Mike's Oud Forums

Removing bad habits

ArmoOudist - 3-8-2021 at 06:56 PM

So I had my first formal oud lesson this past weekend with John Berberian. After being self-taught for about a year, it was incredibly helpful to have a lesson.

Two technical bad habits that I need to iron out:
1) I rely too much on the first and second fingers for my left hand. This may be weird, but in the Armenian style, we traditionally mainly rely on our first and third fingers, using the second for more obscure intervals. A lot of this comes down to not placing my fingers on the neck correctly. I don't place them at a 90 degree angle the way I'm supposed to.

2) I play almost entirely on the downstroke. Particularly in the Armenian style of playing, which relies on very fast movements, this only serves to slow me down.

Berberian gave me exercises to help practice this, and hopefully I can fix things, but I notice that when I go back to playing songs that I was playing before, I go back to the bad habits. I'm hoping that over time, this will automatically start to shift and I'll play even things I was playing before correctly?

maraoud108 - 3-8-2021 at 09:31 PM

The trick is to give it time.

Practice the two techniques, 90 degree finger placement, and the picking exercise for 5-10 minutes a day each.

Then forget about them, just play as you normally do.

Over a month or two, the new techniques will gradually come into your playing.

Practicing them for an hour once a week will not work. Slow and steady wins the race. Do it daily. It's about the change happening slowly over time, like when you put a vanilla bean in vodka. In a few months you have vanilla extract.

ArmoOudist - 3-9-2021 at 02:25 AM

That's exactly what I wanted to hear :)

I was doing the exercises, and then when I was doing the songs I like to play, I was thinking about the techniques too much. It caused me to play even worse than normal because I was overthinking it.
Thanks!

dusepo - 3-9-2021 at 07:23 AM

I second the advice about daily practice.
I also find that my muscle memory sticks with bad habits with pieces I learnt longer ago. What I've found is just to keep learning new pieces and making sure that I use the new, better techniques when I do learn them, and eventually it overpowers the old habits, even when playing older pieces.

maraoud108 - 3-9-2021 at 09:14 AM

Quote: Originally posted by dusepo  
I second the advice about daily practice.
I also find that my muscle memory sticks with bad habits with pieces I learnt longer ago. What I've found is just to keep learning new pieces and making sure that I use the new, better techniques when I do learn them, and eventually it overpowers the old habits, even when playing older pieces.


Yes this is totally the case. Keep learning new pieces, but also, there's a balance. If you're constantly learning new things and techniques, you become a master of none.

Eventually, those new techniques will come into your playing and will start to effect old pieces. Pieces that were so hard at one point will be easy.

I remember spending months on just one of the Bach violin partitas. About a year later I started to notice it in other aspects of my improvisational playing: the arpeggiations, the sense of harmonic development.

The tough thing in the beginning is to understand this long arch. That the results are not going to be instantaneous, and may not come for months or even years.