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"We are standing at the precipice of hell. The western model of growth is inherently toxic. It's highly capital intensive, and highly resource intensive, uses a lot of materials, uses a lot of energy, and generates a lot of waste. If every Indian was to live like an American, then the planet is doomed. And the planet is doomed forever." -- Sunita Narain, in the PBS television program Frontline, episode titled "Heat", aired (in my area anyhow) 2008-10-21. (Ms. Narain appears at about the twenty-minute mark.)

( Sunita Narain, on the environment and developing economies )

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The weekend's exertions took their toll. Despite spending the last third of yesterday resting, I was in no shape to do anything this morning, so this morning's plans are pushed to tomorrow, and my making it to 3LF tonight is unlikely (though I've not ruled out the possibility, if another short nap and medication are enough to make me feel like I can move and stand upright long enough).

Listening to other guitarists, I'm often impressed by really fast passages and how much effort it's taken on the occasions when I've tried to learn somebody else's solo. So listening to a recording of myself improvising in response to instructions to play something 'bubbly', I was startled to notice that it seemed faster, more flurry-of-notes, on playback than it had felt while I was doing it. It occurs to me that what I did, more or less, was to stack a bunch of ornaments together and then ornament the ornaments. And ornaments don't feel like 'playing fast' when I play them, because they're ... well not exactly atomic, but sort of 'trigger and forget', uh, 'finger macros'. That is, while I'm playing, I don't notice an ornament as a series of notes or a sequence of techniques, any more than I think of a familiar word as a sequence of letters or phonemes even though it is so. (I'm mostly thinking of ornaments like turns and mordents and slides and grace notes, but to some extent this also applies to vibrato, bends, palm-mute, etc.)

So maybe the way I should try to learn really fast passages in the future is to try to identify the composer's vocabulary of ornaments (at least when the composer is a strings player, fretted or otherwise) and learn those ornaments well enough that they become incorporated into my own, so that I can break the passage down into something slow enough to think about consciously plus a bunch of ornamentation in that artist's style.

Or maybe not; this is a thought that I haven't followed down into the details yet. But it seems like a thread worth following to see where it takes me.

( The weekend was too much. And an idea sparked by a "wow, did I really play that many notes?" moment. )

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