Distinctions
First a list, then a note.
- Viloteau on, ‘always play music,’ with strong similarity in Mathews and Yang: let the desire to express music drive development of technique
- Viloteau on playing in front of a mirror, recording, filming, slo-mo review, playing for small audiences of friends, &c; in general, emphasis on evidence gathering and analysis as a highly active part of practice, ‘becoming your own teacher.’ (Mathews concurs, but Viloteau gives it more prominence than others.)
- Mathews on insistence on rhythm first and always; Kappel agrees on rhythm but Mathews makes practicing it distinct and explicit
- Mathews on separating RH and LH practice
- Mathews on providing rafts of self-tests
- Mathews on incompleteness, that is, making your small practice sections run across bar lines, rather than be musically complete in themselves
- Mathews, Ossareh, and Sloan on saying note names out loud
- Werner on the requirement for a qualified teacher (conditioned on Werner addressing beginning students, unlike the others); generalized, having a coach
- Iznaola, Kappel, Van Betuw, Ossareh on general mental state (‘inner poise’). General in contrast to specific, viz., concentration.
- Sloan on ‘memory palace’ and fret numbers
- Tennant on touch and the sensation inside the fingers
- Provost on multiple levels of goals, dispassionate assessment of same, and logging and review. (Van Betuw agrees, in less detail, but asks for even higher-level goals and daily re-grounding.)
- Van Betuw, and Werner, on ending each practice session on a high
- Van Betuw on what in the early LSD days (late 60’s) we called ‘set and setting:’ mindset going in, and physical setting. (Here’s an amusing [kind of] worst-case on setting.)
- Van Betuw on stretching and walking as elements of music practice, important to consolidation and creativity
- Van Betuw on learning the song in detail as music prior to beginning to learn to perform the song. (Caveated by acknowledging Mathews and especially Viloteau: if one’s musical imagination is sufficiently developed and vivid, it may be the case that score analysis comprises learning the song; Iznaola remarks on musicians who can do this.)
- Van Betuw on conscious attention to emotional semantics, the ‘story’ of the current piece. Viloteau and Mathews want us to develop a (draft) interpretation before technical practice, and Mathews comes close to Van Betuw in remarking that the goal of both technique and interpretation is to express the emotional core of the music
- Yang on (figurative) synesthesia, associating songs with physical scenes or with other kinds of art, building emotional cross-representations
- Ossareh on re-representation, that is, writing the score from memory, writing chord names, writing fingering charts, marking the score with color-coded circles, and so on
- Ossareh on dynamic, self-assessed working memory setting the scope for fragments to be practiced
- Ossareh on sleep
- Ossareh on spacing, e.g., the scheduled practice of ‘dormant’ pieces (Mathews has a recent post on this as well)
- Ossareh on practicing whole songs as music, with no ‘internal’ corrections or technical repairs, a form of ‘putting aside’ technique for the music
A note on the distinctions. They don’t (mostly) represent disagreements, but rather differences in emphasis. Viloteau is explicit in ways the others are not with regard to evidence gathering, but it’s hard to picture any of the others discounting his suggestions. As another example, Kappel’s ‘sliding window’ for repetitions does not appear elsewhere (though Mathews says something with a family resemblance); again, it would be a surprise if any of the others disagreed.
Learning music on guitar 