Patience - An ability or willingness to suppress annoyance when confronted with delay. Quiet, steady perseverance.
We all want to improve as musicians. It’s why we practice and why we study the art form and, ultimately, why we became part of the SBL Academy! We put in the hours with the instrument, and we aim to become better at what it is that we do with the instrument...except that often, it doesn’t happen as quickly as we want it to. Or we feel as though we have plateaued, and that concepts, ideas or vocabulary just won’t go in or come out the way we want them to. What this comes down to is Patience.
Firstly, I’d like to discuss being patient with yourself. The human brain is an incredible device that man’s technology has yet to even begin to approach when it comes to flexibility, adaptability and its ability to retain information. But even the human brain has limits. I think we’ve all reached that point in our practice where your head starts to hurt, the frustration builds, and you feel like a over-soaked sponge. These are all clear signs that your brain has reached its learning limit, and that further attempts to learn new information on a given topic are not only futile, but potentially counterproductive and is thus indicating that either moving on to something else or putting down the bass and taking a break is the best course of action. This is where many of us (myself included) must develop patience with ourselves.
Everyone learns at different rates, and using different methods, and everyone wants to get that arpeggio, that chord, or that new lick down and integrated into our playing, preferably yesterday. But just as it took time for you to develop the ability to speak and to develop a fully formed and comprehensive vocabulary, so too it does so when developing your voice on the instrument. Pieces of vocabulary can take weeks or months for your brain to comprehend and your ears to accept, especially when they are not a development of something you already know. A good analogy would be suddenly studying the language of Shakespeare and expecting to be able to converse and speak that way. It would take time and no small amount of effort to develop. In the same way, if most of what you know and have practiced is within the realm of major and minor pentatonics, suddenly learning a ton of diminished or altered vocabulary is going to be a huge shift. Your brain and ears will be working overtime trying to process this new information and (more importantly) this new sound that you are working on. This takes time, the amount of which differs from person to person. Your brain is doing its utmost to process quickly, so sometimes it’s very important to recognise when the brain has reached its limit, give it a break and be patient with yourself! With time and application, that vocabulary will come out as a natural extension of your playing!
The second part of Patience I would like to address is patience with the process. In the modern world everything is available at our fingertips, so the concept that something won’t happen immediately is often a foreign one, especially to younger generations that grew up with the internet at their fingertips.
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Skill sets like the ones we use within music, such as command of harmony and improvisation take a great deal of time to develop, regardless of your learning pace. Being patient and playing the long game is thus a vitally important skill. A lot of videos on YouTube offer tips, hacks and tricks to artificially accelerate the process (such as “Improvise over any chord using one scale”). A lot of this is nonsense and often boxes you into a corner with no way to move away from it. Your focus instead should be on playing the ‘long game’ and thinking of where you would like to be in 3-5 years time. A strength coach whose work I admire said, when asked about advice for increasing lifts quickly, that searching for quick improvements leads to disappointment and (often) injury. Instead, your method should be to hire a good coach, train consistently and visualise your lifts in 5 years time. Not only is this applicable to the sport of powerlifting, but it also translates directly into our practice methodology as musicians. We often overestimate what we can accomplish in a day or a week, then we get frustrated that we are not improving as fast as we want to, then we often become dispirited. But if you visualise what you could accomplish in 52 weeks, or 365 days...suddenly there is serious capacity for improvement. If you then multiply this over 3-5 years, you can completely transform your playing out of all recognition.
Play the long game. Be patient. And above all, enjoy the process!