2/4/24 How to Play Like a Five-Year-Old

Do you remember the first time you really had fun with music?

Maybe you were 5 or 6, dancing with total abandon to some music. Or you pretended to be the conductor and waved your arms around. Or you sang along with a favorite song or with someone who was playing guitar and singing songs you knew.

Remember how easy and fun it was? How natural and instinctive it felt to just jump around or sing out, before people started telling you to sit down or be quiet?

All my life I have tried to keep a little shelter for my 5-year-old self to dance around in. A place where no one will tell me to stop.

And that includes me.

I need to shelter my inner child from my grown-up professional musician self, working on things and improving, full of self-judgement--I’m supposed to be practicing, right?

My teachers spent years very teaching me how to teach myself—how to practice. Probably the most important thing a teacher can do, and I’m beyond grateful.

Practicing is a deliberate focus on critical listening—am I doing this well or poorly? Does it need improving? Is it good or bad playing? These kinds of questions are necessary to the process of improving.

But they can be in direct opposition to another very important part of being a musician, and that is to be an unobstructed conduit of musical joy to anyone who is listening.

Yes, we need technique to accomplish this feat of being a musical conduit—and the technique of string playing is extremely demanding.

But we are what we focus on.

And if we focus only on critical listening to improve technique, we risk losing touch with that 5-year-old inside who just wants to dance around, sing out loud and wave their arms around like a fool.

Luckily, being in the musical moment like that is such a strong feeling, that 5 minutes out of an hour of practicing may be enough to keep the flame alive.

But, it’s always good to remind yourself, when you step into that practice room, that what we are trying to do is really difficult. And when you are trying new things or doing difficult things, we sometimes have to step back and stop for a few minutes and play something really easy—put on a recording, something you love, and play along to it--to allow ourselves to be children and just enjoy making sounds on our instrument.

To just play and not worry about the outcome, whether it’s good or bad.

Because if it feels good to play and to listen to, it is good. And if it doesn’t, it’s bad.

Groove on
​--Tracy