Guitarbench Magazine Issue 4. Ken Bonfield's Artistry of the Guitar. by Terence Tan

Ken Bonfield’s Artistry of the Guitar Maintaining the Beginner’s Mind-Set

Hello and welcome to my first article for Guitarbench. Here at Ken Bonfield’s ‘Artistry of the Guitar’ column we’ll talk about acoustic guitar; practice, performance, designing custom guitars, playing in alternate tunings, plugging in and sounding good, all sorts of stuff I spend my time thinking about and doing. It’s geared towards the intermediate to advanced player, but hopefully there will be something here for everyone and I hope you find it as interesting as I do. For my first column I wanted to address a foundational piece in any guitarist’s quest to learn new techniques or break through plateaus- maintaining a beginner’s mindset.

Over the past four years I’ve had to go through my own journey in maintaining a beginner’s mind-set when in 2008 I started learning to play slide and in late 2010 when I got a harp guitar from luthier, Alan Carruth. I’d always wanted to play slide guitar; I’ve been a huge fan of Ry Cooder, David Lindley, Martin Simpson, Sonny Landreth, Lowell George, and the late Duane Allman since I first started playing guitar in 1974. Over the years I’ve bought and collected a variety of slides and unsuccessfully tried to add slide playing to my list- always with utter failure. This time however, I was determined to meet my goal. The first thing I did was analyse why I was unsuccessful in the past. What did I do wrong? Or, what did I not do? I’ve learned over the years in teaching workshops and in private lessons that when people say they can’t master a technique it usually means they haven’t done the work or spent the required time. But why? These are good guitarists, and not lazy people. Over the years I’ve chided them about that, but lately I’ve been asking folks why they don’t do the work.

What’s stopping them (and me) from adding new techniques or breaking through plateaus? And their answers were telling; almost without fail they said that at this point in their playing if they can’t do it right away they’re convinced they can’t do it all. And why? Because they’re already accomplished guitarists and should be able to learn any new technique quickly. They think they just don’t have the slide ‘gene’ or the alternative tuning gene, etc. And that stopped me in my tracks-because that was also true for me. Hell, I get paid, not a lot, but I get paid to be a virtuoso guitarist-the kind people come out to see and say “Holy crow, how’d he do that?’. But when I took a hard look at it I realized that any new technique, especially one as different as playing slide, would take months of playing, many many hours to accomplish. Hours I’d not put in, and to wrap my head around that I had to become a beginner again. But what did that mean? To become a beginner again one must trust in one thing; that proper practice done over time will yield the desired results. The key phrase is ‘over time’.

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Issue 4 2012

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Think back to when you were a beginner and first learning to play chords, and then learning to move from one chord to another while maintaining the rhythm. Think about how many hours and weeks it took to do something we all think of as simple now. So, I made a plan. For the next 90 days I’d play slide guitar for at least 45 minutes every day-no less-more would be OK. And boy that first week was hard. I had no material to play, just an idea that I wanted to play in open D tuning and learn a song by my friend Brooks Williams, “Goodbye Walker Percy” a haunting blues ballad on his “Little Lion” cd. This song would be my primer for learning slide. I also started messing around with “Amazing Grace” a song I know quite well and have arranged in a variety of alternate tunings for fingerstyle guitar. And I plugged away; sometimes I could only play for 15 or 20 minutes at a time before I got bored or frustrated, but I would come back later in the day and play more; I always played for 45 minutes, staying patient and remaining confident that my plan would succeed. The 90 days passed and I was shocked, I’d written a half-dozen pieces-two quite good, and others were promising. The key moment came for me in April of 2009 at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, AR when I debuted my slide piece “My Magnolia” for 300 people. And they loved it. I’m not a slide master, yet, but it gives me tremendous joy, and another trick up my performer’s sleeve. And more importantly, my plan had worked. I’d gone from not playing slide, to entertaining a paying audience with an original slide tune. This experience buoyed me greatly when Al Carruth presented me with a harp guitar in October of 2010. It’s an 11-string with 6 standard guitar strings and 5 sub-basses. It was daunting at first just holding this guitar let alone trying to play it, but I incorporated my 45-minute, 90 day plan for the harp guitar and

as again met with success-I performed my first piece on it in mid November less than a month later in a show I did with Larry Coryell, and again the audience LOVED it. But I also noticed things were different-in early January just passed 60 days into my 90 day plan I was feeling a bit lost, negative, and unsure of my direction. I realized then that the second, and probably most important component of maintaining a beginner’s mindset is keeping a positive attitude. I started talking to other guitarists who were having problems with a technique change or playing a new instrument or playing in a new tuning; and the common thread was negative self-talk. The words they were saying to themselves were holding them back every bit as much as their lack of time. Wow. So, over the next few weeks I kept a real close eye on my thoughts and made sure to clear out the negative thoughts as soon as they’d appear. It was hard at first; it took practice. I also made sure that when I picked up the harp guitar that I was in good mental shape for the work ahead-it was daunting at first-the harp guitar is just so damned hard, but I persevered and maintained a positive attitude.