Bradford Werner’s books are oriented toward beginning and early-intermediate players. His method recommendations comprise a single page of heuristics. There’s substance in the page, though.
His methods can be found at his site. The first is free. Very nice site, updated weekly, recommended.
He instructs:
- Play perfectly, no matter how small a section and no matter how slowly.
- Problem-solving: isolate difficulties and solve them immediately; do not go forward with a problem unsolved.
- Don’t neglect things you can already do: ‘Finish [each practice session] with something you can play well.’ End high.
- Practice is different than ‘just playing the guitar.’ (Not sure I agree. I understand his view, but if someone is just playing but with full attention and curiosity, the potential for learning seems high to me.)
- Pay attention; repetition should be mindful. ‘Balance repetition with thoughtful reevaluation.’
- Slow down. ‘I’ve rarely encountered a student who practices as slowly as I think they should.’ ‘The majority of your practicing should be at very slow tempos.’
- Keep it simple and set realistic and manageable goals. Focus more on quality than quantity.
- Trust your teacher.
As with all others reviewed, Werner underestimates the range of potential diagnosis/prescription issues. Perhaps for earlier students diagnosis is straightforward, and prescription follows in an equally straightforward way? Consider the elite guitarist Ana Vidovic, who plays tremolo with two fingers. In an interview she remarked how problematic her a finger is. Most elite players use a-m-i, and looking at our hands, that makes sense. Vidovic plays beautiful, clear tremolo; were she a less capable musician, how would you diagnose her a-finger issue? What would you prescribe?
Perhaps because the intended student level is different than most of the others reviewed, Werner instructs, ‘trust your teacher,’ being clear this applies even when what he or she says differs from Werner’s advice. Werner is clear about having a teacher. How does having a teacher, or for more advanced players, perhaps a coach, influence learning?
Elite athletes have coaches, even in individual sports. Roger Federer has a coach. Distance runners tend to be highly analytic and the data with which we work is more clear than any other sport save perhaps swimming. Yet Eliud Kipchoge, elite even among the elite in the world’s most common athletic activity, has a coach. Do we learn more effectively with a teacher or coach?
First, there are (it seems to me) three degrees: teacher, coach, and peer practice partner. In all three cases there is mutual obligation, on the one side to perform and on the other to attend closely to the performance from a position of positive critical analysis. I’ll use ‘coach’ as the inclusive term.
One way to break this down is to consider motivation, feedback, and direction. Regarding motivation, a coach creates a mutual obligation. Most of us do more, more attentively, when we know there’s someone who cares how we do. (By contrast, an indicator of depression is the feeling that no one cares how you do.) The cognitive and emotional energy to attend to the very fine detail of guitar performance is demanding; the implicit presence of someone who both understands what you put into it and what comprises a high level of performance for you ‘pulls’ energy upwards to persevere.
(Note: This is not the Hawthorne Effect/observer bias, as the relationship sometimes lasts for decades. I’d like to cite a controlled study, but will rely on the analogy with sports, which are as empirical as it gets. If people with coaches didn’t win more than people without, more athletes would be without coaches. Few are.)
Feedback can:
- Elicit recognition-based (or primed) learning, often including putting words to something sensed but not articulated (which creates a new retrieval path).
- The relationship can draw out self-directed analysis. (‘Have you thought about…’ ‘Have I thought about a, b, c, and d? Oh my gosh, you’re right!’ ‘Uhhh…I was thinking of e.’ ‘Oh.’)
From experience, effective scientists and engineers seek feedback relentlessly. (A technical editor once told me about the Inverse Law of Technical Writing: the less individuals needed a technical editor, that is, the the higher the quality of their writing, the more likely they were to seek him out for feedback. The bad writers did not look for help.) With respect to how learning works—multiple mutually-reinforcing paths in a complex network—both aspects of feedback, outside and self-directed, seem like potentially strong contributors.
Direction is (potentially) multi-layered, from early players whose teachers will prescribe programs for them, to the graded levels of the ABRSM, LCM, or Royal Conservatory, to consultation on choices of piece or direction, to discussion of interpretation and presentation. Direction is a little more on the side of what to learn, rather than how we learn. However, developing self-regulatory skills with regard to self-direction, e.g., different approaches to analysis and experimentation, is central to lifelong study, and mimicry, that is, seeing how a coach decides direction, can help us learn our own best approach.
A summary might be, set simple, manageable goals, don’t practice errors, don’t only practice what you can’t yet do, pay attention, slow down, and end high.
Learning music on guitar 