image credit: DavidArtWooten. Yes, this theory applies to all ages
When it comes to learning, there are numerous theories out there. However, the most common method by far, is to simply ‘wing it’ and put in as much time as possible in the activity and hope to become good. Effort in = results out right?
Of course, there are some problems. Some people obviously do not learn certain skills well. We then attribute the inability to pick up tennis as a lack of coordination; the inability to do math as not being good with numbers and formulas; the inability to learn a language as an unknown element of queer and eluding inspiration.
To all except the language case, I say that the excuse is completely invalid. (If you’re interested, the language learning issue is discussed casually in the article ‘Feeling the guitar’)
So what I want to cover in this article is:
- The Wrong Way to Learn a Skill
- The Right Way to Learn a Skill
- The Way to Get Intermediate Proficiency at playing the Guitar
And it’s as simple as that!
THE WRONG WAY
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. No plan ≈ no results or lots of wasted time.
Sure, many people manage to just keep trying to pick up a skill and succeed. Numerous examples of the guy who simply takes up boxing and becomes the champ, the big guy who becomes a pro lineman. And certainly, we cannot ignore some of the child prodigies in the piano and other musical instruments. Yet at the same time, there are some people who definitely get where they are through plain old hard work.
We cannot discount hard work, which is always a necessity, but this post is not about that. I will take working hard as a given in any scenario discussed here.
My aim is to ignore the hits and look at the misses. For all the successes we see, we also see numerous failures. Some people seem to ‘just suck at math’ despite how hard they try, or just cannot swing a bat to hit a ball to save his/her life. To these people, the hard work approach does not work at all. Fortunately, most people will quit early and pursue other more favourable skills, and hopefully enjoy some success.
Of course, most people don’t totally suck, but aren’t particularly talented either. In my opinion, this group (of which most people will fall under) stands the most to lose from using the ‘straight charging’ approach. They end up trying so hard and get past the newbie stage with much effort, only to be confronted by the huge challenge still ahead of taking their skills to the next level. If you’re pursuing the skill as a hobby the worst case scenario is wasted time. If you’re trying to make a living out of playing the guitar, then this is a big problem.
The 3 big problems
- Undirected/unfocused effort
- No positive feedback
- Suboptimal use of time
The first problem refers to a lack of focus. This boils down again to the 80/20 principle.
To give an example from tennis: A forehand consists of the preparation, the actual hit, and the follow through. To many, thinking of everything to do with hitting the ball is just going to fry your brain. You’d have to consider the velocity of the ball, the trajectory of the return, the air speed, the spin, the strategic placement of your return to beat your adversary, the angle of your racket …… This is not something a beginner can fathom (and even the pros for the matter).
And if you don’t care about anything and just try to imitate the pros and hit the ball, chances are you won’t succeed the first time round. The likely scenario is that you keep spending time trying to hit the ball is whichever way you think is best and flop around with random swings. 6 months later you can roughly hit the ball to where you want it to go, but you technique has some flaws and you invested a ton of time into the skill and still are not very good.
The second problem arises when our weary tennis player still sees sub par results despite his best efforts. He is no longer a newbie, but still is nowhere near playing a full game of tennis. His friends all play better than him, and he can’t join them in doubles play. He doubles his efforts, playing 2 hours a day for another month, and yet his friends who started out the same time as him are beating him hands down. In frustration he quits.
The third problem is pretty obvious by now. But it is made worse, when after quitting the game for six months, he meets with this girl whom he falls madly in love with, but who loves to play tennis and is excellent at it. In desperation, he tries to pick up the sport again, this time, spending lots of time, not getting the same results, and worse still, looking foolish in front of this girl.
My 3 solutions
- Focus on the important parts of the skill
- Consistency is key
- Practice perfectly under the most favourable conditions
The first part is to put your efforts into the most important areas of the skill to be learned. In tennis, most people have a natural preparation of the swing, but the footwork is off. During the hit, most people fumble around and don’t get a consistent hit. Most people don’t care about the follow-through.
The solution: Focus on footwork, look at the ball all the way until the hit, follow-through the stroke while still looking at the spot.
More specifically to the guitar, the principles were to relax the fingers, use minimal force to press the strings, and try to feel for the sound of the playing.
Yes, this kind of knowledge may be hard to come by, but it is vital that you establish a few things to focus on and not everything.
There are 2 ways to establish this:
- Get a good coach/ good learning resources
- Experiment yourself with various methods
My experience has been that a combination of the 2 is required, but in the newbie stage, a great coach or a good resource (say an audio & video software to learn guitar) will win out over self-experimentation in terms of both effectiveness and time efficiency.
However, everybody will be slightly different, and you will have to tweak some of your efforts to suit you, especially in the grey areas.
For learning the guitar, on of these fuzzy areas would be the ‘feel the sound’ part. Some people are better at visually looking at the notes of the score and playing without looking at their fingers. Some people must look at their fingers while listening to the tune being played. Some people fare better with not looking at their fingers and then singing the tune in their head.
Also, he who has prior musical experience may like to think in musical theory terms (minor 3rds, perfect 5ths), whereas he who is just starting out may benefit more from simply remembering finger positions.
Anecdotally, I in particular fare much better playing by predicting the sound of the note to be played. Looking at my fingers sometimes confuses me with the varying inputs going into my brain.
The point is to not stress about it, but still find the time to experiment with some various methods of learning.
Some people will find that math is made a whole lot easier once they are presented with diagrams, while others will benefit under phonetically tying down formulas to various sounds to remember.
I myself found that by focusing on the sound of the music, I progressed much faster. This sort of distillation of technique is my explanation for the reason some musicians are just good, and yet they don’t know why. Sure, you can break down their technique to the bare bones, but they certainly don’t think about it that way when they are playing. The same goes for the best tennis players, golfers, painters, etc.
This bridges onto the second part of the solution, which is consistency.
I like to say that everything, good or bad, will have to come with time.
We get fat by eating too much over the period of months to years (sometimes weeks, but not common), and yet think that getting fit is going to take weeks or days.
The same goes for any skill, and it is this consistency which will pay off in the end.
Just like our hapless tennis player who quit playing for 6 months, a lack of consistency will always stifle any progress.
I will say that even if the practice is sub-optimal, consistency will at least garner some results. It is the magic of combining the right focus with consistent effort that is going to bring about the most success in the learning of any skill.
In part, this can be due to the rate at which we forget a skill.
It is an ongoing hypothesis of mine, that the rate at which most people can learn is pretty good, but the reason that most people don’t get anywhere fast is because they don’t consistently keep at the skill and thus forget the skill and have to relearn it. This ultimately leads to much wasted time in the re-learning process. (very often doubling the time needed to learn a skill)
This is probably best seen in any high school or college, whereby students study one topic, get proficient at it, and yet 3 months later during the exam, have to struggle to cram the same knowledge into their heads to get good results.
I’m pretty sure that there is a certain frequency of practice which will yield the best results. Too much may mean too much time invested for not much results, yet too little and we simply forget the skill. I discuss this solely in the article ‘The spacing effect and how this applies to learning guitar’. Unfortunately, I cannot prescribe this best frequency whereby time is maximised, that will be up to individual experimentation, but if you have the time, more frequent = better.
But just to shoot up a number, I found that the best progress that I made with the guitar was doing 1 hour each day, and constantly trying new techniques. For math, that frequency was 10 minutes everyday with probably 30 minutes when the exams came by.
Finally, we can come to the third and final solution of this long article. This involves practicing under the best possible conditions.
We can shoot up so many variables over here: duration of practice, noise level, time of day, etc.
To quote from my own experience once again, I found that once I hit that 1 hour mark, my fingers would start to hurt and generally the motivation to continues just started to wane. I practice with headphones so the only thing I hear is my playing. And finally I do so mainly at night before bed when school and other worries have been settled.
This is certainly not the same for everyone, since I know another classical guitar player who does best with his 3 hour long sessions whereby he says he just gets into this ‘flow’ state and forgets about time.
Again, this is going to be experimentation on your part.
I take this very seriously because I know that 1 hour of good practice is better than 20 hours of crappy practice.
This will be a universal principle. Some people just cannot muster the energy to go for a run in the morning, but feel bouncy and energised in the evening. Why schedule a morning run then? Similiarly, some people cannot focus on reading at night, then why study at night?
This is probably one of the reasons why I did not take guitar classes. They were rigidly timed and the techniques I learnt had to be done in a progressive manner. I would have to learn chords before plucking, bending before vibrato, etc. Why not just do everything at the same time, especially since the techniques reinforced each other? (eg: learning bending helped with using the tips of my fingers)
Furthermore, if you’re in a group, you have to progress with the group, which may be too fast or too slow. Either way, conditions were suboptimal.
So practicing under the right conditions, the right energy level, the right mindset, all contribute to the overall effectiveness of learning the skill.
So there are my 3 solutions, they certainly do not have to be implemented all at once and they may not even be all that important for some people (especially those naturally talented). Hopefully, I have given you some ideas on how to improve your practice.
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