Growing up in the 1980s, heavy metal hairbands were rock gods looked up to by kids and adults alike. While studying piano and awkwardly attempting early compositions, I wanted to hurry and get to the "rocking out" part of my musical prowess, just like the bands I admired so much.

It's so easy to fixate on an immediate reward that you forget practice is what helps us climb the ladder to success. It takes us to another level of connecting with ourselves and with our art.

Improvisation still depends on structure. It's the balance of chaos and structure that allows you to create your own "voice" that becomes authentically you. Mastery comes from loving the craft itself.

We end with an improvised piece in C minor called “A Flavor of Slop.”

Transcript

Ah, the 80s Growing up in the eighties, Friday night music videos, then MTV, these were the big things I'd get so excited to see. Aha, Billy Idol, Michael Jackson, Madonna, the rest. Big hair metal was amazing. Guns and Roses was still underground. Metallica was counterculture.

Practicing my scales, arpeggios, playing green sleeves on the piano with my teacher. I drift off to wonder how do these people, how do these musicians make the music they do?

My First Compositions

It seems so far off from whatever it is I'm doing. I try to make up this, that, or the other. My first composition was something of a series of notes running up and down a scale and some key that I made sure to include sharps and flats, just to make sure it was complex enough.

Eagerly I'd show it off to my piano teacher and she patiently, kindly, maybe even sincerely said something along the lines of, "That's nice," followed by a "Now, let's get back to work." And in my mind, but, but I'm not rocking out like Poison yet.

It's Not About the Reward

We're so accustomed to reward. The end goal, the vision of whatever we think will bring us joy, happiness, if not some unconscious fantasy of immortality. And we see it in our psychology with Skinner who linked stimulus and reward. We push it in our science and medicine when we implicitly say that the only thing that matters is what can be measured.

We say it in our day-to-day lives when we believe that we only need that hack or trick to make something work. We do it to ourselves when we aim for a score in that language app, rather than using the app to connect with our own voice within.

The trope of focus on a journey over its reward persists as a trope because we so often don't live it.

We Practice ADHD

Students often wonder about the WAVES approach to dealing with an ADHD mind. But it's not about "dealing with", it's practicing. We're practicing ADHD.

Well, what good is that? Well, when practicing the piano, we do eventually find a place of ease within the notes, we discover a voice.

Regularly I hear others tell me that they can instantly recognize my style of playing. It's not that I deliberately sought that out. I got there by practicing the fundamentals. The voice came of its own accord.

Over time whatever unique bubble I represent in the current wave of existence manifests on its own. It's just the way it happens. My job is to be aware and remove impediments where I can regularly over time. It's also known as practice.

Real Practice Helps Us Find Our Voice

Not only that, but the thing is I enjoy it. I enjoy that process. I enjoy the engagement of challenge in the small and large, finding a possible trailhead of mastery where I can.

Feeding the play that comes with that, that resonates with the sense of meaning within and often with others. The same thing happens when we practice our way of being.

ADHD for example, is this flow through a thin passage of the now. Strong and powerful, or stumbling and turbulent. It's like air within a flute, bow across a string, a tap on a drum

We don't manage ADHD, we practice it. And in so doing, we can find our strength and power, and more importantly, our own voice.

When hearing the simple ease of Frank Sinatra's, almost spoken, but clearly sung tunes, and we watched the smooth moves of Michael Jackson's feet.

When we know those moments of care, calm, play, and mastery, all hidden in that gentle, barely perceptible smile of a craftsperson at work, we know that they're in love with the craft, the practice itself. And when we bring that joy to the moment's challenge, we bring that self into the work.

The funny thing about improvisation is that it rests on structure. Without structure, we'd only have a mess. As I say, there's something interesting that does seem to happen at this interface between chaos and structure.

Whatever systems we build have to include the nature of our wandering, that flow of thought, that delight in play. Otherwise, we ourselves are not there. We're simply acting as some automaton.

So much of those, "I don't wanna" feelings are about rebelling against being that automaton. When we approach structure, when we practice. When we look at the study of others, their systems, their views of the world. There can be something powerful about pausing, and aligning this with our own voice, with our own moment of challenge, which then lets us take in whatever it is we're studying to grow our own voice.

The following piece is an improvised work, but it rests in a very clear structure of C minor, a particular set of notes. And as a home of C, that root note and the notes and the structures of the notes themselves all form something.

But all of those notes, all of those ideas, all of the ways this sonic building has come to be over the eons, if you will, has been brought in into that studied place in order to become play, which I hope you can hear between the notes.

The following piece, it has a silly name, it's called "A Flavor of Slop". I like that name. It's in C Minor, as I mentioned, and I hope you enjoy it.

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