‘Guitar practice is the study of simplification.’
Free book here, at his always-useful site.
Mathews introduces his sequential model with, ‘One of our main goals is to eliminate confusion,’ meaning that prior to handling the instrument we know exactly what notes, in what order, in what rhythm, with what intonations we’re going for. Said differently, before physical performance we have a fully articulated musical intention. His typology of problems has two elements:
- Confusion about what we’re trying to do.
- Technical challenges that we understand but can’t perform correctly and consistently.
In different words, first what we’re trying to do and then how we’re trying to do it. In a later section he says, ‘Begin with the intention to memorize the music.’ This is part of the fabric for eliminating confusion, i.e., intend to learn and be as certain as you can be that you’re intending the correct thing(s) at both the musical and performance levels. An important implication is that ‘memorize the music’ includes not only the notes but the rhythms, the tone colors, the interpretation.
The gist of his approach is top-down understanding implemented with bottom-up practice: understand the song you want to play; break things into small, manageable pieces, then break those down even further, continually returning to the whole.
His seven steps: make small sections, then make them even smaller, i.e., by doing only the rhythm, only the LH, only the RH, joining them together only at extreme-slow:
- Make small sections. One or two bars, but he advises always crossing a bar line; bar lines, like line breaks in text, are there to make reading easier, but it’s often the case in music that they’re a little more like paragraph breaks—blocking out the sections of a piece often coincides with bar lines—so his recommendation in decomposition is to always practice starting the next thought, so to speak, even if only one note or chord. I’d not seen this applied before so directly for music practice. (Though there’s something similar in To hear ourselves as others hear us by James Boyk.) It enforces continuity between sections. This is to be done without the guitar. Learning research has found we recall almost-but-not-quite complete things more strongly than completed things. Mathews has each small section end with incompleteness, enhancing savings.
- Make sure you know what all the notes and musical markings mean. The way Mathews writes this section seems oriented toward less-experienced musicians. However, Viloteau echoes it in more depth, e.g., music theory, concepts like opposing motion, &c. In other places Mathews writes about understanding underlying melodic and harmonic structures, so I interpret this as going as far as currently possible in one’s understanding. For example, if you recognize a chord progression, then you already know the harmonic structure and direction and there’s much less that needs to be learned for the specific song. The essence of this step is to understand what the song (as represented in the score), and you as the player, intend.
- Clap and count the rhythm aloud. No other author mentions this as a technique. (I was not taught it.) Mathews insists it’s essential. ‘… before we even start to play the notes, we want to make sure that we know exactly what we are doing rhythmically.’ The echoes Kappel, above, that rhythm is the most fundamental element of music. Mathews adds a 3b: decide the dynamics and phrasing here. He recommends standing up. In To hear ourselves as others hear us the recommendation is to dance to the song. In both instances, full physical engagement is called for. The physical engagement feeds back into phrasing and dynamics, a way to test different interpretations purely on a rhythmic basis, without the ‘distraction’ of melodic/harmonic movement. I wonder if part of the value of this step is motivational; while getting the time right is critical, doing it this way also allows an early victory. Mathews presents it as a self-test as well: if you can’t do this, you don’t know the rhythm yet. ‘If you skip this step, chances are that most of the practicing you do will be full of mistakes and have to be re-learned. This will add tons of time to your overall process (or you will just never get it quite right).’ An important element of Mathews here, paralleled by Viloteau, is that he recommends exploring your interpretation of the song as a whole before you even touch the instrument. Since he advocates breaking the song into very small parts, establishing the overall intent first works to prevent learning a series of perfect parts that never cohere into a whole. Supporting this, a small study by Langer had novices playing a C major scale. One group was instructed to ‘try to change your style every few minutes and not lock into one particular pattern,’ and ‘attend to the context, which may include very subtle variations on any feelings, sensations, or thoughts your are having.’ When they were compared to a control group that had been given more standard instruction, the non-standard group were found both more performance-competent and more creative, and that group also reported more enjoyment in the practice. Even though a lot of classical music, especially Romantic (like Sor), seems pretty simple, rhythm is rich and complex.
- Play the RH alone. This is the first time the guitar is touched. As in Viloteau and Kappel, having identical RH fingerings every time is considered as important as LH fingerings, where most guitarists focus. (Ericsson et al of the famous 10,000 hours focused on LH fingerings in their studies of musical expertise, but for stringed instruments, and especially the guitar, the RH is where the sound comes from.) ‘What many less advanced players do is to get into the habit of working on the left-hand first and letting the right-hand do whatever it wants to. This may work at first, and at slow tempos, but it doesn’t scale.’ I’m guilty of this. We are to continue counting the rhythm out loud during this step. Exaggerated dynamics, both in voice and with the instrument, are recommended. Mathews tells us to intentionally play something other than what we want in the end to produce, called in learning research a ‘productive failure.’ (Similarly, Viloteau suggests that we haven’t mastered a piece until we can play it 20% faster than our target tempo, as another ‘productive failure.’) Exaggeration is a means of self-test. I don’t recall any of the other authors suggesting RH-alone.
- Play the LH alone. Similar to above, with strong warning not to give in to the temptation to play the RH. (Which needs a strong warning because it’s hard to resist.) Continue counting the rhythm or singing the notes. Watch the LH closely for form, movement, &c. Play the LH in rhythm just as much as the RH. Mathews reminds, ‘treat this step as an end in itself.’
- Play the hands together, note by note. SLOW DOWN (caps in original): ignore rhythm for a while and take ‘note by note’ seriously, going slowly enough to disable muscle memory, pausing after each note. Practice ‘goal-directed movement,’ viz., shortest/easiest path from where I am to where I’m going, applied to both hands. (Viloteau writes about ‘anticipation,’ below, seemingly the same thing; it is less clear that Iznaola’s ‘easy movement’ is the same, as that may also refer to body position, neck tension, &c.)
- Play in rhythm, with the metronome. ‘Go much slower than you think you need to.’ He notes that the metronome can be used in earlier steps as well. Again, he recommends counting aloud and using exaggerated dynamics. We’re throughout all of this playing small sections with overlap.
Of particular note is the ‘slow far enough down that each note/chord is conscious.’ For years I learned songs as continuous procedures, which meant that if I got lost I was dead in the water, with no hope of improvising forward to a more familiar section. Everything was procedural/muscle memory. I can’t now retrieve it.
‘One of the benefits of learning music in this way is that it can lead to effortless memorization. Even if you have found memorizing music difficult in the past, there is a good chance that you will memorize pieces you learn in this way without even trying. This is a natural way to learn anything: Get Familiar. Because you are examining each small section from so many different perspectives (rhythm, right hand, left hand, dynamics, etc.), you are naturally becoming more familiar with the section. Effortless memorization stems from becoming very familiar with the music. This is the same way that we learn and memorize most things throughout our daily lives.’
Key here is I think the heterogeneity of the familiarity. It seems to me that the risk of satisfycing slips into the generalized vague practice that is common: I’m close enough, I’ll move to the next thing. (Something I’ve done far too much.) (‘Satisfycing’ means ‘good enough’ rather than optimal.) This method (if followed) seems to enforce not doing that. Mathews implies that memorizing where you keep the car keys and memorizing a song are the same, or close enough, although for the former knowing roughly where they are is fine, but knowing roughly what a harmony is for a song is not fine. It might be that the principle still stands, but I’m not aware of empirical evidence either in favor of or against.
A brief expansion on this. Knowing that a store is somewhere in this section of Main Street, and it’s on the righthand side when driving west, can be good enough. Situated cognition, as mentioned above: you know where the store is well enough to get yourself close and then recognize it. In music, the analogy changes to, knowing exactly where the keyhole to the door-handle to the entry is. An engineering heuristic holds that things an order of magnitude or more apart are different things. What is the case for music memorization?
A second note on memorization: you have to, even if not completely, in order to play well. Graceful physical movement is a dynamic reconciliation of present need and preparation for what comes next (and what’s possible from what came before). A lot of classical guitar fingering is not optimal when taken in isolation, but it might be the best compromise to get to the present from before and to move to what’s next, or to preserve legato. This is (parenthetically) a good example of the inseparability of musical intention from physical performance: suboptimal is fine for a passing or transition chord, but if musically it’s an important point, then the price of a more difficult transition might be repaid by the musical value of perfection in that spot.
Last on memorization is that there are age-sensitive effects and it’s not clear that the ‘effortless’ learning Mathews refers to is available to older players. We humans live longer after the end of our reproductive span than almost any other mammal, and while Blaffer Hrdy’s hypothesis that it is about cross-generational child-rearing is well-supported, Heinrich argues that deep memory is a significant factor as well. Remembering that counterintuitive place to find water from when you were six, when you’re seventy-six, keeps the entire tribe alive when the once-a-century extreme drought comes. (Real example.) If Heinrich is right, there’s an evolved tendency for older people to remember the deep past more vividly than the recent, with the corresponding opposite effect for young people to learn and save memory rapidly. If this is true, as anecdotally it seems to be, we’d expect familiarization to be less effective with older learners.
‘Treat every step along the way as an end in itself,’ that is, resist the urge to play the song but rather focus on mastering each small part of it as a thing in itself prior to stitching it together. A kind of meta-practice while practicing: ‘…over time, with practice, we can learn to treat every step along the way as an end unto itself. We can learn to take great enjoyment in mastering the elements that make up the whole. This is the stuff truly great practice is made of.’
This echoes Iznaola’s ‘me, today, here, now.’ Both are advocating a kind of mindful practice. Perhaps a way of thinking of this is, the interplay of our long-term and more immediate goals provide the choice framework we use to select what to practice at any given time (Viloteau: ‘be your own teacher’); once the choice is made, then put aside everything other than just practicing the specific thing with full absorption.
Mathews cautions, ‘If you just blunder along, and hack through it, you’re training your muscle memory every bit as surely as if you do it correctly. …The quickest way to create a beaten path is to take the same route every time. We are creating pathways and directions in our brain and muscles to perform the piece. So if we can do it the same way every time, we will learn classical guitar pieces much more quickly and make fewer mistakes.’
An open question, here as elsewhere: is ‘from slow to performance tempo’ a linear progression, or do different things happen when moving faster? Running is a different gait than walking, and getting good at walking fast will not help much in becoming fast as a runner. There’s much more continuity in the transition from running slowly to running fast, but (for instance) the foot strike pattern can reverse, and something directly applicable to guitar-playing, relaxation at speed is a specific and important skill. I don’t know what the right physical analogy is. The cumulative heuristic is to go slowly, that speed will come of its own accord and as a natural thing. I don’t know if it’s true, or if it’s accidentally true, that is, most observation has been with young players who will get faster simply by continuing to grow up. It seems likely, as with memorization, to be age-sensitive.
Four elements of musical memory:
- Visual: Mathews is more broad than some, though consistent with Iznaola, in including the score but also how our hands look on the fingerboard or strings, or really anything visual that triggers the music
- Auditory
- Kinesthetic (muscle memory and proprioceptive imagination)
- Theoretical
I’m really not certain why these small ontologies are included, unless the intent is to provide hints about different approaches to retrieval? If that’s the case, then explicitly mentioning it would clarify.
As well… (Former professional ontologist speaking, so maybe overly touchy.) As well, consider analyzing a piece with regard to the ‘five shapes,’ a potentially useful way to map a (new) piece to something you already know, which will (should) aid learning. This would be visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and theoretical all at once, making the separation into categories counterproductive.
‘How you practice is how you play. Every error in practice is a practiced error.’
‘Supercharge’ your memorization by:
- Consciously intend to memorize
- Look away from the score frequently
Mathews addresses assembly into a whole early—the clapping and singing of rhythm, the exaggerated dynamics—so it is on the player to continually resist the urge for local optimization, that is, playing each particular section perfectly, resulting in a set of ‘perfect’ sections that don’t necessarily cohere into a song. Understandable since much of the pedagogy is trying to get us to focus on small, on the reduction to atoms and the perfect playing of same. ‘The secret to playing beautifully: master the details and play them all in a way that supports and demonstrates the main idea (emotional core) of the music.’ In my words, the whole song is (or should be) different than the sum of the parts; local optimization is not global optimization. For example, I might play this section with a more metallic tone if the tension it sets up is later resolved by a repetition in a rounder tone. Rounder tone is generally preferred, so I’m choosing something sub-optimal locally (earlier) to make the overall better. This is common.
Last note on Mathews. He persistently reminds that the process is the goal. ‘What really matters in our music can’t be measured, so we substitute benchmark achievements.’ The latter are valid, but the core of it, the life of it, is in the daily engagement. Music practice as meditation, or perhaps contemplation.
Mathews is not disparaging benchmark achievements—at one time I could play Bach’s Chaconne, in full, at tempo, from memory, a fact that now astonishes me—but I suspect that the wisdom in Mathews’ Buddhist-type approach (emphasizing internal rewards as more foundational than external) is basic human motivation. Playing music to get laid (for either/any sex) is probably the basic reason music exists, if you’re good with Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, but to achieve the patience and persistence needed to play the classical repertoire, the direct daily reward of beautiful, coherent sound seems needed. In any event, the internal/external reward dichotomy is a simplifying cognitive economy, not a statement about the world.
I take Mathews as he (possibly) intended, as ‘always appreciate the beautiful music you can make today.’
Learning music on guitar 