working at the limit of your technical abilities is frustrating. i mean, i can be cool as in sometimes it's fun to be just barely hanging on, but it's frustrating hitting the brick wall limiter of your own hands. i never set out to be fast. i'll never be fast. that, having been said, sometimes relative fast is what a piece calls for and if i'm going to play it... well, oh boy.

recently i've been working on a piece that by pretty much any measure is not difficult. it's 185 BPM (though i feel/count it as 92-ish. it's just easier for my thinkybits to process) and has a section that is 12 bars of 16ths with some syncopations. nothing really tricky about the fingering or conceptually difficult. it's just... man, i struggle with it. 

i'll sit there and loop the first 4 bars of it for 3,4, or even 5 minutes just to really get into it. i'll consciously make sure i'm not straining my hand or tensing my shoulder. i'll be aware of my position shifts and make sure that they're smooth. i'll pay attention to the stabs and make sure they're landing right on the syncopations. i'll make sure my notes are even and in tempo. i got it. but do i consistently got it? not by a long shot. sure i might get a few bars on the money, hell, i might even get 11 bars, but this appears to be my limit.

now, full transparency, i've been working with this piece for 2 weeks... and i mean daily. i didn't just try to play it once and then put the bass away. some days i'll focus on one section or another a bit more, but i've addressed this section every day. sometimes multiple times before and after work. point is, when you spend that much time on 12 bars of music and you don't have it down, it's at the limits of your abilities. and i'm okay with it.

now don't get me wrong, i wish it was easy for me... like i could do it without making some mixture of bassface and "what's that smell?", but it's not. it's challenging and i don't want "good enough"... i want perfect. i want accurate. will i at some point be able to bang it out with, maybe not no problem, but with more consistency? for sure. when will that be? i dunno, i'll let you know when i get there. 

what's frustrating about hitting your limits? i think it's because that's the point where progress becomes incredibly slow, sometimes imperceptible, and it becomes difficult to know if you're actually improving at all. i have an anecdote that i think parallels nicely. back in college i spent a semester in spain. after like 4 months i was feeling pretty discouraged because i felt like i was not learning the language at all. i was telling this to the program director and he said that when people figure out that you understand a certain level of a language they will stop cutting you slack. the result is conversations are always challenging so you feel like you're never "getting it" because it never gets easier. in reality, though, you are making some serious progress because you're always at your limit. when it gets easy is when your well within your comfort zone and not learning, just coasting. you may still be doing something, which has its own merit, but it's not really advancing your skills.

i need to find my limits so i can figure out how to nudge them forward. in the meantime, this limit needs to get hammered out so i can put this piece behind me and move on to some new challenge.