Listening to and watching others
Standard notation has a rich set of annotations because for centuries it was the only way to represent music in a portable form. Not so now: we can watch and listen to multiple expert performers and nearly any song. Musicians have never before had such rich opportunity to experience so many elite players. Mimicry is our earliest method of learning and it remains powerful throughout our lives. It is important for learning motor skills. Guidance from elite players on good—and bad—practices in using this astonishing resource, particularly for problem diagnosis, would be welcome.
Listening while playing
Of course whenever we interpret—which is any time we play—we’re to some degree listening; or, at least, intending. But the physical act of playing can absorb full concentration, and listening is a different skill. Listening as though you’re the receiver of the song’s story, while at the same time producing the song: how to effectively learn this? How to gauge whether in fact we’re learning? How to debias our listening to hear what we play rather than what we think we’re playing? How to assess whether it’s even within reach and worth trying?
Playing ‘bare’ songs, sounding it out, improvising
Single-voice instrumentalists, violinists and horn players, learn to play unaccompanied melodies accurately from the start, or at least so I imagine. Mathews mentions it as part of his list of memory tests (as well as bass and middle lines). Provost says knowing a song means being able to sing each of the melody, the bass, and the middle voices. Ossareh is alone in suggesting practicing songs as single-note melodies on the instrument. None suggested using that approach to work out dynamics, tone colors, and interpretation.
None suggested regularly putting aside scores and figuring out songs by ear. This is of course much harder and slower than reading a score. It may, however, be a desirable difficulty: removing the written representation forces a direct connection between what our ears hear and our hands do to create music.
None of the authors suggested practicing improvisation. Before Western classical music was ‘classical music,’ it was just music. Bach was a famous improviser. So was Beethoven. So was Chopin. Albeniz made a living when young playing in bars. The era of ‘composers as Gods’ whose intent, as written on the page, must exactly be reproduced lingers on, but its influence is malign. As with figuring out songs by ear, this is difficult, does not lead to easy early victories, forces creating musical ideas for yourself, and being willing to get it wrong a lot before getting it right.
Sleep and time of day for practice
There’s some evidence that things learned in the evening integrate more strongly into long-term memory—or for people with more schedule control, sleep at any time within a few hours of learning. There’s evidence that time of day for optimal practice changes with age. There’s evidence that intentional retrieval and implicit (recognition-triggered) memory) have different daily rhythms. There’s a wall of evidence that inadequate sleep interferes with learning. An interesting question: given an hour, would learning be more effective with 60 minutes of practice, or 45 minutes followed by 15 minutes of napping?
Relaxation
Christopher Davis mentions this on his blog. It’s not stressed (so to speak) by any of the reviewed authors other than Ossareh, except with regard to ease of motion. Elite performers in many sports make it a conscious part of their training. Tennant comes close with his instruction to ’empty’ fingers immediately upon completion of a stroke. Muscles work in pairs (to simplify): this one pulls, its paired-opposite relaxes to minimize counter-stress, then they trade roles. Relaxation is treated generally as a desirable state, but less as a skill to be practiced and developed.
Developing judgment-of-learning skill
Judgments of learning (JOLs) are central to goal-setting, to today’s practice, to seasonal and annual cycles, essentially to all aspects of self-regulated learning. For example, before listening to a recording of yourself, predict what it will sound like; or, before rehearsing a song you were studying three months ago, estimate your knowledge, then compare to what you were able to produce. JOLs are a skill that can be improved with practice, and they’re the basis for identifying and selecting what to practice or play within the region of proximal learning. Without explicitly practicing, though, we tend to be poor at them, mistaking this moment’s cognitive ease (fluency) for long-term savings and retrieval.
Decomposing time
Kappel discusses switching your focus every twenty or so minutes when doing technical practice, but surprisingly, none of the authors discuss subdividing focus time with the same attention they give to subdividing scores. Our ability to judge our own attention and capability when we get fatigued is pretty poor. Studying a passage for a minute, then taking a minute break, then returning might be a strategy to marshal full attention. I have only anecdotal evidence that this is effective; it’s worth mentioning though because it isn’t mentioned. (Credit to Alexander Sack for the one-minute unit.)
Forgetting and partial even incorrect recall
While repertoire maintenance is a normal part of most practice routines, the explicit notion of putting a piece aside until you’ve almost forgotten it, then reconstructing it from memory, is not discussed. There’s solid evidence that this, even when you get it wrong, can greatly strengthen savings and retrieval. For example, away from the guitar and not time-proximal to practice, take a few minutes to mentally rehearse a song you were practicing three months ago. (Here’s a survey overview, since this is unlikely to be familiar to most readers.) Ossareh’s suggestion of scheduled recall, ‘repertoire Saturday’ or a variation, is closest.
Interleaving
Kappel advocates this for technical practice sessions, but more for spacing and maintenance of concentration than musical interleaving. It is not discussed for repertoire growth and maintenance. One of my teachers insisted I always have three new songs to work on, typically an etude, an easy piece, and a more difficult (with the latter two different in era or style when possible). The power of interleaving is absent or underemphasized in all of the reviewed books. (However, good to note that’s it’s not magic and it’s not clear it always helps.)
Teaching or self-explanation
Most of us have neither time nor qualification for teaching, but ‘self-explanation’ might substitute. This is ‘translating’ whatever we perceive as the source or meaning of what we’re doing into our own words, and then checking to see whether we’re accurate. Teaching others or self-explanation is a great way to discover gaps and inconsistencies in our own understanding. Ossareh’s various re-representations have a strong family resemblance to self-explanation.
Exaggeration and intentionally wrong playing
Exercises or instruction in exaggeration or doing it wrongly can potentially, through contrast, bring us closer to the center of doing it right. Children playing often incorporate exaggeration. There is some of this—Viloteau’s ‘play 20% faster,’ Mathews’ exaggerated dynamics. This is not about a typology of different kinds of doing it wrong. It’s places where intentionally exaggerating or doing something other than the intended pattern is helpful in learning to do it correctly.
(Since this was published, Matthews has written about exaggeration as a path to creativity, e.g., in interpretation.)
Counterexamples
Counterexamples are missing almost entirely. Not the same as recommendations to keep one’s playing under control. (Counterexamples are like driving directions that include ‘if you get to the big-box stores you’ve gone too far.’) Mathews, on his comprehensive site, provides multiple ‘I did this wrong’ examples, as does Noa Kageyama,who blogs regularly about music performance; Tennant includes explicit do’s and don’ts for technique. It’s not always apparent, though, when practicing, and counterexamples can be helpful in both diagnosis and prescription. Advice on avoiding error (‘be sure to turn at the right place’) is not the same as explicit instruction in how to recognize when we’ve gone wrong. Help with identifying how to know we’re doing it wrong at something more than a superficial level would potentially be useful.
Troubleshooting
Diagnosis and prescription are both much harder than any of the authors seem to address. This is I think the greatest weakness in all of the reviewed authors: the implicit assumption that diagnosis is only matter of looking closely, and that correct prescription follows automatically from diagnosis. Observation of other domains, e.g., scientific experiment design, medicine, software debugging, suggests that neither of these assumptions are true.
The acoustics of the practice area
Most of the authors remind us that sound is central. Typical college/university practice rooms are acoustically dead. This is intentional and necessary to allow pianos in adjacent rooms, but the guitar has a small voice and a dead room washes out the pleasure of the sound. For most of us our practice space is a compromise: a good spot for concentration and a bright sounding room don’t always go together. (I used to practice in a bathroom; I’d bet I’m not the only one.) None of the authors mention this.
Emotion
We remember things associated with strong emotion more easily than those without. Van Betuw suggesting we consider what story we want to tell with a piece recruits our emotional cognition, but neither she nor any of the other authors suggest consciously assigning emotions to elements to be learned. Emotion is treated more as a reaction than an action. We feel emotion in a song, but our emotion is responsive rather than constructive.
A last note
Practicing perfection is a common theme. Insistence on perfection, though, might greatly diminish the repertoire or the pleasure of the dedicated amateur player. One can certainly bring oneself to the place where the only thing heard while playing are the errors. I’ve done this. For the majority of us, having (for example) zero string noise, ever, is simply not an achievable goal. Artur Rubinstein would not have been the great artist he was had he been banished for committing errors. To say this uncomfortably, part of goal-setting is thinking about what level of inadequacy is acceptable in the trade for being able to play the songs you like.
Learning music on guitar 