing that with every instrument I play, from 10-hole harmonica to double-10 pedal steel, for decades and decades. Problem is -- it usually (if not always) sounds better in my mind than with the instrument at hand. And that may not be such a bad thing.

Charlie McDonald · From: out of the blue

I think it is a good thing. The brain alone works without traction; you can do anything. The traction is in the hands.
There are no actual parts in the process. Body and mind are one; mind isn't possible without a body unless you have a magical existence.
So the part (or the symphony) will sound better unimpeded by the fingers. If it weren't so, we wouldn't be driven to do it better. It would be perfect.

And if at some point ego gets involved in the process enough to think how cool the part is--well, it better be at the end of the song, and it better not last long.
Like Jackson Browne sang, 'When you stop to let 'em know you got it down / It's just another town along the road.'

Bobby D. Jones · From: West Virginia, USA

Fred you are so right. Good practice makes for good execution. Bad Practice makes for bad execution. That is where a good instructor/teacher who makes you concentrate and repeat the same move exactly till it come without you thinking about it, Your body just does it and does it proper and precise.

Jerry Roller · From: Van Buren, Arkansas USA

I really wish I could turn it off. I do this way more than I want to.
Jerry
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Richard Sinkler · From: aka: Rusty Strings -- Missoula, Montana

Billy McCombs · From: Bakersfield California, USA

I saw a Paul Franklin in a interview where he was in a conversation with an individual and you could see his right hand laying in his lap and his fingers were moving as if he were playing. Must have been working out a part for a George Strait song. Paul is my Hero.
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Jim Sliff · From: Lawndale California, USA

After playing for many years it was my primary rehearsal method. Because of family/job commitments I often didn't have actual practice time, but enough experience that listening to and thinking through songs worked just fine. I think it also helped with being more spontaneous and not being "locked in" to playing the same thing every time.
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Bobby Nelson · From: North Carolina, USA

I haven't been at the steel long enough to have experienced a lot of this yet. But, when I was younger and learning 6-string, I remember digging and digging on one particular riff or chord sequence or whatever, for months and months until I got so sick of it, that I decided if it was going to not come, I'd just forget about it and leave it alone. Then, maybe a few months later, it would magically appear as if I'd been playing it effortlessly forever. This seems to be the way my mind works on things - frustrating but effective.

Jeff Harbour · From: Western Ohio, USA

I have always naturally done this.

A very early success story was in my high school days as a percussionist, where I was selected for the all-state band twice. This was a particularly difficult audition compared to lower levels (such as all-county) because a percussionist had to demonstrate skills on snare, tympani, AND xylophone. I was a "drummer"... I did not play xylophone at all!!

I can clearly remember that I developed a system to practice the required pieces mentally any time I wasn't near an instrument. Also, in the case of the tympani and xylophone, I would practice the parts on a piano so that I could train my ears to memorize them (by 'hunting and pecking'... I don't play piano either...). This was critical for the tympani part, because it involved getting your ear close enough to the heads to actually retune the drums (very quietly) to another pitch by ear while staying in time rhythmically. Oddly, that was a more familiar task to me than the xylophone.

I still use both of these methods. The only difference is that now I put way more emphasis on ear training and sound memorization since my steel playing is mostly improvisation. It's rare that I am required to play any steel part exactly as the record, but if I am then I do mentally visualize the motions while I'm away from the steel.

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