tonebase is an on-line guitar instruction site. It’s subscription, reasonable for paying the musicians; some free lessons are possible. Ossareh identifies elements of learning that few others mention.
Setting
Ms Ossareh begins by commenting on practice setting and mindset. The setting should be conducive to focus; the timing, for most of us worked out according to when possible rather than when optimal, should nonetheless be clear of distraction from fatigue, hunger, sleepiness, anxiety, and so on. A clean, well-lighted place.
As with her fellow Canadian, Van Betuw, Ossareh discusses mindset for practice. She advocates awareness and mindfulness. In the first case, she puts full, undistracted conscious awareness of what we’re doing as the central pillar of our learning. In the second, she’s advocating close non-judgmental observation. (‘Non-judgmental’ on the self-beating-up axis, not on the pragmatic ‘I’m playing this too fast’ axis.)
We actually learn a lot unconsciously (called implicit learning). Commonly, though, we exhibit the implicitly-learned knowledge through primed or recognition-based recall. For example, you can’t really say how to ride a bike, and you don’t typically feel it in your body when sitting around, but you get on a bike and you know what to do. I interpret Ossareh’s comments, echoing Landkowski, pointing us to awareness as necessary if there’s ever to be conscious retrieval.
In short: comfort, good light, good posture, relaxed, alert, a place where your can concentrate, and a time when you’re ready to. As with pretty much all others, the quality of attention is central.
Finding patterns and associations
Patterns: get out your colored pens! The score is the opposite of sacrosanct. First, know the key, time signature, and form, e.g., binary (AB), ternary (ABA (or AABA like most of rock and roll), rondo (ABACA or more letters between the A’s), theme-and-variations (Bach loved this), and so on. From her instruction, I’m not sure Ossareh is insisting on the names of the forms as much as recognizing beginnings and ends of repeating sections within songs. Mark them. Then, see a common (or uncommon) chord? Write the name above the staff. A repeating RH pattern? Mark it. A repeating rhythmic motif? Circle it.
Ossareh likes different colored pens or pencils to make the different kinds of patterns stand out on the page. (The color-blind could use different tip-width or textured markings.) Any repeating pattern you can find is fair game. She mentions clucking with one’s tongue, an alternative to Matthew’s clapping, which she expands to either rhythm or melody.
This is the step in which the piece is decomposed into ‘right-sized’ parts for study, with the correct size varying not only with the student but with the content of the part.
There are two elements of interest to learning in her comments. First, writing directly on the score engages the generative (active) aspect of your mind, in contrast with the receptive (passive). Engaging more parts of the mental network typically leads to more savings and better retrieval. Second, she suggests an entry to analysis that does not require a deep vocabulary of music theory. At some point in one’s learning, the easiest thing might be to recognize where an A melodic minor scale has been substituted over a C major, but that’s hardly the first rung on the ladder. In contrast, even a beginner can circle visual patterns on a score that correspond to hand and musical patterns. There will be errors, but research on self-explanation found that errors when corrected by the learner led to better understanding.
Encoding and repetition
Ossareh uses both ‘short term memory’ and ‘chunking’ in idiosyncratic ways; but it’s not important to the validity of her recommendations. There are multiple kinds of concurrent working memory, e.g., visual, olfactory, linguistic, &c. Chunking is aggregating multiple things into ‘one’ memory element, e.g., as an elite player she may see a Lydian ascending scale in a song as a single thing (one ‘chunk’ in working memory) while with much less expertise I might see a half-dozen individual notes. It doesn’t matter to her recommendation: find the right-sized block for yourself, that you can hold in mind all at once. That should set the size of the part you repeat.
This is a dynamic self-regulatory action: not only will chunk size change over time with experience, but within a single song, chunk size is unlikely to be constant, e.g., here there are two measures that repeat a simple pattern, while in another place there may be an uncommon change in a half-measure. Or, in one place the issue may be technical, and in another musical understanding or interpretation. One of the constants in all of the reviewed authors is to slow down in practice, but as common is the recommendation to decompose songs into very small sections (or fragments). Finding the right-sized practice chunks per day, per state of mind, per song, per level of knowledge: this is a sophisticated metacognitive skill. Ms Ossareh recommends practicing it from the very beginning of your playing.
Visual learning and memory
More score markup: see a repeating structure like a short ascending scale? Circle it. Repeating pattern in the bass? Circle it with a different color. This is purely visual; you don’t have to know the name of the scale to do this, only that there’s a repeating (or repeating with variation) visual pattern in the score. Same for rhythmic patterns, or bass/harmony patterns. For example (from her video) alternating patterns per measure get different colored circles.
Get out graph paper and draw sequences of hand positions/shapes corresponding to the score, color-coding each LH finger. Nice echo of self-explanation in this: she’s telling us to re-represent an aspect of the score in a different form, which guides us to identify where we don’t understand the score (but perhaps thought we did), or as a minimum to analyze the score closely with regard to the left hand. This is in addition to creating vivid, memorable visuals for LH shapes that can be learned, bound tightly to the score, and recalled fluently while performing. Arpeggio, tremolo, or block-chord pieces are particularly friendly to this approach.
Auditory learning and memory
Find the layers in the music and learn them separately, easier in contrapuntal music perhaps than Romantic, but as a minimum know the melody, both in memory and on the instrument.
Auditory memory is also on for remembering dynamics and possibly rhythmic variations like ritardando or accelerando.
Ossareh remarks that knowing the melody, including how to play it, can be a potential bridge/fallback if you encounter a memory lapse while performing.
Note naming
Say or sing note names or solfege (do-re-mi &c). Is this building a linguistic mapping for music? Certainly it is practice reading scores and instantly recognizing note names, which (one hopes) are tightly bound to fingerboard positions.
This is recommended by Sloan and Mathews as well. I’m unable to find research either supporting or debunking it. Reasoning by analogy, one wouldn’t teach touch-typing by having students name keys. Does saying note names deepen musicality? Provide alternate routes to retrieval?
It seems potentially counterproductive. There are two parts singing note names:
- Ear training, that is, intending a pitch in the mind’s ear and correctly producing it on the instrument
- Sight-reading, where instantly associating note names and finger positions on the neck is desirable.
Ear-training does not require note names, although singing the intended pitches and playing them may be advantageous to learning, viz., practicing the fundamental musicality of melody. In any key other than C or Am, though, we’re not really singing the note names. (Unless you can sing ‘sharp’ or ‘flat’ really fast.) From this, it would seem that note names are not relevant to ear training. (They’re also arbitrary labels; jazz and rock musicians are taught to sing intervals, which are not.)
Solfege may be relevant for improving sight-reading skill. This is uncertain: what’s wanted is an immediate association between a mark on a page (the score) and a behavior (playing the note.) Note names are useful (necessary) to discuss scores and to identify the same pitches across instruments, that is, to talk with other people about music, but are they necessary to sight-reading? In (text) reading, most people subvocalize, the nerves and musculature of the vocal chords actively ‘reading’, even if unconscious. Not everyone subvocalizes, though, and those who don’t tend to read much faster. Practicing note names may be a form of teaching oneself to subvocalize. Does this improve sight-reading?
Creating alternate mental representations of the same material (song) aids both savings and retrieval, particularly the latter. But that generalizes overly-broadly here: assigning musical phrases to small mammals in a song and drawing the various animals across the top of the score as they appear and vanish might aid memory as well, as an alternate representation, but as opportunity cost, would that be a time-efficient way to proceed compared to other learning methods? (It might be kind of funny—next time I play the intro to Bach’s BWV 997 prelude I’m going to picture a kitten trying to stalk another kitten, and then the two of them chasing each other around the house like lunatics.)
Summary: Ossareh and others recommend this as a memory aid, which is synonymous with a learning aid by the working definition of ‘learning a song’ given in Section 2. She asserts that naming the notes is one of the best ways to learn/memorize a piece, and that making it a ‘natural habit’ is highly beneficial. From a ‘learning basics’ perspective, this seems shaky, but if multiple expert performers and teachers recommend an approach, especially in a domain where the empirical results of the approach are directly perceivable, it’s probable that her advice is correct and my analysis is faulty.
Motor learning and memory
Yeah, we’re doomed if we try to rely on this. We all pretty much know this from unfortunate experience.
Motor learning is usually called ‘muscle memory’ in music. Ossareh recommends combining motor memory with other modes of learning and recall, e.g., note names. Motor memory is particularly important for ‘acrobatics,’ e.g., big jumps, difficult transitions, &c.
Of course, we can’t play fluidly without it; Ms Ossareh endorses it as bound to other forms of knowing.
Learning to perform musically
When practicing a whole piece, perform it fully. Do not stop to work on technical problems as you go. When practicing performance, practice performance.
This sounds straightforward but is (I think) often neglected: ‘it only counts if it’s perfect, I blew that, I’ll quickly go back and do it again.’ In research with jazz musicians, Charles Limb found that brain areas associated with ‘internally motivated, stimulus-independent behaviors unfold in the absence of central processes that typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance.’ A different way of saying this is, playing a whole piece is practicing becoming engrossed in the moment and following the flow of the music, which requires temporarily turning off your error-monitoring.
None of the other authors mentions this. It’s centrally important.
Learning support: Scores, breaks, scheduled recall, and sleep
Some suggestions:
- Write out the score from memory. A form of testing, that may include partial and incorrect recall, which counterintuitively aids correct recall.
- Take the parts you’ve practiced and write out a ‘map’ of the song, sequencing the pieces. Using this, or the score, write instructions for yourself on tricky areas.
- Take breaks when tired or tense.
- Schedule recall and practice of pieces you’re not currently working on; if you let them fade, then ‘jolt’ them by trying to remember them, both savings and retrieval are much strengthened (even if you can’t quite remember). This is the essence of spacing.
- Sleep: it’s necessary for consolidation, that is, letting what you’ve learned sink in and become stable.
Re-representation
Although she doesn’t use the term, many of Ossareh’s suggestions involve modifying or re-representing musical content (as encoded in a score). Writing the score from memory (generative or constructive, in contrast to receptive); writing chord blocks with fingerings demarked by different colors; circling patterns in scores; writing chord names above measures: all of these seem to be forms of self-explanation. Self-explanation, like teaching others, is strongly associated with better learning and recall, and as well with better judgements of learning.
Final word
Awareness is central.
Learning music on guitar 