Progress is like a puzzle
Image by WikiImages from Pixabay
When laying a puzzle, I usually start with the edges and create the frame. Those parts are the easiest to identify and combine, because it is obvious where they should go. After the frame is completed, I then pick out some key part of the motive. A couple of years ago me and my wife built some geography puzzles of a world map, and one such key part could have been to “let´s build Africa”. And then the other components. Finally, we laid down the oceans, which are all blue and thus by far the most difficult. That’s why they came last. Because without a framework it is almost impossible to place them at all. A very interesting fact about puzzles is that the closer you get to the goal, the speed of the building process accelerates. Just think about how quick you will lay down the final three pieces compared to the first three!
Tonight, I realized that the puzzle analogy works excellent when practicing a difficult song. And probably a lot of other things in life too… I am currently learning Meshuggah – Bleed on the drums and I am in my third year of daily practice. These last days I have certainly felt that my progress rate is accelerating. Things are “falling into place” and I have now started to focus on very subtle details when playing and practicing, like getting a solid 1/8 right hand groove on the HiHat/Cymbal, while doing polyrhythmic ghost notes and machine gun kick drums with the left hand and feet. I believe this is analogous to laying the oceans in the world puzzle. For every blue ocean piece you lay, there are fewer options to place the remaining pieces. Which makes it a lot easier.
When I began the project in July 2019, I was a blank slate on the drums. We had just bought a house and I finally had the possibility to install a drum kit in the garage, where I could practice 15 minutes every day. The first thing I had to do was to put down the framework of the song, aka the edges. In this case it was to learn the Herta Herta rhythms on the kick drums. I think I spent eight or nine months on that first intro riff alone. Crazy, I know. When the kick drums were somewhat aligned in a slow tempo, I added the hands and finally the ghost notes on the snare. Another critical work I did was to track the entire song in Cubase, as a MIDI file, to learn what was going on in all the patterns. I use that MIDI file constantly when practicing the structure of the song. I have a TV on a stand in front of my drum kit where I play back the MIDI file so I can see all the notes. Just like Guitar Hero.
Creating the MIDI file is perhaps equivalent to looking at the cover of the puzzle box, where you see what the result looks like. Just imagine how impossible it would feel to lay down a 1000–2000-piece puzzle without a picture of the motive! That’s exactly how it feels when you start to learn Bleed on the drums as a beginner. It’s somewhat different with music, depending on the song of course. To just listen to a song and replicate it by ear is usually simple. But it also depends on the song in question. There is probably someone out there who can learn to play Bleed by ear, but to me that seems to be one in a million or even more rare. Mere mortals are likely well served by creating a transcription of the song, when learning it.
I find the puzzle analogy very satisfying. With the puzzle, it is so obvious that the completion speed accelerates the more pieces of the puzzle you lay down. And I am convinced that this analogy holds, kind of like a law of nature when learning new skills. Just keep showing up every day and eventually you will get there. And when you reach that phase when the afterburner kicks in, is one of the best there is.
Can you recognize this puzzle analogy in your own life?