Following The Golden Thread
One of the biggest challenges we face as musicians is how to stay focused while practicing. The guitar naturally lends itself to exploration, creativity, and “following the golden thread.” The golden thread is a beautiful thing, but it’s also the supreme disruptor of our practice session. Oftentimes this is a good thing. The golden thread is how songs get written, solos take shape, and how we hypnotize ourselves into the repetition that’s required to develop comfort with the instrument and better technique. By playing the same thing over and over without any sense of time, we enter into a deep state of focus.
The golden thread is that little lick, melody, rhythm, song, or riff you stumble upon out of the blue. Something about it strikes a chord (pun intended) internally, and we start toying with it over and over until it begins to take a clear shape. Maybe it’s the start of a new song. Maybe it’s a scale pattern. Maybe it’s the start of a new exercise. Maybe it’s an old song we love deeply. Whatever it is, we find ourselves playing it over and over, and this is one of the crucial elements of making progress. For creative people this is one of the most exciting experiences of playing guitar. Often the golden thread phenomenon happens when we set out to practice something totally unrelated. Most often it happens when we set out to practice something challenging; the golden threads show up as an escape route, an excuse for us to avoid the difficult work of practicing our instrument. Minutes go by before we even recognize we’ve gotten distracted. Without noticing, we changed over to “jamming” instead of practicing.
For unfocused people like myself it’s a daily battle to stay on track and practice the challenging stuff before we head off onto a tangent with reckless abandon. In thousands of practice sessions over 22 years of guitar playing, I’ve never gotten through an entire session without eventually getting distracted. I always diverge from the original reason I sat down to practice. Noodling is just built into the experience of playing guitar. The best musicians in the world strike some type of balance between their focused practice and the pull of the golden threads that show up when the instrument is in their hands.
This search for balance gets more elusive as we become better guitar players. More golden threads begin to show up. We get distracted and find ourselves playing something totally off the path of what we sat down to practice in the first place.
I encourage all my students to follow the golden threads when they show up, but also carve out a specific amount of time to focus directly on the weekly assignment or the challenging song/riff/exercise you’ve been working on. The point isn’t to be perfect, but to maintain awareness that both creativity & focus are equally important in the journey to learn the instrument.
Rob Wolfe teaches guitar lessons in Austin, TX, and teaches students all over the country through his online guitar lessons.