Commonalities
A top five might be:
- Pay full attention to what you’re doing while you‘re doing it.
- Understand the music. Structures and patterns, emotional resonances. Know what you’re trying to do before you begin trying to do it. The deeper the understanding, the easier to learn and memorize. This is the source of musical intention.
- Decomposition. However small it needs to be, even partial measures; probably smaller than you think. Noteworthy that elite performers like Viloteau, whose musical ‘reach’ is presumably much broader than most of us, taking in larger spans of music, insists on very small, even tiny subsections. Decomposition is it seems to me the obverse of understanding; taken together they allow chunking at multiple levels.
- Slow down. However slow it needs to be to practice identically and perfectly. ‘Slow down’ is frequently capitalized, so presumably a common problem. Werner seems to speak for all of his teaching colleagues in his remark that he’s ‘rarely encountered a student who practices as slowly as I think they should.’
- Sound production. Never to be sacrificed, always central.
Decomposition and slowing down are complementary and mutually reinforcing for learning, I believe. By taking tiny sections and looking at them from multiple musical perspectives (a la Kappel) the material can thoroughly sink in: high savings, high retrieval. The psychological nemesis of doing this is faulty judgment of learning based on immediate fluency. Recall the caveat on the power of testing, that if you test immediately after review, it works for overconfidence rather than longer-term learning. Even if there’s impatience to play the song or move to tempo, settling deeply into each very small section, slowly enough to really feel subtle differences in tone and relative timing, conscious of every movement of hands and sound, seems likely to increase the effectiveness of learning.
In no way ‘second place,’ more commonalities, with some overlap:
- Repetition identically and perfectly, though possibly with different foci of attention (tone, RH position, LH movement, &c.)
- Taking breaks and varying content (spacing, interleaving)
- Cross-domain integration and memorization. Melody, spoken note-names or intervals, fingerboard visualization, rhythmic clapping or singing.
- Self-regulation/self-monitoring, in both the small (gather evidence) and the large (review goals) (Van Betuw and Provost particularly); this is a continuous and integral process, particularly for adult learners
- Consistency, of time and/or place for practice, of practice structure, and so on. This is a way to lower the cognitive burden in both self-regulation and focus.
Perhaps a summary might run,
- The easy way is hard enough
- In the long run, understanding the music you want to play and practicing it slowly and perfectly is the easy way
A last commonality is is how generous and nonjudgmental all of the authors are. There are writers on guitar, and music in general, who are adamant that this musical style can only be learned or played this way, and any other way is not merely wrong but offensive. The reviewed authors are on the opposite end of the spectrum. Rigorous but not rigid.
Learning music on guitar 