Discipline Equals Freedom

“First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, and then you forget all that shit and just play.”

– Charlie Parker

 

 

If you’ve ever tried to “play from the heart” or improvise in playing a musical instrument, you’d know that it’s so much harder than watching your favorite musicians would otherwise have you believe. It requires a deep sense of familiarity with the rudimentary details, like scales or how the notes work together, in order for you to develop the freedom to express yourself and at the same time, create beautiful music. 

With this being said, it’s understandable that one of the world’s greatest improv guitarists, Joe Satriani, is also known for being a strict teacher. With his students, Joe instilled a rigorous discipline of practicing hours upon hours every day. Many of his students went on to become masters themselves, including Kirk Hammett of Metallica, and Steve Vai.

Especially for Steve Vai, he could recall a particular experience with Joe that forever changed his work ethic.

In one of their lessons, Joe instructed Steve to memorize all the notes on the guitar in one week. With the excuse that he didn’t have a good memory, Steve thought it was impossible for him to memorize the notes in that amount of time, so he didn’t bother putting in much work.

In their next lesson that following week, the first thing that Joe said to Steve was, “Play an F# on the B string.” Steve could only fumble on his fretboard.

“Stop,” Joe said to him. “Leave. Don’t come back until you know the notes.”

Before sending him home, Joe wrote in Steve’s notebook, “If you don’t know your notes, you don’t know shit!”

Steve still has Joe’s note to this day, and credits the experience for shaping him into the musician that he is today. As he said, “I decided at that moment that I was never ever going to not know my lesson 100%, maybe even 200%, where I do twice as much.”

We love the idea of freely expressing ourselves in our art, as though our craft is an extension of our mind and spirit. For many of us, this is the thing that inspired us to take up our craft in the first place. But not many of us are in love with the learning process that it involves for us to get there.

In our outcome-oriented generation, we need to teach ourselves again that nothing in life can be gained without process. To be great at anything involves thousands of hours of rigorous learning and practice, of being good at the small things.

Of course, we may not end up using everything we learn. But if we don’t learn everything, we wouldn’t truly know which ones are relevant to what we want to do. And at the very least, everything that we learn ultimately culminates in us being able to think in tandem with our craft — whether it’s thinking like a musician, or a marketer, or an engineer, etc.

Back when I was studying electronic engineering, I had to take courses such as Engineering Math and Electronics, which were broken into four parts and spread across different semesters. One of my Electronics professors told us a story about his former students, who complained to him that they were only using things in their work that they learned in the later courses, like Electronics IV.

My professor told us, as he told them, “If you don’t learn Electronics I, you wouldn’t be able to understand Electronics II. And if you don’t learn Electronics II, you wouldn’t be able to understand Electronics III. The same goes with what you’re using from Electronics IV.”

Trust the process, and embrace the tedium. And in time, almost without you realizing, your craft becomes more and more enjoyable. It becomes almost second-nature for you to freely express yourself in your craft.

It certainly did for Steve Vai. Towards the end of his education with Joe Satriani, their lessons became less instructional, and instead turned into six-hour jams, where they would just let go and play, and play, and play.