Two men are standing at the base of a mountain, their glistening eyes fixed on the far-off peak. Excited for the challenge ahead, they exchange grins and begin working their way up the slope. After making steady progress, they eventually hit a steep section. They both try to climb straight upwards, but one of the adventurers quickly realizes that he simply isn't a strong enough climber to make it past the ice wall. He makes his way back down to solid ground, looks up at the peak once more, then abruptly turns left. "Where are you going?" asks the other man, still meticulously searching for footholds on the ice wall. "I will find a way around," replies the first. The man on the wall laughs in contempt.
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When I was in high school, I had a weekly assignment planner to help me stay organized. On any given day, there would be the usual barrage of largely pointless assignments, but I also kept track of goals for my own projects. Among these, there would always be at least one guitar goal each week. At the time I didn't view myself as a serious musician, but I desperately wanted to learn to play Glasgow Kiss, an epic progressive metal song by my hero, John Petrucci.
Memorizing new sections of the piece came quite naturally for me, but there were a number of sections that were so astoundingly technical that I would have to play them at half tempo just to get the notes right. This didn't phase me; I would simply set up a training loop in Guitar Pro (my most favoritest piece of software in the history of forever), drill a particular section over and over and over again until I felt totally comfortable, increase the speed just a little bit, and then repeat the process. As a total math nerd, I expressed my target tempo as a percentage of the actual tempo. As such, my weekly guitar goals frequently took the form of "Tapping section at 60%" or "Second verse at 75%".
Over time, I noticed a somewhat discouraging trend: there were a number of goals at around 80% that never got completed. I would play through sections at my highest possible speed literally hundreds of times, but whenever I cranked up the tempo just a little bit, it would completely fall apart. I didn't understand how it was possible to practice those passages so many times without making any noticeable progress. Eventually, after learning the entire song but still unable to improve on the tough spots, I lost interest. It had gotten to the point where it took a ridiculous amount of practicing just to maintain the tempos I had already reached; improvement and enjoyment were completely out of the question.
This exact situation repeated itself for all of the Petrucci songs I tried to learn: Damage Control, The Test That Stumped them All, Overture 1928, Beyond this Life, Constant Motion. I would learn everything, start whittling away at the tough spots, get completely stuck at a particular tempo, then lose interest and move on. A small part of me remained hopeful that I would eventually be good enough to tackle these beastly songs. A much larger part of me dismissed the idea, insisting that Petrucci was somehow a fundamentally different type of human and that I would never reach his level. A third part of me worried that even if I did improve as a musician, there were inherent physical limitations on how fast it is possible to play guitar without a pick.
In the weeks that followed my musical epiphany, there was one particular moment that threw all of those old doubts right out the window into a moving van full of sexually repressed wolverines. While practicing in my college dorm room, trying not to inhale the stench molecules that constantly poured out my roommate's feet, my fingers just decided to move faster than I ever thought possible. I literally stared at my guitar afterwards and thought "Wait, did that actually happen?" I played the same thing again; this was no fluke.
I quickly opened up Guitar Pro and calculated how many notes per second I had just cranked out: 16. Compare this to 10 notes per second, which had been my absolute maximum for months before this breakthrough. That change is the equivalent of Haile Gebrselassie posting a marathon time of 1:17:29. This kind of shit just does not happen in the real world.
It is important to note exactly what I was doing when the breakthrough happened. I was not drilling a metal riff over and over again. I was not even running through finger exercises. I was just playing around with a riff I had come up with the day before, and the sudden onslaught of notes was just the perfect continuation to what I had already written. I quickly tried to apply that newfound speed to a tricky section of Overture 1928, a Dream Theater song I had only recently forgotten about. Where before I had struggled endlessly, I was now magically imbued with the ability to hit each note at full speed.
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To this day, I still find myself trying to learn songs that are way beyond my ability level. If you had asked me in high school why I did this, I would have naively replied "I know I can learn this song if I just practice these riffs enough times." Now, if you were to ask me the same question, I would say "I realize that there are challenges here that I will not be able to overcome today, but I will push myself to do so anyway. When I have learned all that I can here, I will walk away. Then I will climb around the mountain."
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