Monthly Archives: September 2013

Using Metronomes Effectively – Part 1

September 26, 2013PostsMandolin, MusicHollis Easter

Everyone knows you’re supposed to buy a metronome if you’re going to be a musician. It’s one of those pieces of wisdom that passed into our culture as an article of faith. Music teachers will all tell you to get one, but we rarely offer much help in terms of how to use them effectively.

Korg MA-1 Metronome (from korg.com) — Korg MA-1 Metronome

I’d like to start by talking about how people tend to use metronomes most of the time. Most people use metronomes in ways that don’t guide them toward good performance, so they don’t get much value from the practice. We’ll look at why it doesn’t help much, and then we’ll talk about what actually works.

What are metronomes good at doing?

Metronomes are good at exactly one thing: setting a steady beat that isn’t affected by the player. The simplest metronomes just tick at various speeds, and while fancier ones can play different sounds on different beats, articulate different rhythms, etc., the basic purpose is still the same. They are designed to provide an external stimulus that shows us where steady time is. They’re a temporal reference.

Electronic metronomes do this job really well. People disagree about whether mechanical metronomes are less accurate; I stick with electronic ones because I trust their mechanism. Assuming it’s in good repair, your metronome’s opinion of time is pretty accurate, and therefore you can rely on it.

Whatever speed you tell your metronome to click, it’s going to do it. Mindlessly, perfectly, without variation, forever, until you give it a different command. It’s reliable. Trust it.

What are metronomes bad at doing?

Metronomes provide a reference. Think of them like graph paper, where each tick of the metronome is like one square of graph paper. They can help you to play evenly (sort of like graph paper helps you to draw evenly), but they can’t force you. All they do is show you where the time is; after that, it’s up to you.

More to the point, a metronome is not a coach. It doesn’t know why you’re practicing, what you’re trying to accomplish, how skilled you are, or anything else. It just does what it’s told to do, clicking away indefinitely. It’s a useful tool, but the intention and care need to come from you. The metronome is just a guide.

The metronome also can’t make you listen to it. If you stop paying attention to the clicks, the metronome can’t get you back. We need your brain for that.

What are we trying to accomplish with the metronome?

Music is about the relationship between sounds and time. The better you understand time, the better you’ll be able to speak the language of that relationship, and the better you’ll sound. When we talk about musicians with good rhythm, usually we mean people whose playing is precise in relation to time (different genres address this concept differently, but it’s there in all the styles I’ve studied, from jazz to piobaireachd to gamelan to opera). It stands to reason that if you don’t have a good sense of time, you’re not going to place notes with precision, and your playing will suffer.

So, most of us are trying to use metronomes in service of rhythm. Maybe it’s needing to play a difficult passage at 165 beats per minute (bpm) in a bluegrass session, or it’s about Alberti bass in a quick harpsichord piece, or it’s about fitting drum fills into the right spot, or it’s about getting that reel to swing at dance tempo. We know we need to be “in time”, so we set the metronome at performance tempo, take a deep breath, and fire on.

An example – The Torn Jacket

I recorded a quick example of how this sort of metronome practice (set metronome to concert tempo; play the piece) tends to go. It’s on mandolin, which I’ve played for almost three months. I’m playing an Irish reel called The Torn Jacket here, and since I intend to play it for contra dancing at 118 bpm, that’s where I’ve set the metronome. Once you’ve listened, keep reading.

Done listening?

Let’s analyze that!

What did you think of my performance? Was it musical? Pleasing? Competent?

Or was it painful, out of time, rushed, and generally pretty awful? I know how I’d answer.

What’s going on there? I’m a competent musician, and although I’m new at mandolin, I’m not that bad. What happened?

The biggest factor is that I’m trying to play at a speed that’s just not realistic for me right now. Although I’ll eventually play this tune at dance tempo, I’m just not ready for it right now: I don’t have the tune under my fingers, and I’m not skilled enough at mandolin to handle it at that speed.

In terms of measurable things, what went right and what went wrong in that practice session?

Right:

I got through the tune, mostly. At 118 bpm, which is performance tempo!
I practiced.

Wrong:

My beats didn’t line up with the metronome, which means I was wrong.
The subdivisions of my beats (my eighth notes) didn’t line up with the metronome, which means I was wrong.
I often stopped listening to the metronome because I was concentrating so hard on what I was playing.
I gave different amounts of time to notes with the same rhythmic value because I was alternately rushing and lagging behind.
I produced very poor tone on the instrument.
I got frustrated (did you hear the heavy sigh?) and I didn’t enjoy playing.
My hands got very tense, and my neck and arms did too.

The critics would boo me off the stage if I played like that in public. But this was just a practice session. Let’s suppose I spent an hour practicing like that. Was it valuable?

Let’s reinforce some bad habits!

Practicing like that is worse than useless. Practice makes permanent, not perfect, and all I’m doing like that is forming bad habits that will last forever.

Every time I practice this tune, my brain is forging neural connections that will last. My brain is doing its job, just like the metronome: it’s memorizing what I did, comparing it to other experiences, and making sure I can repeat it next time. Practice it enough times and I’ll be able to do it from memory, without even really thinking about it.

Unfortunately, when I practice like this, I’m setting myself up for bad playing, pain, and injury long into the future, because I’m learning it as this stressed out, uneven cacophony that’s lurching along, out of control, and not fun at all. Even worse, I’m working so hard to fit the notes in that I’ve trained myself to stop listening: to myself, to the metronome to anything. I’ve stopped listening, and that’s bad news.

Yet this is how most of us were taught to use metronomes.

We know the piece needs to be at 118 bpm, so it seems to make sense to use the metronome to measure whether we’re there yet. But if we’re just learning the tune, it’s unlikely that we can play it at dance tempo, so we fail. We try again, and we fail again. And again. Maybe we admit defeat and slow the metronome down a little bit, feeling bitter shame as we set it for something “easy” like 100 bpm. Even if we manage to play the piece at the slower tempo, the knowledge of that 118 bpm failure sticks with us. Is it any wonder that people don’t like practicing, when ‘practicing’ is just shorthand for ‘failing repeatedly’?

If the purpose of practice is to improve our playing, we need a different approach. We need to get away from using the metronome to measure how fast we can play and start using it as a tool to guide us toward good performance. In the second half of this article, that’s what I’ll address.

Check back soon to read the second half of the article!

Questions or concerns? Leave a comment, please!

Alcohol tinctures – How much alcohol is needed?

September 24, 2013PostsCooking, HerbalismHollis Easter

I’ve seen conflicting advice on different herbal recipes when it comes to adding vodka to alcohol tinctures. Some say to add vodka to cover the herbs; some say to add vodka to cover with an inch or so of clear alcohol atop the herbs. Further complicating the issue is the fact that some recipes mandate the use of more expensive 100 proof (50% alcohol by volume) vodka, while others seem to imply that the cheaper 80 proof/40% alcohol vodka is fine. What gives?

What does alcohol in tinctures do?

It has a couple of basic functions. The first one should be obvious from the alcohol tincture’s other name: ethanol/water extraction. We use tincturing because there are some desirable compounds in an herb that aren’t soluble in plain water, and the ethanol gets it out for us. This is also part of why garbling is important–the ethanol needs to have access to the compounds we’re looking for.

Alcohol’s other function in a tincture is for preservation: we want tinctures to last a long time, especially since we often devote a large quantity of herb to the making of a given quantity of tincture. I’ve seen figures suggesting that alcohol concentrations above 37.5% should have adequate ethanol content to prevent fermentation and rot.

So if we’re working with vodka that’s either 40% or 50% alcohol, why does it matter? Furthermore, why do we need the extra inch? Do we always need it?

Can you figure it out?

As a hint, I think we’d get different results trying to make a tincture of dried cinnamon bark than a fresh dandelion tincture.

I think it’s about the water content in the herbs, and that the inches thing is a red herring–or, at least, a rule of thumb. If the herb we’re using has very little water content, as in the cinnamon example, the 40% alcohol might be fine because the herb contains almost no water to dilute it. But with a jarful of fresh dandelions, there’s a lot of water still locked up inside the dandelions, and it’s not a stretch to imagine that it might dilute even 50% alcohol down below that critical 37.5% threshold.

Remember that people say to dry your herbs carefully after washing? Same story: every drop of water on a dandelion leaf is working to dilute our alcohol down below 37.5%.

So I think the extra inch of vodka isn’t about excluding air (unlike in fermentation where the extra inches of brine are needed to create an anaerobic environment), but rather about ensuring that there’s enough alcohol in the jar to handle any excess water that comes out of the herb.

What do you think?

How to make dandelion tincture (whole herb)

September 24, 2013PostsCooking, Herbalism, HowtoHollis Easter

Making dandelion tincture

Dandelions grow almost everywhere, in any kind of soil, in most climates. They’re tremendously adaptable and effective at surviving even in bad conditions. And they’re even good for you! Dandelions are really bitter and full of vitamins and other compounds that allegedly support healthy digestion. I’ve been taking dandelion tincture as part of my treatment for Lyme disease for a while now; here’s how you make it!

A quick disclaimer: do your own research about whether to use this stuff. I researched it and, on the advice of my medical providers, have been taking it. I’m not going to write much about what dandelions are supposed to do, or why, or what their risks are. This is a ‘how’ article, not a ‘why’. Similarly, make sure you know how to identify dandelions, for sure, before you harvest them. Never eat a wild food without knowing for sure what it is.

Ingredients and supplies:

Dandelions, including the roots
100 proof vodka (50% alcohol by volume)
Mason jar(s)
Cutting board
Sharp knife
Waxed paper
Muslin fabric (used later)
Labeling materials

We’re going to make a whole-herb tincture here, meaning that it involves all the parts of the plant. This recipe is based on folk process herbalism, which you can look up if you’re curious. By ‘tincture‘, we mean that we’re making an ethanol-water extraction of soluble compounds in the herb. There are other terms you can use if you’re interested in the history of herbalism.

Gathering

Gather a bunch of dandelions, being sure to dig up the roots. Many gardeners will thank you for this task and encourage you to return, soon, to ~~clean up their lawns~~ make more medicine for yourself. Remove any slugs, worms, or other animal inhabitants from your dandelions. It’s better if you do this when the dandelions are flowering, so you get some of the petals, but I’m making this batch in September so it’s leaves and roots only.

It’s best to gather dandelions that aren’t right next to roads, driveways, or other places with car exhaust. Also, don’t harvest dandelions from a lawn that gets treated with pesticides. You want plain, natural, healthy dandelions.

There’s a tradition in herbalism that suggests it’s important to approach these tasks with gratitude in your heart and an awareness that you are asking these plants to die in order to give you greater health. The same tradition says that it’s important to really focus on good health while you’re working on making the tincture. You are, of course, welcome to omit these things if you choose, but I find that they bring some additional meaning into the process and, perhaps, turn the act of making tincture into a meditation on health.

Washing and Drying

I gathered enough dandelions to fill a plastic shopping bag. They were covered with dirt, so my next step was to wash them in several changes of water. It amazed me how many stones and weeds and grains of sand were stuck to my dandelions.

Fill up the bowl and swish the dandelions around for a while. You’ll find the water getting muddy; repeat this process until it’s clear. As you do, pick through the dandelions to remove anything that’s not a dandelion: weeds, slugs, dead leaves, etc.

Once the dandelions are clean, it’s important to dry them. I used a salad spinner, processing the dandelions in several batches. Keep spinning until no more water comes off. Here’s why I think it’s so important to dry them fully.

2013-09-23 00.04.31 — Washed, dried, and looking good!

Garbling and Chopping

Have you ever heard of a message being ‘garbled’, meaning that it was hard to understand because it had gotten all separated and mixed and chopped up? It turns out that garbling is an herbalism word, too, meaning to separate out the different parts of an herb (dandelion, in this case) and strip away anything that’s not needed.

We’re going to keep the leaves and roots of the dandelion (and the flowers and stems, if they were in season), but I like to discard the part that’s sometimes called the nodule. It’s the intersection between the leaves and the root. If you look at my cutting board here, you’ll see that I’ve cut out the nodule; we’ll compost it.

Leaves - nodule - root — Leaves – nodule – root

From this point, we want to chop the herb into small enough bits that the vodka can do its work extracting the good stuff. There’s no great magic to the approach other than that smaller is better. I’ve read that you shouldn’t use a food processor, though, because the blade tends to heat up the mixture and drive off volatile compounds. I like to batch process the dandelions to save time: I’ll remove the nodules from about 10 dandelions, then chop their leaves, then chop the roots. I’ve found that if you roll up a bunch of leaves like a cigar, you can easily cut them up using scissors.

Once you’ve chopped your dandelions, put them into a glass jar, packing the mixture down with a clean metal spoon. Leave an inch or two of space at the top of the jar.

Filling and Shaking

Now it’s time for the vodka. It’s important to use 100 proof (50%) vodka because we want the alcohol concentration to stay high enough to prevent fermentation and rot. Various things I’ve read say the critical number is 37.5% alcohol by volume, and standard vodka (80 proof/40%) is too close for comfort. So spend a little extra and buy the 100 proof.

Once your dandelions are packed into the jar, start filling with vodka. Fill it up until you have at least an inch of vodka above the dandelions. Why an inch? Read this.

Once you’ve done that, cut a square of waxed paper to fit over the top of the jar, cover with the lid, and screw down the band. Tighten it as much as you can. Then shake the dickens out of it, turning the jar all different ways. Once you’ve done that for a while, open it up and see whether you need to add more vodka to maintain that inch of coverage.

Labeling and Waiting

Always label your tinctures. Always. If you remember nothing else, remember this. A good label is worth its weight in gold. (Unfortunately labels don’t weigh much, so it wouldn’t actually be worth that much… anyway.) Label the jar, not the lid.

The label should clearly state what’s in the jar, when it was made, and what else needs to happen with it. At this stage, I’m just using masking tape since the tincture isn’t finished yet; later on, I’ll probably make nicer labels.

These jars are labeled “Dandelion whole-herb tincture in 50% alc.” and “9/23/13 strain after 10/23/13“. We want these to sit for at least two weeks, and preferably more like four to six weeks, before we strain them.

I like to put them on a sunny windowsill, partly because it reminds me to shake them every day and partly because they’re just pretty. Open them periodically and make sure you still have an inch of vodka covering them. (You may need to replace the waxed paper after a few rounds of opening them, because the vodka seems to soak through the paper after a while. No harm done; just replace it.)

It’s probably better not to leave the tincture jars in direct sunlight long-term, but I find that I forget to shake them unless I’m looking at them every day. Your mileage may vary! Once the tincture is finished extracting, I encourage you to store the bottles in a dark place.

Click to see how to finish the tincture once it’s done steeping.

Tinctures all bottled, labeled, and ready to use!

Any questions? Leave a comment and I’ll do my best. What are some of your favorite tinctures to make? (Remember to read the article on finishing up the tincture and the one on alcohol proportions!)

The Pillar Metaphor

September 21, 2013PostsCrisis HotlinesHollis Easter

The Pillar Metaphor

We use lots of metaphors for talking about mental health. Lots of models, lots of approaches. Like different camera lenses, they all offer a slightly different view that, ideally, helps us see a little more clearly.

Imagine that you’re building a house on ground that’s very wet. Digging a basement isn’t going to work because it’s too wet, so you dig deep and set support pillars into the soil, bedding them as deep as you can. Once these pillars are in place, you build a pad atop them, and above that you build your house. That house is your life. You live in it, you work in and on it, you invite people into it… you live in it.

As long as things are stable, you probably don’t think much about whether your house is stable or not. You don’t notice whether your house has a lot of support or just barely enough–as long as it’s stable enough, you’re good. And as long as things are stable, you probably don’t spend a lot of time poking around underneath to see whether all the supports are in good working order.

This is normal.

There’s a fine line between proactive maintenance and obsession. Nobody’s suggesting that you should spend all your days under the house checking out the pillars, making sure their concrete is sound, clearing cobwebs, or anything. But neither is it a good idea to let your supports go too long without checking in–because otherwise you only learn about problems when you lean on the supports and they crumble.

So you’ve got this house, which is the metaphor for your life. At any given time, it has a certain amount of stress or strain¹, which is like the total weight of the house and its contents. This is the normal up-and-down stuff of every-day life: family, health, job, friends, the person who shoved you in the grocery store, the toddler who offered you a flower on the way home, the feeling of waking up after a good night’s sleep, the lingering smell of burned toast, the questions about paying for retirement or college, the dinner party, all that stuff. Nothing world-shaking, nothing too far outside the ordinary. If your house was designed well and is in decent repair, you’ve got plenty of support for this stuff–so nothing bad happens when these things appear in your life.

But sometimes a storm comes along and trashes things. Maybe it comes with gale-force winds, which push really hard on your house’s walls and (effectively) add weight to the structure. Maybe it floods the soil and then lashes it with wind, which destroys some pillars if it lasts long enough. We all know what storms look and feel like; they’re the big events that hurt. Deaths, job losses, serious injuries, relationships ending… big stuff. We’ll call this stuff a storm factor. (Sometimes good things can be storms, too–ask anyone with a new baby).

Strain = House’s weight * storm factor

Let’s say that your house’s resilience is a function of its number of pillars. Basically, it can resist a certain amount of strain, for a while, if it has enough pillars. Since pillars can be different sizes, or be in bad condition, we’ll add a factor to show how strong the pillars are.

Resilience = number of pillars * pillar strength

As long as resilience is bigger than strain, everything is fine: the house stays up, nothing shifts, and the occupants are usually pretty oblivious to the balance. But if strain creeps above the resilience threshold, even just for a moment, things start to crack. Maybe the pillars start cracking, lowering total resilience for next time. Maybe the house starts to tip a little bit, and furniture starts falling over. It’s still salvageable, but things are pretty tough. This is where we start a lot of the interventions in the mental health and substance abuse worlds. Seems a little late, don’t you think?

If the strain gets a lot higher than the resilience, the house’s supports just buckle and the house falls down. At that point, it’s going to require heroic efforts to save it at all, and even if we succeed, it may never go back to quite the way it was. This is where a lot of people enter the mental health world: in the midst of a suicide attempt, at a psychotic break, or hitting “rock bottom” on substances. We can still help these people, but on some level we’re now talking about disaster services, which are really expensive and resource-intensive.

About those pillars…

Let’s revisit those equations I posted up above.

Strain = House’s weight * storm factor
Resilience = number of pillars * pillar strength

Which factors can we control? We can have a small effect on the house’s weight–we can take a more- or less-stressful job, add or subtract relationships, etc., but a lot of the stuff in the house isn’t really under our control. We can’t do anything at all about the storm factor, because accidents happen and we can’t stop them.

What about the pillars? Most of our efforts work on increasing the number of pillars we have, because pillar strength is largely out of individual control. (Think of pillar strength as being innate–some people seem to be more resilient than others, have a more natively positive world view, etc.)

If your house needs more support, you can go out and find some. Maybe it works something like this:

Good family relationships –> you get 5% more pillars
Good health –> you get 5% more pillars
Mental health care –> you get 5% more pillars
Faith community –> you get 5% more pillars
Stable job –> you get 5% more pillars
Nice neighbors –> you get 5% more pillars
… and so on.

The more of these you stack up, the higher your resilience is going to be. Remember, this won’t matter on most days, because your house was designed with enough resilience for its intended normal load. But the more extra pillars you get, the bigger a storm has to be before it can knock your house down. You can weather the storm (forgive me) with way better odds.

But it’s not all positive. We can look at a lot of the crisis conditions we work with as vandals that go in and sabotage your foundations under cover of darkness. They go in and mess with the pillars. Again, under normal conditions, you may never know until things get really bad, because most people have some reserve capacity built in. But eventually, this stuff can weaken the foundations to the point where even normal life exceeds the rated strength of the foundation:

Schizophrenia –> knock down 20% of your pillars
Chronic illness –> knock down 10% of your pillars
Alcoholism –> knock down 15% of your pillars
Lyme disease –> knock down 15% of your pillars and put up paper replicas to hide the empty spaces
Loss of loved ones –> knock down 5-50% of your pillars
Poverty –> knock down 65% of your pillars and require monthly rent on the others
… and so on.

So what’s the point?

It’s not easy to see the foundations of things. There’s usually a lot of stuff piled on top: a house, a history, a life. Even with a lot of introspection, it’s hard to really know what’s going on under there unless things start falling apart. We just know one simple thing: it’s strong enough, or it isn’t.

Not everybody even starts with the same number of pillars, and some people’s pillars are stronger. John D. Rockefeller had some advantages compared to the people living under bridges, and we can think of these in terms of how many pillars of support they started with. Some people just get wired in ways that make them seemingly happy all the time; many of them got lots of pillars at the beginning. Some people come from horribly disadvantaged backgrounds, have very few pillars, and still do fine–we can think of this as having a few pillars with huge pillar strength factors.

But we often forget that people’s life conditions make them more exposed to instability, or we pretend that it’s all about willpower. How many times have you heard someone talk dismissively about an alcoholic who starts drinking again after a year in recovery or a mentally ill person who “loses it”? Heard someone tell a suicidal person not to be so selfish, or a schizophrenic that if they just try harder, the voices will go away?

Would a contractor say “well, your house wouldn’t have fallen over if the foundations had tried harder“?

No.

I’m not trying to say that willpower is unimportant, but I think it’s overrated. A lot of the problems our clients and callers face are saboteurs: they destroy the underpinnings for a stable life. Is it any wonder their boats are sinking when they’ve got so many stowaways drilling holes in the hull? Is it the house’s fault that it falls over if half its pillars are gone?

I’d like to see our behavioral health professions taking a more compassionate look at people’s circumstances. Real empathy starts with seeing people the way they are, and respecting what’s possible for them. Not everyone gets to have a house with tons of extra pillars, and some people can’t repair the ones that break. Some people’s houses fall down. Sometimes their choices lead directly there; sometimes they’ve tried good things but been overmatched; sometimes they succeed in shoring up the foundations. But when the strain outweighs the resilience, we shouldn’t be surprised that things fall apart.

And finally, take a look at your foundations. If they’re crumbling, find someone to help you rebuild–before you really need it.

So that’s the pillar metaphor: a new lens for seeing stability.

1: Yes, I know that my use misuse of ‘stress’ and ‘strain’ is probably giving the engineers in my audience conniptions. I’m sorry. Maybe you could use this moment to notice that my misuse of terms has momentarily increased the stress in your life (did you see what I did there?) and that your support pillars are under a bit more strain just now. Perhaps this will provide the impulse you need to force yourself to display a little more toughness in your relationship to words with linkages to multiple meanings, or maybe you’ll just think I’m a jerk. I hope this paragraph makes you smile, anyway.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy reading: