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’.