November 2, 2017 | 0 Comments

Why I’m Not A Concert Pianist: The Importance of Fundamentals

When I was a young boy, my parents gave me piano lessons. I had a knack for it, but soon ran into a problem: I needed to learn my scales, but I didn’t want to practice them.

I didn’t see the point. “What does this teach me?” I asked. “Scales are boring. Why can’t I just learn to actually play some music? That’s what I really want to do.” I thought I knew them well enough to move on, but my teachers thought otherwise. Because of my distaste for scales, I soon stopped practicing altogether. And thus ended any hopes my parents had of their son becoming the next Liberace. While I would dabble on the piano for years afterward, I never became anything remotely resembling a pianist. I learned to play a handful of pieces, but never seemed to get over “the hump”.
Looking back on it, I now understand perfectly why learning scales was so important. They taught the fundamentals of keyboarding and music theory. They served as a foundation for playing music. Had I put in the time and effort to master the scales, learning musical pieces, even complex ones, would have been much easier. I would have learned broad, general principles and technique, which I could apply to musical pieces at will. I understand now how neglecting to learn scales prevented me from ever truly learning the piano.

Shooters of all experience levels often make the same mistake that I made as a budding young would-be pianist. They believe that once they have a rudimentary understanding of the fundamentals, the only things that are going to make them better are challenging shooting drills, competitions, reality-based training, and the like. All of those things are fine training tools, but without a solid mastery of shooting fundamentals, they are largely pointless exercises. If you are struggling with more complex shooting exercises, you might think that you just need to practice those exercises more. In actuality, what you need to do is practice your fundamentals more.

Some people think that fundamentals are boring, but they are key to mastering a firearm. In every Guncraft Defense Firearm Course, we spend the first few hours working on fundamentals. Many experienced shooters roll their eyes when they realize that’s how they are going to spend the first morning of the class, and they think that it exists only for the benefit of the new shooters. But by the end of the morning, 90% of these “experienced” shooters realize that they don’t understand the fundamentals are well as they might have thought. Almost always, they find at least one thing that they’ve been doing poorly or incorrectly, sometimes for years and without even knowing it.

As the course progresses, we ramp up the complexity and difficulty level of the drills. If a shooter starts struggling with a specific drill, it is almost always a problem with the fundamentals. The instructor coaching the student will usually spend a few minutes getting the student focused back on fundamental techniques and concepts, or perhaps will give the student a modified version of the drill to allow the student to practice fundamentals for a few moments. Almost always, this quickly fixes the problem, and the student catches up with the class.

Intimate familiarity with your weapon. Proper gun handling. Grip. Stance. Proper use of sights. Trigger control. Balancing speed and accuracy. Weapon presentation. Consistency, consistency, consistency. These are the things that will make you into an expert with your gun. Not a shooting competition, the latest video training, or some whiz-bang drill that you found on YouTube. There is nothing wrong with those things, but they will only benefit you once your fundamentals are solid. Once the fundamentals are second-nature to you, you’ll be able to perform just about any drill or exercise, because all drills have the fundamentals in common. And once they’re second-nature to you, practice them some more.