Faith and achievement

[bennyboy]

Just as endlessly hammering out scales is good training, particularly for improvisation.  Familiarity, knowing what sounds like what...where it is, and how it fits with the rest.  You don't think much about walking either, I bet.  That's familiarity, not faith.

Most study of "the zone" occurs in the context of professional musicians practicing.  So there's your way to the zone.....sadly, it's practice.

Oh no doubt.  There's something about an ongoing focus that sometimes arrives at that zone, and practice has a HUGE amount to do with it.  In my opinion, it's something like help-hynosis: you fall asleep from the pure repetition of it all, and enter a kind of trance-like state.  However, I've practiced sometimes 8 hours with intense focus hoping for the zone, and it never comes; it's almost like hoping for it scares it away somehow.

The funny thing is that when I'm IN the zone, everything seems so crystal clear. I can't understand how I could have been so clumsy the previous day, because what I'm doing is no harder than drinking a glass of water. Then the next day, I wake up with 10 thumbs, and it all seems like a distant fantasy again.