The graduate student looked away, idly scratching his head. "Well, I'm grading homework problems in my calculus class, and there's this one exercise I can't figure out..."
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At some point during the past few weeks I was lying awake at night, pondering the various things that one ponders, when a question suddenly popped into my head: "What is the simplest thing that I cannot do consistently?" Over the days that followed, I continued to think about that question while practicing guitar, searching for those exercises and patterns that were deceptive in their level of difficulty.
After a few days of noodling around, I devised a series of exercises designed to improve independence between the fingers on my left hand and those on my right. Using my roommate's bass, I would take a finger pattern on my left hand, such as index-pinky-middle, and play it at each position on the fretboard twice. The tricky part is that I would play the notes using an arbitrary pattern on my right hand, such as middle-ring-index. When the two finger patterns are similar, the exercise is easy. When they are completely different, as is often the case for the four-finger exercises, it becomes very tricky to coordinate both at the same time. Overall, there are 1296 exercises total, of which I have completed 816 in the past three weeks. Thrilling, as you can imagine.
In the past, I've discussed the philosophy of only working on one's strengths, which has been fervently advocated by the legendary Steve Vai in many of his interviews. It may seem that these two ideas are contradictory: if one is working on the simplest thing that one cannot do, then one must surely not be working on one's strengths, right? When I first realized this, I thought to myself, "Hmm, you're right, you rugged man-beast." But after thinking it through, I no longer agree that there is a contradiction. "Actually, you're wrong, you useless bag of cocks. Go back to the dumpster from whence you came."
It is true that many of the answers to the question "What is the simplest thing I cannot do?" lie within the realm of my weaknesses. My pinch harmonics are not consistent, I can't sweep upwards for shit, and I find rapid alternate picking to be much more difficult on the higher strings than on the low strings. But the exercises I described above are intended to improve independence, something I consider to be one of my greatest strengths as a musician.
I find it helpful to think of individual skills and techniques as vectors. Developing one's strengths often means extending the vectors that are already relatively long, but it's important to remember that the number of directions in which a vector can extend is infinite. This means that no matter how good you are at a particular set of skills, there will always be a very similar skill that is not as developed.
The graduate student finished writing out his work on the whiteboard. "So this is the answer I got, but it doesn't agree with the answer in the back of the book. At first I thought it was a typo, but almost all of the students got that answer, and none of them had the same answer as I did. I know I'm integrating correctly since my answer is only off by two, but I can't figure out what I did wrong."
The professor looked over the calculations for just a few moments, then slowly turned to face the student. "You do realize that cosine of pi is negative one, not positive one, right?" The graduate student blinked. "Oh. Yeah, I... that was... well, thanks for the help!"
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Week 21 total: 25.5 hours
Grand total: 518 hours
Required pace: 404 hours (+114)
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