Needless complexity or not?

[PosauneCat]

I posted this as part another thread but it veered so far off the path I think it deserves its own post:

I’ve probably explained my situation ad nauseum now, but in the interest of clarity and context here’s the nutshell version: I started playing at about 14, went to a good conservatory for undergrad school for performance and lit, grad school for other pursuits in music, got out, played professionally for a while in Boston and NYC, then ultimately stopped playing to follow other paths in music. 25 years later, here I am, just trying to pick it up again for fun.

It used to be easy, now it’s really hard. No doubt my facial structure has probably changed to a degree and the musculature has to be developed all over again. To make things even more difficult, there’s an incredible glut of information out there, much if it conflicting, much of it just wrong, much of it so complex you need a degree in human physiology to grasp it, and some that’s practical and really good. Back in my day (how’s that for old man talk?) Remington said TAH was all you needed and John Coffey said “just tongue and blow, kid!” (OK, that’s an over simplification, but not by much). Now things have gotten extremely complex and highly analytical, and occasionally pseudoscientific which is really hard to take. I liked the old days better (only in regard to the bone, generally things are better now). I was too young and stupid to know how hard it was! Plus, there are myriad things that happen each second you play, much of which are conscious and readily controllable, some of which are reflex and mostly unconscious, some are so deeply buried in physiological function as to be essentially invisible to analysis.

I have a friend who is a remarkable musician, truly gifted (many of you would know the name) and he laughs at some of the things he sees on YouTube and reads on webpages. As he says, people of all ages, skill levels, IQs, can put up anything they want and a lot of it is really stupid, or worse…dangerously bad advice. I know it’s easy for someone at such a high skill level as my friend to make it look easy and simple, but he thinks there’s too much information that becomes needlessly analytical and that in practice really accomplishes nothing other than the old cliche “paralysis by analysis.” He we may be right. I’ve been out of the game way too long to have a meaningful opinion on it.

I will say there are many more fine players now than ever before, but that’s probably because the general population has doubled since the days I’m talking about…and schools just keep taking in massive amounts of money and churning out far more people than the music job market can handle, at least in the US. And, thanks to charlatans like Malcolm Gladwell, et al., people have the half-assed notion that all it takes is 10,000 hours to be a genius at anything, regardless of the fact that you have zero talent. Let’s face it, no performer gets to the top without first having tremendous gifts. Yep, almost everyone can get better, but in my business the folks at the top were born with the abilities that make them the best.

Anyway, I got way off track. My point was just that some things really were easier before we started getting bombarded with INFORMATION 24/7/52/365.25!! There’s great stuff, some stuff, and dangerous stuff and it can be hard to tease out the real stuff.

The over complication of things has been ex​ac​er​bat​ed by the glut of information and the general tenor of the internet. When I studied theory with Allen Forte we often laughed about how many theorists were really mathematicians at heart, music was ancillary! Honestly, I think was true of Forte as well, just look at how important he made set theory for 20th century analysis of dodecaphony. The same is now true of many performers and teachers. It seems they would have been more fulfilled going into medicine or physics. I have no dislike of meaningful analysis, regardless of complexity, as long as it yields meaningful and significant results. However, that’s just not the case in much of what is now available. I think y’all know what I mean. We often see diametrically opposing ideas in posts in this forum. Opinion is one thing, fact is another. Of course there are as many ways to play properly as there are people to do it, but there are some basic truths that are incontrovertible. How do we parse the meaningful from the ridiculous?

[Burgerbob]

Get a good teacher for the initial comeback, worry about the online advice later.

[Bach5G]

“ Now things have gotten extremely complex and highly analytical…”

Case in point: the D Yeo fMRI videos and we still can’t agree what they show and how to tongue in the low register.

[PosauneCat]

“ Now things have gotten extremely complex and highly analytical…”

Case in point: the D Yeo fMRI videos and we still can’t agree what they show and how to tongue in the low register.

Right?

[robcat2075]

Coming back: I've come back from multi-year abandonments of trombone playing a couple of times. It took about a year to get back to playing something like how I remembered it being when i played well. I never get all the way back but... close enough.

The glut of information: There is an eager audience for it. The answers they are looking for may be foolish quests, like a trumpet novice who thinks getting to double high C is what it's all about.

There are also a lot of self-learners out there. I'm self-learning the cello. I don't need to "find a teacher" because I know the world doesn't need me to play the cello anyway. However, I do find it interesting and useful to hear accomplished players talk pointers about this or that.

But much of the demand for answers is from people who did 'find a teacher" and find that the teacher is often lacking for answers. I had nine different teachers over my trombone lesson-taking life. A few were at the height of the profession but none were overflowing with answers or instructions. They could assign a page to two or ten for me to learn for next week and tell me if I got it right, but beyond that... ?

At the time I sort of accepted that i should just do the assignment and not ask questions but now i regard that model of teaching as bogus BS.

So i am unsurprised that there are many people asking questions today and many people venturing to answer them, for better or for worse.

You're not a novice. You've studied and played at a high level. You know what it's supposed to sound like. You can tell if this try was better or worse than the previous one. You can ascertain what you did differently to make one better, what to keep doing, what to discard.

I think you are your best guide and can ascertain what is sense and nonsense in the advice out there.

[CaptEquinox]

PosauneCat, the world really went to hell when they invented AM radio. Seriously, on some of what you've written, you're probably going to need to be more specific. It's still true that “a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on", etc., The internet has just made the whole process more efficient.

Talking about who is really gifted and who isn't and who sort of is and who sort of isn't is always going to be a murky subject, although there are aways examples most people agree on. Add trombone into the equation, and things get murkier. I've known some pretty gifted brass players that I thought didn't necessarily have the musical inclinations to match. But then again, that was just like my opinion, man.

You're a music theorist. That math can be related to music is certainly inescapable. But is that it, only?

[BurckhardtS]

I wouldn't say 'needless', but it may be 'needless' for you to know certain things if it doesn't apply to you. That's half the problem with internet forums is that people like to try to diagnose themselves (think how many people would have diagnosed themselves with cancer by WebMDing their symptoms) and they need a teacher to suss out the root of what their issue is.

Yeah I'd say the best way to progress at any level is to have a teacher who have a great combination of ears, experience and knowledge that you trust.

[AndrewMeronek]

To make a complex subject more complex: there is more than one definition of "complexity" going on here. Complexity just in the sense of a large volume of information to parse out is different from complexity as part of a large system where there are lots of interacting elements. The former may have lots of info but very few relevant interactions. But colloquially, people use "complex" in both cases.

[PosauneCat]

Coming back: I've come back from multi-year abandonments of trombone playing a couple of times. It took about a year to get back to playing something like how I remembered it being when i played well. I never get all the way back but... close enough.

The glut of information: There is an eager audience for it. The answers they are looking for may be foolish quests, like a trumpet novice who thinks getting to double high C is what it's all about.

There are also a lot of self-learners out there. I'm self-learning the cello. I don't need to "find a teacher" because I know the world doesn't need me to play the cello anyway. However, I do find it interesting and useful to hear accomplished players talk pointers about this or that.

But much of the demand for answers is from people who did 'find a teacher" and find that the teacher is often lacking for answers. I had nine different teachers over my trombone lesson-taking life. A few were at the height of the profession but none were overflowing with answers or instructions. They could assign a page to two or ten for me to learn for next week and tell me if I got it right, but beyond that... ?

At the time I sort of accepted that i should just do the assignment and not ask questions but now i regard that model of teaching as bogus BS.

So i am unsurprised that there are many people asking questions today and many people venturing to answer them, for better or for worse.

You're not a novice. You've studied and played at a high level. You know what it's supposed to sound like. You can tell if this try was better or worse than the previous one. You can ascertain what you did differently to make one better, what to keep doing, what to discard.

I think you are your best guide and can ascertain what is sense and nonsense in the advice out there.

This is a really nice post, Robert. Thank you for that and for sharing a bit of your history. I can’t add anything to it. I know I joke around in some of my posts but I’ll be serious here. It’s very frustrating having my background and knowledge, but after 25 years away I really am pretty much a novice, at least physically. The memory, slide technique, musicality, is there for the most part, but I have no comfort in the high range, and I don’t trust my embouchure. I think there are some things you develop very slowly and incrementally as a kid that become incapable of functioning properly if you don’t stay with it. I know tons of guys my age who have been playing for decades, many of them on this forum, who sound terrific, they are playing at very high levels, but they continued progressing all along. It’s easier to maintain muscle than build it after a certain point.

I’m not giving up until it becomes absurd to continue. Fortunately i have the time to devote to it. I’m not kidding when I say it’s the most difficult and frustrating I’ve ever tried to do. It’s an interesting journey.

[Cmillar]

Who am I...but, here are some thoughts from someone who has been playing seriously for 40 years at professional level in all styles of music and made some technical breakthroughs this year thanks to finally turning to Doug Elliott for some advice, lessons, and mouthpiece advice.

Get a lesson or two with Doug Elliott, or another trombone teacher versed in the Reinhardt methodology.

I've been fortunate and been able to have studied with some excellent world class trombone players and learned much about the art of playing music.

But, in retrospect, did any of them REALLY give any sound advice or really observe any brass playing problems insofar as really identifying what needs to be fixed, and then prescribe some remedies?

Having had a majority of teachers who were either the 'Eastman-school' or the 'Chicago-school' of brass playing, their methodology is really just 'do these exercises' and blow and practice.

Some others were actually very helpful, such as Dave Taylor in NYC, in getting down to working with some individual needs at a given point in their playing.

Anyways....get some lessons with Doug or someone who is on the same wavelength.

It's never too late to learn something about the art of brass playing.

[harrisonreed]

If you are having trouble, a teacher would definitely help. But I think that after I learned about musicality, how to articulate (stylistically, the jury is clearly out on how is actually done), how to hold notes for the correct length, how to end notes, and what is a good sound vs. a bad sound, there was not much a teacher could give me on the physical "how". The teacher is so important to be there to demonstrate what right sounds like, and to tell the student "that ain't it", and for insights -- "this is how I think about it, this is what works for me". But the teacher is often less useful for much beyond that. What is a teacher anyways, other than the person you respect ,but you really just want to be better than to begin with? There are exceptions, but I have no experience with those teachers. We've all tried as teachers to put into words exactly what we think is going on physically, and it's a tall task.

So, forget about all that. You gotta experiment on your own and get better at your craft, every day, as much as your ambition dictates. There is nothing you can read, hear, or see that will suddenly make you better. So, as a teacher I'll give some uninformative, non-descriptive, non-analytical insights that I've tried, all of which have worked for me to get better as a player:

1. How can I change resisters using only the back arc of my tongue? What does this do to the sound? If I can make it sound worse and less focused, can I make it sound better and more focused with just this component?

2. Do I have more endurance if the empty space in my oral cavity is a larger volume or a smaller volume? What do these two extremes do to the sound? How do I even change the volume anyways? How far forward can my tongue stay while I'm playing, and does that change depending on the register?

3. Are my corners too firm? Are my chops stretched across my teeth? Was my teacher wrong about everything they said about how the chops work? What if I just play with my face mostly relaxed?

4. Did I make an actual informed decision about the mouthpiece I use, or did I just pick one arbitrarily? Is the mouthpiece shifting around when I change registers? Do I
actually know anything about mouthpieces?

5. Is equipment actually important? Why does almost every great trombonist I can hear have a custom setup, especially their own mouthpiece, and are they just trying to cash in?

6. What exercises and studies actually fit with the music I want to make? Which actually help me? Which are a chore, and why are they a chore?

7. What the heck do I want to sound like, anyways? What the heck do I sound like, anyways?

Answer all those thought problems for yourself. I guarantee you the greats have all struggled, and been stumped by most if not all of these thoughts.

[PosauneCat]

Who am I...but, here are some thoughts from someone who has been playing seriously for 40 years at professional level in all styles of music and made some technical breakthroughs this year thanks to finally turning to Doug Elliott for some advice, lessons, and mouthpiece advice.

The key difference is that you kept playing for 40 years. Be glad you did! I’ve talked to Doug and others about this. I just couldn’t get the hang of pivoting. I have no doubt that it works for many people but I couldn’t make it work. It felt very awkward and when I could gain any upper register by pivoting I couldn’t play in any other range. My setting was so drastically changed that I literally couldn’t recover my normal setting in the mid or low register. Sometimes it feels like I should shift my whole mpc placement to the right but when I do that I sacrifice any hope if stability and a good sound in the lower registers.

The good news is I did buy the most comfortable and efficient mpc I’ve ever played from Doug. It’s fantastic and I recommend that everyone give them a try. The whole component system is brilliant. I just think my chops have changed too much over the years and what muscle memory I have from my playing days is now useless, in fact, it’s a hindrance. What I know was my normal embouchure decades ago isn’t anymore, so continuing to try to re-develop what feels right is futile. Conversely, trying to change position and/or pivoting also doesn’t feel right. I’m sure over the years physical changes can occur that inhibit what used to come naturally. Ok, I feel silly going on about this. It like a former college athlete pining for his glory days. I’ll give it some more time and decide what to do after that. I appreciate everyone’s input though. It helps to put it in perspective.

[PosauneCat]

If you are having trouble, a teacher would definitely help. But I think that after I learned about musicality, how to articulate (stylistically, the jury is clearly out on how is actually done), how to hold notes for the correct length, how to end notes, and what is a good sound vs. a bad sound, there was not much a teacher could give me on the physical "how". The teacher is so important to be there to demonstrate what right sounds like, and to tell the student "that ain't it", and for insights -- "this is how I think about it, this is what works for me". But the teacher is often less useful for much beyond that. What is a teacher anyways, other than the person you respect ,but you really just want to be better than to begin with? There are exceptions, but I have no experience with those teachers. We've all tried as teachers to put into words exactly what we think is going on physically, and it's a tall task.

So, forget about all that. You gotta experiment on your own and get better at your craft, every day, as much as your ambition dictates. There is nothing you can read, hear, or see that will suddenly make you better. So, as a teacher I'll give some uninformative, non-descriptive, non-analytical insights that I've tried, all of which have worked for me to get better as a player:

1. How can I change resisters using only the back arc of my tongue? What does this do to the sound? If I can make it sound worse and less focused, can I make it sound better and more focused with just this component?

2. Do I have more endurance if the empty space in my oral cavity is a larger volume or a smaller volume? What do these two extremes do to the sound? How do I even change the volume anyways? How far forward can my tongue stay while I'm playing, and does that change depending on the register?

3. Are my corners too firm? Are my chops stretched across my teeth? Was my teacher wrong about everything they said about how the chops work? What if I just play with my face mostly relaxed?

4. Did I make an actual informed decision about the mouthpiece I use, or did I just pick one arbitrarily? Is the mouthpiece shifting around when I change registers? Do I
actually know anything about mouthpieces?

5. Is equipment actually important? Why does almost every great trombonist I can hear have a custom setup, especially their own mouthpiece, and are they just trying to cash in?

6. What exercises and studies actually fit with the music I want to make? Which actually help me? Which are a chore, and why are they a chore?

7. What the heck do I want to sound like, anyways? What the heck do I sound like, anyways?

Answer all those thought problems for yourself. I guarantee you the greats have all struggled, and been stumped by most if not all of these thoughts.

Another very good post! I’m glad I do other things in music though. If I had to rely on my trombone playing for my musical fulfillment I’d be lost. There was a time, sadly, when it was how I defined myself, and probably others did as well. Picking it up again has kind of opened up that can of worms and made me search deeper to see if I may be defining myself too much on what I do and how well I do it, and not enough on who I am. That’s an issue that I’m sure a lot of people struggle with. In my current position as an executive producer there is no second place. You win or you lose. It can be brutal. Anyway, I certainly don’t want to start a discussion of the psychology of being a musician. You see, Harrison, I think too much!

[harrisonreed]

Well, to go back to the original meat of your post, I suppose, "how do we parse the meaningful from the ridiculous?", here's how I see it. Keeping it real and tongue in cheek here, I think this all applies to all of us:

1. You either care or you don't. No reason to parse if it doesn't actually matter.
2. You either respect the person whose advice you are trying to parse, or you don't. If they sound bad, or can't do the job they claim they can teach, they probably don't know what they are talking about. This is an internet forum, and plenty of people with "creds" spouting advice that seems sound until you hear them play. If the advice was useable, you'd think they would, like, use it. I'm sure many would say this about me, too. There is a spectrum. No one is immune from criticism. I started taking lots of the people here with creds with a huge helping of salt after I heard them play.
3. At the end of the day, you have to take a dump. You can't be reading a manual about how to do it while you're on the pot. Spending too much time worrying about how other people do it is a waste and a shame, like having to take a dump the second you get out of the shower.

[PosauneCat]

Well, to go back to the original meat of your post, I suppose, "how do we parse the meaningful from the ridiculous?", here's how I see it. Keeping it real and tongue in cheek here, I think this all applies to all of us:

1. You either care or you don't. No reason to parse if it doesn't actually matter.
2. You either respect the person whose advice you are trying to parse, or you don't. If they sound bad, or can't do the job they claim they can teach, they probably don't know what they are talking about. This is an internet forum, and plenty of people with "creds" spouting advice that seems sound until you hear them play. If the advice was useable, you'd think they would, like, use it. I'm sure many would say this about me, too. There is a spectrum. No one is immune from criticism. I started taking lots of the people here with creds with a huge helping of salt after I heard them play.
3. At the end of the day, you have to take a dump. You can't be reading a manual about how to do it while you're on the pot. Spending too much time worrying about how other people do it is a waste and a shame, like having to take a dump the second you get out of the shower.

Again, some very good stuff here, despite the scatological analogies of the 3rd bullet point.

[PosauneCat]

You're a music theorist. That math can be related to music is certainly inescapable. But is that it, only?

Absolutely not. After studying Riemannian, Schenkerian, and then extensive work in 20th century techniques I developed my own way of delivering the material to students that combined both abstract and analytical theory with practical applications for composers and performers. It was rewarding. Theory gets a bad rap by many performers as being dry and pointless. That’s silly, and a lazy attitude. The more you understand what you do the easier it is to make good esthetic and practical choices.

Granted, I am a flatout theory nerd and have done lots of work that is sheerly gaming within the systems. I like puzzles and am in love with mathematics so of course I see and hear musical relationships that are fascinating to me but probably of little interest to a lot of folks.

One of the most practical applications of basic theory can be used to become better at memorizing music. I’m also a pianist and I memorize very quickly. As a kid I developed a form of synesthesia, which most you often hear of as musicians seeing or assigning colors for pitches and harmonies (Scriabin and Torke for example). Mine was different, I see numbers in everything. I’m not talking about assigning numbers to pitches (like pitch class or Roman numbers analysis), it’s more a matter of sounds being quantified as if everything becomes an element within a vast equation…it’s really hard to explain briefly, or at all for that matter. Anyway, in terms of memory I not only hear everything in context if it’s melodic and harmonic function, but the number assignation helps to imprint music in my mind very easily. (I think a lot of jazz players function this way too). After years of working with that, I started to try to teach others a similar way of memorizing using whatever extra-musical associations they may have. Not everyone functions this way, but with the the students I’ve had who really had trouble memorizing it was always worth a try and often helped them. So to me theory goes way beyond traditional musical analysis.

You made the mistake of mentioning theory to me so I’m getting WAYYYY off topic because I just love theory and it disappoints me when I hear performers and composers dismiss it as pointless analysis after-the-fact. In reality it is simply a discipline which tries to make sense of patterns and relationships giving us a way to see music in a more complete way other than just as “magic that can’t be explained!” No doubt music is incredibly complex and all the analysis in the world will never fully explain it, nor should it, the “magic” is a key part and honestly probably the thing that all of us love the most about it.

I’m sure we all have non-musical friends who just don’t get it when you experience an emotional rush from hearing something that completely satisfies your soul. I once tried to turn a friend on to a particular passage in Schumann’s Konzertstück, Op. 86, for 4 horns and Orch. It’s a passage that always, ALWAYS, sends an electric shock through my body and impresses on my mind the whole of the German Romantic/nationalistic musical experience. He just looked at me blankly and smiled, admitting he had no idea what I was talking about! Sound familiar to anyone?

I really have to stop highjacking my own posts by going off on tangents. I can’t seem to help it though. CaptEquinox (great name btw), I thank you for taking my mind off my trombone complaints by bringing up one of my other obsessions.

[robcat2075]

My working presumption is that you played enough in the past and heard enough advice in the past to assess yourself and know what to do next at each juncture as you retread old ground.

But if you've really reached a point not knowing what to do next then that is where a teacher comes in. I suggest you audition several for brief stretches to see who has real advice.

He just looked at me blankly and smiled, admitting he had no idea what I was talking about! Sound familiar to anyone?

Yup, that was every day directing public school bands.

Except for the stuff after "blankly". That part never happened.

[Bach5G]

Record yourself. Are you happy with the articulations?

[PosauneCat]

He just looked at me blankly and smiled, admitting he had no idea what I was talking about! Sound familiar to anyone?

Yup, that was every day directing public school bands.

Except for the stuff after "blankly". That part never happened.

Yeah, I knew people could relate to that. I didn’t know you did the public school band director thang! To me that’s pretty courageous. I hate working with kids!

Hey, I posted this in the “media” section of the forum. You might enjoy it.

https://trombonechat.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=21689

[PosauneCat]

Record yourself. Are you happy with the articulations?

Not yet.

[Kbiggs]

Doug’s post in the “Low Register Tonguing” thread applies here:

Analysis (when it's correct and means something) can be a great thing to help understand what's going on.

When it's just guessing, or incorrect, or looking at the wrong thing, it just confuses the issue and causes more problems.

Also, writing music is one thing. Analyzing it is another. Listening to it is yet another. Playing music is an altogether different thing. They require different skills and approaches.

They overlap, of course. I’ve found through the years that it is difficult to suspend my analytical and judgmental brain while I’m playing. I often have to remind myself, “I’m doing the best I can in the moment.” I’m getting better at it, and I find that it helps to play music without my analytical and judgmental brain telling me things like, “You chipped that note,” or “The intonation was poor in that scale.” That’s what recordings are for: to help you go back and analyze after you’ve played the piece.

[timothy42b]

Remington said TAH was all you needed and John Coffey said “just tongue and blow, kid!”

Hit it hard and wish it well.

Those always worked, and still work, for some people. IMO of course, there were plenty of people they didn't work for.

Some people need more complexity, maybe some people less.

[imsevimse]

"Needless complexity or not?" Who to trust? What to trust?

I can see this is a problem, especially if someone is new to an instrument. I do not think threads on Internet is the best way to learn the basics. I think a teacher is best to start students, a teacher that can show the sound.

In some cases this isn't true and the teacher will not be a good one, and the student is at a stage he wouldn't know that. The first teacher I had for my first four years could not play the trombone. He could not play any brass. He played clarinet and sax and accordion but he was still the trombone teacher. I had no clue, and had never heard a true trombone sound until I was about 14-15 years. I had not heard someone who acctually could play for real. This is my background,.

Still it was possible to learn how to play and even to reach the high level I'm at know. I had to overcome a lot of bad habits on the way and did so until I was about 25 years old but it was possible. How did I do that?

The solution was I finally got a teacher that could play and also could explain what I had to do to get better.

Now most technical problems are long gone but I still have some issues that are details that needs to be better so I still seek advice but at this stage I've become my own best teacher. My pro friends acts as assisting-teachers, just by producing good sound and to provide for a musical environment. We play together and this is how I check I'm on track.

Other ways is to record myself both on audio and video. It thought me some new stuff: "I need to look like I know how to play too". Something that I've overlooked for many years until I got to see myself on video.

More ways to learn?

I've read a lot from people who give away advice and I find it very rewarding sometimes. I usually want to know their playing first because I have not the time to listen to anyone at any level. I then choose only the ones that can play.

I did put up some audio here of my playing and had you all commenting on that and to me that also was rewarding. I got good advice that I tried and that helped me a bit. After all ALL that listens are entitled to have an opinion. Since my goal is to evolve and not to be just another show-off I need the criticism, acctually that's what I want from everybody. As long as criticism is given to help it is good. The one who gives the criticism does not need to be a better trombone player than I am. The criticism is still valuable.

That's my take on criticism and advice.

/Tom

[timothy42b]

More ways to learn?

Every gig sitting next to someone is also taking a free lesson from them, if you're paying attention.

[lauriet]

I've made this parallel before.

If you think playing trombone is confusing and full of conflicting imformation, then you should try learning to play golf.
A million different opinions on what to do......I fall back on the old teachers/players that learnt to play by feel, not buy watching videos of other players.
In the end, its more Art than Science......soooooooo

Keep your head still and swing the weight on the end of the stick.
Listen to yourself playing, while you feel what you are doing.

[timothy42b]

Keep your head still and swing the weight on the end of the stick.
Listen to yourself playing, while you feel what you are doing.

Works for you, but not for everybody.

Einstein almost said, "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

(a lot of quotes attributed to him are just myths, but he did say something reasonably close to this in 1933."

[Matt K]

I'm reminded of an incident before my time on TBC where Joe Jackson was lamenting that there was little discussion of some insightful transcription analysis that was occurring at the time but there was a lot of discussion about something that he perceived as being rather mundane about equipment. A sentiment I don't necessarily disagree with. However, as a gearhead myself, there is a corollary to those who collect vehicles simply for the sake of enjoying having the vehicle.

Or put another way, what is "needless" is essentially in the eye of the person doing an analysis on something. For one, results of a certain tangible amount might be expected. For another, results might be a happy coincidence to something they enjoy, useful or otherwise. But there's a reason that some prefer to analyze things that seem mundane to othersat the expense of something that might yield more fruitful resutls. For example, if I spent more time transcribing, I'd most certainly be a better improviser. But my goal, particularly as an amateur, is not to be the best improviser.

So how you parse the meaningful from the ridiculous is tautological: you find to be meaningful and what you find to be ridiculous and calibrate your expectations about any discussion to what you want it to be.

[Kbiggs]

Every gig sitting next to someone is also taking a free lesson from them, if you're paying attention.

This is gold.

[robcat2075]

(a lot of quotes attributed to him are just myths, but he did say something reasonably close to this in 1933."

I'm surprised real Einstein and real Twain ever had careers when fake Einstein and fake Twain were always cleverer.

[Wilktone]

How do we parse the meaningful from the ridiculous?

An awful lot of the way we teach and practice trombone is very subjective. I've long been an advocate for making things more objective, whenever possible. Sure, much of how we play trombone is inherently knacky, you just need to try things out a lot until it clicks, try to remember what you did, and do that consistently. That said, there are ways to look at the how and why of what makes for successful music making and replicate it with other people.

Asking questions is one of the best ways to separate the wheat from the chafe. Whether you're getting advice from someone in person or from the internet, if something doesn't pass the sniff test, ask how they came to that conclusion and why they feel their advice is relevant. Does it conform to reality? Is the rational subjective or does it have a way to objectively approach why something might work a certain way?

I don't buy the "paralysis by analysis" argument. If you're choking up from analyzing you're doing it wrong. Either the analysis is faulty in the first place or you're trying to think about too much at the wrong time.

Simple answers are easy and attractive. Getting into the weeds and understanding our art better is hard, but for me ultimately more rewarding.

Dave

[PosauneCat]

I don't buy the "paralysis by analysis" argument. If you're choking up from analyzing you're doing it wrong. Either the analysis is faulty in the first place or you're trying to think about too much at the wrong time.

I wouldn’t dispel the idea if I were you. Your description above is the very definition of “paralysis by analysis,” hence it exists. With so much information available and so many people who have the “right” answer, it’s hard to settle in on which, if any, of those approaches might work for you. So you start trying some of the suggestions and in time you get lost in the morass of possibilities. If you’ve never gone through this, you’re very lucky.

The big question is, as in the original post here, how do you know which advice to follow unless you try it out for a while? And how do you separate the meaningful from the ridiculous? Take all this and add to it what memories you might have (both muscle and cognitive) of your former playing and you have a recipe for disaster. You, Dave, may know exactly what you need to do based on the pinpoint accuracy of your analysis and simply continue doing what you know to be right until, voila!, you can play brilliantly. However, if you do not know what it is you need to do you start to experiment, work with others, study, think, and try everything until it starts to work. But that process can be really grueling and ugly.

Of course it is faulty analysis which causes the paralysis. If you knew from the get go what to do you wouldn’t even need to analyze, you’d just follow the yellow brick road to perfect playing. I don’t know about you, but my journey hasn’t been that beatific. It’s been rather hellish.

Bottom line, telling someone they are doing it incorrectly isn’t helpful if you can’t provide a solution. The solution isn’t “you doing it all wrong.” The solution is the solution and that requires investigation, and trial and error.

Saying you “don’t buy the paralysis by analysis argument”makes it sound like you don’t believe it is a real thing. It would have been more meaningful had you simply said that paralysis by analysis is caused by following the path of faulty analysis. Of course that’s true, but that doesn’t negate the existence of “paralysis by analysis.” In fact, it defines it. Ipso facto, paralysis by analysis absolutely exists.

[Matt K]

This is called the "Optimal Stopping Problem." Basically, the dilemma is not which option to pick, but which options to consider. Mathematically, the answer is ~37.5% of the possibilities. The following excerpt is from a great book that distills the subject quit well called "Algorithms to Live By". This is a very contrived example I've indicated as an excerpt below, because it has a relatively objective conclusion and a finite set of possibilities, but I think can be useful nonetheless. You don't want to try every teacher or method, etc. but if you can identify a fixed amount of them and try roughly 1/3 to 2/5 of the list, you're likely to have found the best answer to the problem with the least amount of effort.

So in short, your question isn't the right approach. You are asking about how to know which advice to follow:

The big question is, as in the original post here, how do you know which advice to follow unless you try it out for a while?

The question should be: "How much advice should I try to follow before committing to what has worked the best up to that point?"



Excerpt below:

The 37% Rule* derives from optimal stopping’s most famous puzzle, which has come to be known as the “secretary problem*.” Its setup is much like the apartment hunter’s dilemma that we considered earlier. Imagine you’re interviewing a set of applicants for a position as a secretary, and your goal is to maximize the chance of hiring the single best applicant in the pool. While you have no idea how to assign scores to individual applicants, you can easily judge which one you prefer. (A mathematician might say you have access only to the ordinal numbers—the relative ranks of the applicants compared to each other—but not to the cardinal numbers, their ratings on some kind of general scale.) You interview the applicants in random order, one at a time. You can decide to offer the job to an applicant at any point and they are guaranteed to accept, terminating the search. But if you pass over an applicant, deciding not to hire them, they are gone forever.
...

In your search for a secretary, there are two ways you can fail: stopping early and stopping late. When you stop too early, you leave the best applicant undiscovered. When you stop too late, you hold out for a better applicant who doesn’t exist. The optimal strategy will clearly require finding the right balance between the two, walking the tightrope between looking too much and not enough.

If your aim is finding the very best applicant, settling for nothing less, it’s clear that as you go through the interview process you shouldn’t even consider hiring somebody who isn’t the best you’ve seen so far. However, simply being the best yet isn’t enough for an offer; the very first applicant, for example, will of course be the best yet by definition. More generally, it stands to reason that the rate at which we encounter “best yet” applicants will go down as we proceed in our interviews. For instance, the second applicant has a 50/50 chance of being the best we’ve yet seen, but the fifth applicant only has a 1-in-5 chance of being the best so far, the sixth has a 1-in-6 chance, and so on. As a result, best-yet applicants will become steadily more impressive as the search continues (by definition, again, they’re better than all those who came before)—but they will also become more and more infrequent.

Okay, so we know that taking the first best-yet applicant we encounter (a.k.a. the first applicant, period) is rash. If there are a hundred applicants, it also seems hasty to make an offer to the next one who’s best-yet, just because they were better than the first. So how do we proceed?

Intuitively, there are a few potential strategies. For instance, making an offer the third time an applicant trumps everyone seen so far—or maybe the fourth time. Or perhaps taking the next best-yet applicant to come along after a long “drought”—a long streak of poor ones.

But as it happens, neither of these relatively sensible strategies comes out on top. Instead, the optimal solution takes the form of what we’ll call the Look-Then-Leap Rule: You set a predetermined amount of time for “looking”—that is, exploring your options, gathering data—in which you categorically don’t choose anyone, no matter how impressive. After that point, you enter the “leap” phase, prepared to instantly commit to anyone who outshines the best applicant you saw in the look phase.

We can see how the Look-Then-Leap Rule emerges by considering how the secretary problem plays out in the smallest applicant pools. With just one applicant the problem is easy to solve—hire them! With two applicants, you have a 50/50 chance of success no matter what you do. You can hire the first applicant (who’ll turn out to be the best half the time), or dismiss the first and by default hire the second (who is also best half the time).

Add a third applicant, and all of a sudden things get interesting. The odds if we hire at random are one-third, or 33%. With two applicants we could do no better than chance; with three, can we? It turns out we can, and it all comes down to what we do with the second interviewee. When we see the first applicant, we have no information—they’ll always appear to be the best yet. When we see the third applicant, we have no agency—we have to make an offer to the final applicant, since we’ve dismissed the others. But when we see the second applicant, we have a little bit of both: we know whether they’re better or worse than the first, and we have the freedom to either hire or dismiss them. What happens when we just hire them if they’re better than the first applicant, and dismiss them if they’re not? This turns out to be the best possible strategy when facing three applicants; using this approach it’s possible, surprisingly, to do just as well in the three-applicant problem as with two, choosing the best applicant exactly half the time.*

Enumerating these scenarios for four applicants tells us that we should still begin to leap as soon as the second applicant; with five applicants in the pool, we shouldn’t leap before the third.

As the applicant pool grows, the exact place to draw the line between looking and leaping settles to 37% of the pool, yielding the 37% Rule: look at the first 37% of the applicants, choosing none, then be ready to leap for anyone better than all those you’ve seen so far.


Christian, Brian; Griffiths, Tom. Algorithms to Live By (pp. 10-14). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

*Optimal stopping problems have had a number of incarnations, each reflecting the predominating concerns of its time. In the nineteenth century such problems were typified by baroque lotteries and by women choosing male suitors; in the early twentieth century by holidaying motorists searching for hotels and by male suitors choosing women; and in the paper-pushing, male-dominated mid-twentieth century, by male bosses choosing female assistants. The first explicit mention of it by name as the “secretary problem” appears to be in a 1964 paper, and somewhere along the way the name stuck.

[Wilktone]

This is called the "Optimal Stopping Problem."

Very interesting, thanks for posting. What would be the optimal stopping point for trying out a new method or practice approach? The trouble, as I see it, is that sometimes we get better at playing wrong. Sometimes a better long-term approach takes a longer time to reach the point of where it is better than the short cut.

Saying you “don’t buy the paralysis by analysis argument”makes it sound like you don’t believe it is a real thing. It would have been more meaningful had you simply said that paralysis by analysis is caused by following the path of faulty analysis. Of course that’s true, but that doesn’t negate the existence of “paralysis by analysis.” In fact, it defines it. Ipso facto, paralysis by analysis absolutely exists.

I'm sorry that I didn't really describe the nuance of my thoughts well enough to get my point across. I've written up on this so many times that I just got lazy.

The point I was trying to make is that it isn't the process of analysis, in and of itself, that is bad. The expression, "paralysis by analysis" is (usually) thrown around in a way to put the blame of a bad result on the act of analyzing. This has led to a culture where analyzing instrumental technique isn't taught, so we haven't learned how to do it correctly. From a pedagogical perspective, this leaves the student unable to solve their own problems and doesn't effectively prepare the student to become a future teacher. Instead, we get left with the easy answer - don't think, just play.

Doing a musical analysis of a piece of music presumably will help us perform it better, but if we make mistakes in our analysis, we could end up making musical decisions that end up poorly. Trying to analyze the musical material while we're in the midst of performing could also end up distracting our attention away from where it should be and end up causing problems. But neither of these hypothetical situations means that the act of analysis itself causes problems. In other words, if analyzing a piece of music screws up the way you're playing it you're doing it wrong.

I think that analyzing instrumental technique is similar. Sure, there's an element of trial and error that has to happen, but I feel it's better to address that head on and in a, well, analytical way. Trying everything all at once is too much. You'll need to sift through everything and decide for yourself what seems plausible for you, and learn as you go. Or, better still, get a teacher who can help guide you.

To address the criticism that I think some will have, I don't think that there's anything wrong with the idea to simply play and let the music flow and fix problems on its own. That is, after all, what we want to be doing when we're performing. I just feel that we shouldn't confuse the end goal with what we should be doing at all times in the practice room. These two, seemingly, opposite approaches are really two sides of the same coin.

I hope that helps, at least a little.

Dave

[Matt K]

Funny you should say thy, that’s the next example is how long to commit to something and the example they use is dating, which is fitting for a book written for computer scientists. I’ll post a follow up later. The basic idea is that you limit it based on the time horizon you want. So if you want to dedicate say 10 years you become more selective as you progress towards that goal. Interestingly, the time element does lower the percentage at which you should “stop” exploring and “commit”.

[robcat2075]

If I follow the progression in that chart, what I really ought to do is interview only one candidate. Then I have a 100% chance of choosing "the best candidate so far"! That's what i ought to do if the "chance" of selecting the best is the guiding factor, right?

Of course, that is preposterous.

Like many asserted paradoxes, "The Optimal Stopping Problem" or "Secretary Problem" achieves its seemingly counter-intuitive TED-Talk style revelation by subtly inserting a false condition...

You can decide to offer the job to an applicant at any point and they are guaranteed to accept, terminating the search. But if you pass over an applicant, deciding not to hire them, they are gone forever.

Neither of those will be true in a real employee search nor would they be true when testing trombone performing techniques.

Someone's advice on tonguing, for example, goes away forever if I decide to try another one after it?

Of course, that is preposterous.

[harrisonreed]

Rob is right. The thought problem is weird in that it mandates that you dismiss the first applicant in order to move on to the next applicant. What kind of hiring process is that? Surely you can interview everyone, or every other one, stack up the results, and just pick the best applicant?

Maybe we could apply it to mouthpieces? If you had an assortment of Doug Elliott rims, say XT100-XT106, including narrow rims, you could audition them blind and force yourself to choose the best rim using the 37% rule. Once you've done that, you repeat the process again, but only using the one you selected, both regular and narrow, and the rims one size smaller and larger, again both narrow and regular, over a longer period of time. It should get you pretty damned close to the rim that works best for you. I still don't like the idea of throwing out a candidate before you can move on to the next candidate, but in this case it prevents you from going back and forth.

The only thing I like about the 37% rule is that it forces you to choose in the first place. But we can do that by just limiting our own search pool, and choosing the best candidate at the end. I doubt most players have bothered even trying it, say, with a mouthpiece. I'd be better off as a player today if someone had given me the 12 DE XT rims and a G/G8 underpart, and had me genuinely audition them all 20 years ago. It took me about 20 minutes in a practice room to figure out what worked better for me, objectively, between two drastically different mouthpieces, when I went in knowing I was using the best gear and that going to a different rim would hurt my playing. And I was wrong! I had only one other applicant, and it was "the best so far" by MILES. From there I could make far more precise and informed changes, and I have been doing that for the last 5 years. I get the "best so far" every other try because I go in and screen applicants before I even interview them.

[timothy42b]

I think maybe some of the problems pointed out with Optimal Stopping are valid but nitpicks, in that the problem for most of us is different. (part of my job is hiring engineers, who must be technically competent, easy to work with and reliable, and willing to work for government wages which at entry level is considerably below commercial, meanwhile following every bureaucratic hiring regulation the govt can come up with - but I digress)

Most of the time I don't need the absolute best, in a candidate or mouthpiece. I just need one better than the given standard. For most tasks the solid competent is enough, you don't need the superstar. Nor is there any really certain way of finding it anyway. So a strategy like: interview X number, marry the next one that you like better than the best of the first X, is about as optimal as you can get. As harrison points out, hiring the first one will always give you the "best," but what you want is not the best of a pool, but any that is better than you need.

[Wilktone]

Did anyone really take the excerpt Matt posted as a literal method on how to hire? Of course businesses don't hire only the last interviewed candidate, the artificial conditions are set up to demonstrate an example of how the math works.

What's relevant and interesting to this discussion is how we can apply some of this logic in a way to optimize any experimentation we might be doing in our own practice and teaching. It's more complicated than trying out something and judging it as the "best" option if you don't have a grasp on what all the options truly are. You can end up picking the lesser of many evils, rather than something that would work best for you long term.

Again, I feel that asking questions (both of the people giving us advice and of ourselves) and trying to objectively investigate what we're looking at are the way to go. Yes, it is more work than "tongue and blow," but I feel it has more long term potential.

Dave

[PosauneCat]

The recent direction of this post proves my initial point about needless complexity.

[harrisonreed]

Just make it sound good. Next slide.

How's that?

[baileyman]

...
1. How can I change resisters using only the back arc of my tongue? What does this do to the sound? If I can make it sound worse and less focused, can I make it sound better and more focused with just this component?

2. Do I have more endurance if the empty space in my oral cavity is a larger volume or a smaller volume? What do these two extremes do to the sound? How do I even change the volume anyways? How far forward can my tongue stay while I'm playing, and does that change depending on the register?

3. Are my corners too firm? Are my chops stretched across my teeth? Was my teacher wrong about everything they said about how the chops work? What if I just play with my face mostly relaxed?

4. Did I make an actual informed decision about the mouthpiece I use, or did I just pick one arbitrarily? Is the mouthpiece shifting around when I change registers? Do I
actually know anything about mouthpieces?

5. Is equipment actually important? Why does almost every great trombonist I can hear have a custom setup, especially their own mouthpiece, and are they just trying to cash in?

6. What exercises and studies actually fit with the music I want to make? Which actually help me? Which are a chore, and why are they a chore?

7. What the heck do I want to sound like, anyways? What the heck do I sound like, anyways?

...

Yeah, man. Those bring results like crazy, and prolly the rest do, too.

[afugate]

If you are having trouble, a teacher would definitely help. But I think that after I learned about musicality, how to articulate (stylistically, the jury is clearly out on how is actually done), how to hold notes for the correct length, how to end notes, and what is a good sound vs. a bad sound, there was not much a teacher could give me on the physical "how". The teacher is so important to be there to demonstrate what right sounds like, and to tell the student "that ain't it", and for insights -- "this is how I think about it, this is what works for me". But the teacher is often less useful for much beyond that. What is a teacher anyways, other than the person you respect ,but you really just want to be better than to begin with? There are exceptions, but I have no experience with those teachers. We've all tried as teachers to put into words exactly what we think is going on physically, and it's a tall task.

Good teachers are also there for experience and wisdom.

I was struggling with something in my own playing and mentioned it to my friend, Dr. Irv. Wagner. Irv suggested something completely out of the blue that has helped me tremendously. Without going into great detail, he suggested I practice my triple-tonguing. Indeed, I have made significant strides as a result.

Is that something I would have experimented with? Maybe... But it seemed really quite unrelated to my issue -- until I tried it.

It's easy to put great players on a pedestal and assume they are good teachers. There are great players. There are great teachers. Fewer are both great players and great teacher. Irv is one of those. (Plus he just a terrific person in general.)

--Andy in OKC

[Basbasun]

The recent direction of this post proves my initial point about needless complexity.

Yes.

Go back to Burgerbob.

[Matt K]

Yes, the scenario is quite preposterous! It's a very contrived example as Dave pointed out. I was busy automating that spam issue this weekend so I haven't had time to elucidate further, but I do really suggest if you are interested in reading about optimal solutions for similar issues, that one checks the book out. Indeed, the objections that are brought up here are mentioned in the book and are addressed at length.

At the end of the day, as noted, there is a lot of information out there so the best one can do is figure out how much they wish to delve into it and figuring out the universe of what is possible to try, how long to try, etc. can be systematically attempted. That would be in contract with the extremes of:

1) Trying "everything" ad infinitum, which would essentially guarantee you never finished (look before you leap... but realistically never leap or unnecessarily delay leaping)
2) Trying "nothing" and going with the "first" approach (whatever that means since there is an arbitrarily deep amount of things to try (leap before you look)
3) Trying "nothing" and being totally systematic and uncritical of your own playing (don't look)

A good systematic approach to epistemology is a "look before you leap", but don't look "too long" because you have to balance the "looking" and the "leaping".

In this case, I think the "paralysis by analysis" is really more of category 1 that I mentioned above. If you spend all your time "looking" for the right approach it might prevent you from delving deeper into a subject area that you would find more fruitful sticking to. That phrase typically seems to be attributed by people who are more in category 2 or 3 from above, which isn't a slight against those people in any way. But if you, for lack of a better term, are "lucky" and happened to try an approach that works for you without the other intermediary steps, it seems like time spent thinking about all of the intricacies that Harrison mentioned as being trivial wastes of time because you could just be practicing, after all!

[paulyg]

One of my biggest pitfalls is that I tend to overanalyze things. I'm not sure if it's because I'm intellectually curious, just impatient, or both, but I think I never really progressed passed the stage where all little kids just ask "why?" unceasingly.

I've discovered that it's very important to compartmentalize that urge away from practicing and playing. Effective practice requires relaxation and focus, and if your head is full of contrived mechanical imperatives, you'll be doing more harm than good. Being distracted while playing is a good way to tense up.

Like others have said, the most effective advice is to keep it simple while you're playing. "Sound good" is a great example. I've been getting advanced lately and added "try to have it not be uncomfortable, either" and those two will keep me occupied for a while. When I think about what I was doing in my practice sessions at the top of my game, it really was about just stamping those very simple mantras on everything I did.

[Kbiggs]

Although I did not go to conservatory, I have experienced some of the problems mentioned by the OP in his first post. I played a lot during my HS and undergrad years, and have had some helpful and some not-so-helpful teachers over the years. When I started working day jobs and playing less, my playing suffered through lack of practice. After a long stretch of not playing, I returned to it, and found parts of playing easy, while other parts were difficult.

It’s very tempting to go the route of more information in order to “solve” the problem. I know because I’ve also done that during my some of my previous comebacks. During my most recent comeback, it occurred to me that I was suddenly aware that what was previously easy was now difficult. I was now working on, thinking about, and analyzing something that was previously a habit.

Many aspects of playing are habits built up over years. They are often acquired without question until someone, often a teacher says, “Do you hear this?,” and then recommends something to address the problem, like forming the embouchure in a particular way, holding the slide a little differently, practicing an étude this way and then that way... Sometimes the awareness comes from sitting next to someone whose playing you admire, even if it’s just one specific technique.

Teaching, I believe, often involves pointing things out to a student—making them aware—and then offering a solution. Not always the solution, but a possible way to work on the problem, based on what the student presents (a performance that is representative of their playing habits). The teacher is, of course, constrained by their personal beliefs on pedagogy, their education, and their playing and teaching experience: they are a pre-determined filter that helps identify problems and solutions. In other words, most teachers can only teach what they know and have experienced: some people who have experienced problems and successfully worked through them are better teachers precisely because of their history of problems. This problem is compounded when we become our own teacher.

Getting back to the OP, and his specific complaint:

It’s very frustrating having my background and knowledge, but after 25 years away I really am pretty much a novice, at least physically. The memory, slide technique, musicality, is there for the most part, but I have no comfort in the high range, and I don’t trust my embouchure.

To me—and I hope I’m not putting words in the OP’s mouth—the problem might look something like this: the OP knows how a trombone should sound (a cognitive construct based on his earlier study and experience), and what playing the trombone is supposed to sound and feel like (also based on earlier study and experience). After 25 years away from the horn, it’s going to feel different. It’s the awareness of the difference between then and now that is causing some of the discomfort (the emotions comfort and trust). What was previously easy (behavior) now seems (emotion) difficult.

In an effort to gain a better understanding of what is happening, the OP seeks additional information (cognitive) in the form of advice, different schools of playing, etc. What might be more helpful is more awareness (mindfulness, or perhaps “metacognition”) of what things sound like right now, in this moment of playing, rather than more information. That’s where recording yourself and a good teacher are helpful: analysis (cognition) after the fact (behavior), rather than comparison of how you played previously (cognition, i.e., memory) and judging (cognitive) yourself as “bad” (emotion) about what you’re playing during the act (behavior).

[Wilktone]

Kbiggs, nice post. A lot of great thoughts in there.

Effective practice requires relaxation and focus, and if your head is full of contrived mechanical imperatives, you'll be doing more harm than good. Being distracted while playing is a good way to tense up.

As I tried to convey earlier, this is an example of doing it wrong. Analyze what you're doing away from the act of playing, then figure out one thing you need to work on to do it better. Spend some time fixing that one issue, then move on. Trying to do too much at once (fix more than one thing at a time) will distract you.

Not trying to fix anything at all (e.g., just "sound good") is how we want to perform and is worth practicing, but it also isn't the most efficient way to fix problems and make improvements.

The recent direction of this post proves my initial point about needless complexity.

I actually see it as the opposite. The excerpt Matt posted was actually taking a complex issue and simplifying it for the point of making it more understandable. Instead of taking the effort to grasp that concept and then put it into context, we ended up taking the simplification too literally. I see this all the time in brass playing and pedagogy - a simplified idea that is one step towards our goal gets confused with the entire process and then gets judged by that alone.

Good teaching and communication simplifies things into manageable chunks. Those chunks get "scaffolded" to more information, which builds on the initial ideas once they are understood and mastered. I think one reason the glut of information can feel so overwhelming is because we haven't taken those necessary steps to understand the foundation and built our knowledge up from there. If we try to do too much (see above) we end up getting distracted and frustrated.

On the other hand, the glut of information and ease that everyone now has to communicate their ideas means that there's also a lot of misinformation out there. If you're confused by contradictory suggestions and don't have a good teacher to help you sort through that all, some critical thinking skills may help. It is more work, unfortunately, but as I said above, I think this process is ultimately more beneficial and rewarding.

Dave

[Matt K]

Dave is quite right. As I noted, there are really two extremes: you can spend all your time knowing a little bit about everything... or you can spend all your time on say, one thing. The problem with the former is you only have superficial information and the problem with the latter is you may have missed out on much better approaches unless you are super lucky.

The middle ground involves some degree of assessing all possibilities, gathering new information, etc. while also taking time to delve more deeply into approaches that may have contradictory methods of assessment, analysis etc.

Or put another way, you could study with potentially hundreds of people over the internet. Is it better to study with them or someone in person? Clearly it doesn't make sense to get a lesson off of every person who teaches lessons online. You'd spend the next decade studying with a person only once. But it also doesn't make sense to pick a teacher based on the roll of a dice and just go with the first one. You'd narrow the field down to say, people who did the type of playing you wanted (e.g. if you wanted to study jazz you'd find someone who played jazz)... by the time you limited to just the relevent teachers you'd probably be left with a handful. If there are 10, it makes sense to give at least 3 a try and then if one clicks after you've studied with 3, go with them rather than take another 7 lessons off of new people.

But as with the limitations of the secretary problem, there's nothing inherently bad about studying with multiple people so if you want to cast a wider net, there isn't anything wrong with it. But if your problem is to limit the possibilities, a systematic approach where you simply keep track of and choose the best after a certain point is a good approach.