Why Is Jordan Tice a Better Guitar Player than Me?
Jordan Tice and I both started playing guitar at the age of twelve. After receiving my first guitar, I formed a band and several months later performed my first “concert”—a reduced-speed interpretation of Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” played to polite applause at the Tollgate Grammar School sixth-grade talent show. After this I got serious: I took lessons throughout junior high school and high school. I played every day—sometimes rocking blues solos to Hendrix recordings for hours at a time. My band, which had the questionable name of Rocking Chair, played around a dozen shows a year: festivals, parties, competitions—anywhere, really, that people would allow us to set up our equipment. We once played a gig in a graveyard facing a parking lot. Our drummer’s mom videotaped it. When she pans the camera from our setup in front of the graves to the lot, you realize that the “crowd” consists of no more than a dozen people on folding chairs. She still finds it funny to play this tape.
By the time I graduated high school I could play from a repertoire of hundreds of songs, ranging from Green Day to Pink Floyd. In other words, I had reached the level of expertise you would expect from someone who had played an instrument seriously for the last six years. But this is what I find fascinating: Compared to Jordan Tice’s ability at this same age, I was mediocre.
Jordan picked up guitar at the same point in his life as I did. But by the time he graduated high school, he had been touring the mid-Atlantic with a group of professional bluegrass musicians and had signed his first record deal. When I was in high school, the acoustic group Nickel Creek was thought of, admiringly, by my grade’s music snobs as Dave Matthews for cool people. When Jordan was in high school, he regularly played gigs with their bass player, Mark Schatz. The question hanging over this comparison is why, even though we had both played seriously for the same amount of time, did I end up an average high school strummer while Jordan became a star?
It didn’t take long into my visit with Jordan to understand the answer to this question. The difference in our abilities by the age of eighteen had less to do with the number of hours we practiced—though he probably racked up more total practice hours than I did, we weren’t all that far apart—and more to do with what we did with those hours. One of my most vivid memories of Rocking Chair, for example, was my discomfort playing anything I didn’t know real well. There’s a mental strain that accompanies feeling your way though a tune that’s not ingrained in muscle memory, and I hated that feeling. I learned songs reluctantly, then clung to them fiercely once they had become easy for me. I used to get upset when our rhythm guitar player would suggest we try out something new during band practice. He was happy glancing at a chord chart and then jumping in. I wasn’t. Even at that young age I realized that my discomfort with mental discomfort was a liability in the performance world.
Compare this to Jordan’s earliest experiences with the guitar. His first teacher was a friend from his parents’ church. As Jordan remembers, their lessons focused on picking out the leads from Allman Brothers records. “So he would write out the lead and then you would go memorize them?” I asked. “No, we would just figure them out by ear,” Jordan replied. To the high school version of myself, the idea of learning complicated lead parts by ear would have been way past my threshold of mental strain and patience. But Jordan came to enjoy this labor. In our interview, a decade beyond his high school years, Jordan at one point grabbed his old Martin and knocked off the solo from “Jessica,” which he somehow still remembered. “Great melody,” he said.
Not only did Jordan’s early practice require him to constantly stretch himself beyond what was comfortable, but it was also accompanied by instant feedback. The teacher was always there, Jordan explained, “to jump in and show me if I junked up a harmony.”
Watching Jordan’s current practice regime, these traits—strain and feedback—remain central. To get up to speed on the wide picking style he needs for his new tune, he keeps adjusting the speed of his practicing to a point just past where he’s comfortable. When he hits a wrong note, he immediately stops and starts over, providing instant feedback for himself. While practicing, the strain on his face and the gasping nature of his breaths can be uncomfortable even to watch—I can’t imagine what it feels like to actually do. But Jordan is happy to practice like this for hours at a time.
This, then, explains why Jordan left me in the dust. I played. But he practiced. The Nashville studio musician Mark Casstevens seconded this dedication to constantly stretching your abilities. When I talked to him, for example, he was in the process of slowly getting up to speed on a “complicated new tune in B-flat with a great deal of barre chords and nasty counterpoint.” Even someone with Casstevens’s level of (literally) award-winning experience (the Academy of Country Music recently named him Specialty Instrumentalist of the Year) can’t avoid the need to “go out to the woodshed in order to practice.”
“I develop muscle memory the hard way, by repetition,” he said, echoing Jordan’s long, skill-stretching practice sessions. “The harder I work, the more relaxed I can play, and the better it sounds.”
These observations, of course, are about more than just guitar playing. The central idea of this chapter is that the difference in strategy that separates average guitar players like me from stars like Tice and Casstevens is not confined to music. This focus on stretching your ability and receiving immediate feedback provides the core of a more universal principle—one that I increasingly came to believe provides the key to successfully acquiring career capital in almost any field.