musings on adult learners, self-directed learning and musical vocabulary

There's a lot of learning theory about how adults learn.  As an adult guitar learner I find it interesting to read about it and compare it with my own experience.  Some of it rings true:   yes, I read around the subject and learn things on my own; I do question why I have to practice some things and what the benefit is;  I hear pieces I like and bring them to my guitar teacher to see if I can learn them,  However some of it doesn't - in particular I'm not a fan of self-directed learning.  Ok admittedly I've probably steam-rollered my guitar teacher over the last couple of years into helping me learn what I want to play, but I am also acutely aware of the fact that I often don't know enough to make an informed decision about what to learn. As a some-time educator myself,  I understand the concept of having students reason out the answer for themselves, but it does involve the prior step of giving them or pointing them in the direction of the materials they need to figure out the answer.  In the context of guitar playing - how to give a coherent description of what I feel is missing from a piece I'm playing?   What if I know there is something wrong but can't describe it because I'm really not sure what's going on...

Come to think of it maybe I need to work on my musical vocabulary.  In pathology one of the first things the students learn is the correct way to describe things - for example there are a myriad words that can describe precisely how stuff is scattered about in a tissue (I won't bore you with them, and only being an observer rather than an actual pathologist, I'd probably get half of them mixed up). Anyway, until they learn those terms students have a hard time accurately describing what they are seeing - translating a visual medium to a written one is after all, a long way from intuitive. And in some ways merely knowing the words should open up the possibilities of things to find when examining a tissue - or in the current context, listening to how a musical piece is being played. So the next question is, where to find these magic words?  I suspect my long-suffering guitar teacher will end up with this question, however in my defense he is partially responsible because he didn't like my use of the word "clunky" - which in my opinion perfectly described the mess I was making of a pretty melody.   However I will admit there are probably more precise terms... Question is, where to find them?  Google is remarkably lacking in answers, so perhaps I'll start building a list of suggestions...

Not legato
Chopped up, punctuated, jerky, disconnected

A pronounced beat that shouldn't be there
Metronomic, heavy downbeats, 'beaty'

Opposite to lively...
ponderous, dragging, listless, dead, lifeless, strained

Uneven sound quality
bumpy, erratic, wobbly,

Why should I switch frequently between practicing different things?

Over the summer I "took" one of those free Coursera courses on learning theory.  Quite interesting - it reinforced something I lucked into when I last studied for exams (I think it was in the dark ages but it may simply have been so long ago I have difficulty remembering).   I had a busy first job when I sat for specialty Boards so my learning schedule involved studying in the evening and reviewing it at 6 am the following morning before work.  I passed the exam, and it so happens modern learning theory seems to be confirming this is the best way to make things stick. i.e. learn something, review it when it's starting to disappear.  The course has some other interesting things to say about learning - such things as highlighting is a waste of time, constantly testing yourself works best, and summarizing in your own words is next best.  I can't see that highlighting or summarizing are useful techniques for the guitar, but testing yourself (look away from the music, can you play it?) is certainly a time honored way to get things into memory.  However what I'm particularly interested in at this point is this concept of 'interleaving' - very ably explained by Noa Kageyama in his blog - basically spending practice time switching between different learning activities.  It does what my serendipitous learning schedule did - making you keep pulling things back when they are not quite there, but in the course of a single practice session instead of overnight.... It certainly can be quite frustrating when you are doing it, but there is a lot of research indicating it speeds up the learning process.

Quite apart from learning theory, I now discover there is another reason that its a good idea to switch often between activities, particularly those that are stressful for the hand - and especially if your joints and tendons are not quite as young and resilient as they once were (let's get real here, mine aren't at all young and resilient any more).   Having successfully badgered my guitar teacher for exercises,  I was determined to apply myself. Indeed I thought I'd work in the  "do it 10x without mistakes before speeding up" system at the same time.   Boy was that a bad idea!  Spent way too much time trying to get to the next level, and after just a couple of days I started to get twinges in an entirely new place on my fretting arm.  I have been known to overdo it in the past, but usually ending up with just a slightly sore muscle,  but this was something different...  At least age comes with some degree of common sense, so I abandoned the exercise for a couple of weeks and limited my guitar playing to non stressful things that caused no pain.  Didn't do much to advance my technical skills, but thank goodness the arm pain disappeared.

Now I'm back to practicing the exercise - however I'm limiting the time I'm spending with a timer, and then moving onto something else. I'm even thinking of applying the timer method to all the things I'm working on ... I'll have to let that one sink in for a bit though before exposing myself to the mental pain.  It's a lot more satisfying to work on something for half an hour than it is to pull yourself away when you're just getting it!

Getting distracted: what to do?

I wish I had an answer for getting distracted.  I'm not one of those people who have problems practicing - or at least I didn't think I was.  Guitar for me is something I look forward to, not something I feel I should make myself do.  Mostly anyway.  Although I don't make rapid progress, I assume I am moving ahead slowly, although I have had to resign myself to the fact that it will take a while, whatever "it" is.  How slowly? there's one passage I've been working on that my fingers just don't want to reach cleanly, but over the weeks (no, months) since I started, I'm finally getting it. No problem - eventually I hope to add it to my repertoire but there's no rush.

However over the last couple of weeks I figured I had some preparation to do - both for the start of orchestra rehearsals and for recommencing regular lessons.  Time to get down to business!   I wrote in my handy log book some goals for the week - restricting the number of items on the list so I could concentrate better (and hopefully make some progress before I was put on the spot).  So now the list merely had a few warm up exercises, an exercise given to me by my teacher to "help me learn where the notes are"! (ouch),  a list of orchestra pieces I have to learn over the next several weeks, and section of a recent piece where I need to revamp the fingering on so as not to miss out the ends of the arpeggios.   So far so good...

As the week went on I noticed that the list was getting longer.  How did that happen? Well, when I worked on something not originally on the list (I mean really worked on it - not just playing for fun)  I added it to the list  and gave it a little check mark.  Day by day the list was getting longer, check marks were being added, but painfully few next to the original list items.   Hmmm.  Turns out despite my best intentions, I was actually mostly ignoring the things that needed to get done in favor of things I felt like working on.  There in front of me on the log was the proof - I had probably spent less than half the time on my urgent list items. And what was this I added? "practice flute" ??   Not likely to do a lot for my guitar playing!

My log has thus identified one factor that could be contributing to lack of results - I'm not actually spending much time on the things that I'm using to measure progress!   I do think I'm doing better at "practicing" rather than playing mindlessly -  just not focusing on immediate goals.   So this leads to the next question: if the whole reason for learning guitar is to have fun, do I need to change the way I do things?  I'm doing it to have fun, but part of the enjoyment is the sense of accomplishment from tackling more adventurous pieces successfully...  On the other hand, turning it into work doesn't do it either.  This summer I had a brief period where I focused exclusively on technique to the exclusion of having fun, and I fairly quickly found myself inventing reasons not to pick up the guitar.  Gosh I hope  there's a happy medium.    Maybe I'll try to limit working on additional list items to just one time per day and see how that goes... stay tuned!

What are the 10 most useful things I learned this year?

I know it's not the end of the year, but it is the new semester, and coincidentally it's been exactly 3 years since I started taking group classical guitar lessons (individual lessons didn't happen 'til later).  In fact when I started I didn't even own a classical guitar - I took lessons using an English steel string guitar my mom bought me as a generous and much-appreciated gift to encourage my new hobby.  I figured that was OK - I didn't really intend to learn "classical" guitar anyway, just wanted to learn some  basics.   How wrong can you be?

Anyway, at least in part for my benefit to hammer them home, here are some of the useful things I have learned this year -not in order of importance, just in the order I thought of them :)

1. Exercises improve a lot faster if you use a metronome.  Really.  I practiced one slur exercise for weeks and weeks on and off and didn't make any noticeable improvement until I started practicing with the 'nome - then I made more progress in one day than I had in the previous several weeks.  Why?  it made me slow down then stop and practice the movement in isolation that had been holding things up.  Which leads to...
2. Isolate difficult parts down to the smallest possible movement.  And repeat it slowly until its in muscle memory.  For some reason this is incredibly hard for me - I always want to speed it up before I've actually really got it.  Which leads to...
3. Don't move on until you can do it 10x without errors.  This can be soooo frustrating....  but it works.  I've been applying it to the parts of my pieces where I stumble most often. with  good results.  However it does require patience and I am woefully lacking in that area...
4. Improvising with the rhythm or harmony of a piece you already know can really help you learn the piece more thoroughly.  I'm terrible at reading guitar music - I memorize it way before I can actually play it, and then rarely go back to the notation (unless forced to by my teacher). I also haven't reached the stage where I understand the music I play - apart from picking out the melody line I just play the notes - I know, gotta long way to go.   However I had 3 separate nudges to do some 'improvisation'  recently (once from my teacher in a slightly different context, once from an instructional webcast, and once from folk camp).   Turns out that was exactly the number of suggestions required for me to actually try it.  Most notably I found I had to go back to the music (gasp) to find out which chords were being used and where they were, and to figure out the underlying structure. It was quite educational ;)  I ended up with a variation on the first half of a piece I often play.  I know, not kosher for classical guitar, but I'm just playing for fun so sue me!
5. Learning to sight read is a long slow process.   I wasn't getting anywhere much by using the beginning sight reading books - I know what the notes are if you point to them, but my fingers don't seem to map them out.  I think this means that I should actually do some technical work - scales in various intervals perhaps.  Helpfully, my teacher just gave me a really dastardly exercise (the first of a series, gulp)  that addresses this issue.  Maybe by next year I will be able to report progress in this area.
6. Memorization involves more than muscle memory.  I've heard this so many times,  and I truly believe it, having now blanked out on a regular basis when playing at the nursing home. Unfortunately the fixes for it mostly seemed out of my reach.  Such things as   "visualize the notation in your head" (oh right - that music I haven't looked at in recent history!), or "be able to play the whole piece through with each hand separately without the guitar."   Um.  I must have the wrong kind of brain.  Then out of left field, a suggestion from another musician (non-classical guitar player) seems to have helped.  He suggested practicing the left hand by itself but with the guitar. I thought I already had this until I tried it. Nope.  However it wasn't that hard to relearn the left hand without the aural and RH cues,  and yeah! it seems to be helping.  I have read that the conscious brain gets in the way of your muscle memory when you are stressed - so you need to learn your repertoire with the conscious brain as well as the "unconscious" one (AKA muscle memory).  Seems that learning the LH by itself even with the guitar present must get that conscious brain working -  and speaking of right and left hands...
7. If there is a part that is causing you trouble, practice the right and left hands separately.  I can't tell you how many times this fixed a problem that seemed insuperable, but somehow I never seem to remember it until all else has failed...
8. If you want to be able to play for others, you need to practice playing for others.  I've written a lot about this because it's my personal bailiwick, but my take home message is to start by finding the safest venue you can where it's just not possible to fail.  You aren't doing yourself any favors if you try but crash and burn, because that failure adds even more stress the next time around.  Everyone has a different stress-inducer  - for some it's being on stage, or playing for large numbers of people, or people you don't know, or whatever. For me it's the fear of being judged and found wanting.  Thus my low stress environments have been areas where evaluation (of me) isn't an issue: playing in a public park and for a dementia unit in a nursing home.  And I had to do it many times before the stress started to abate.   I've learned a lot as a result and my confidence is slowly building.   I'm not ready to play for a knowledgeable audience yet, such as the guitar club, and even playing for my teacher still gives me problems, but I can see the next step might be a casual open mic where the audience are not guitarists...   
9. Recording yourself is a humbling experience but incredibly useful. I don't do this enough.  You hear about 10x as much when listening to a recording as when you are playing.  Even if it's just an iphone recording. I'm making a resolution to do it more even as I write this!   And there's a reason that the teacher needs to see your hands if you are learning by Skype.  I've only ever made one video recording (on the iphone again) and it was more mortifying than humbling, but having the picture of what your hands are doing adds another dimension to what you can learn. And as a ski instructor once pointed out to me when we were being videotaped, everyone else has already seen how you ski so you don't need to worry about them!
10. Playing with others jump starts your learning. If you get the chance, join an orchestra or ensemble.  I am learning a long list of things that I doubt I would have got around to yet if not for the orchestra, such as strange exotic rhythms, keeping time (including with strange exotic rhythms ;)), artificial harmonics, percussive techniques, playing repetitions in different positions, extensive use of dynamics ....... oh and being able to play without looking at the fretboard all the time ;)  And last but not least my guitar friends :)

Taking stock

Well it's the end of the summer and I'm back to guitar lessons and practice again.  It's amazing how a break can make you look at things with fresh eyes - I don't remember feeling like this last year - but maybe that was because I continued having lessons over the summer, doing pretty much the same thing as usual, just at a more leisurely pace.  I feel like I ought to take stock - it's not a new calendar year but I feel like it's a new guitar year, so regardless of the date I will do an end of year roundup.  And contrary to my usual pessimistic approach, I will concentrate on the good things that happened as opposed to what fell through the cracks (or yawning chasms... I know I said I wouldn't be downbeat but just that one little comment ;))

  Let's see, at the beginning of the year I was happy to be starting to work on a piece I had been waiting to learn -  "Birds flew over the spire" by Gary Ryan, I moved from G4 to G3 in the orchestra, which was good because I didn't have to keep tuning down and at least some of the music was mildly tuneful.  I learned the piece and we played several performance including opening for a "real" guitarist!  I got myself a great new guitar,  and despite it being a longer scale than my trusty 630, I was finally getting accustomed to it.  My biggest worry was I was still having a lot of problems playing for anyone but myself.  Even recording on my phone often involved hours of effort until I settled down enough not to choke.   So what has happened since? I've been playing almost weekly at the dementia unit of the local nursing home, and although my progress in confidence has been slow, it's definitely coming  It seems to have gone in stages - at first each visit was really really stressful.  I don't think my heart rate returned to normal for an hour after I left, and each time it was a survival exercise.
Then gradually I noticed I was becoming less panic stricken, I could even eat lunch after leaving!  I was also getting a lot less bothered by my mistakes and much better at forging ahead regardless.  However my playing left a lot to be desired - I was still blanking out and making lots of mistakes, and on top of that  I was having a hard time ignoring all the stuff going on around me leading to yet more mistakes.   I took note of the areas I had trouble with or "forgot" under stress and made a point of subjecting those parts to my latest attempt to improve my conscious memory - learning the left hand separately.  And on subsequent visits those parts at least didn't cause problems.  I also work every time on not analyzing my playing as I'm going along.  Thinking "I've messed up that x8$! part again" invariably results in further mistakes. Instead I'm making a conscious effort to think ahead on how I want to play the next bit. Also when there is a disturbance, same thing, I try to haul myself back to thinking about what dynamics to add to the next bit.  Of course it doesn't always work.  Once I turned up not feeling especially with it, and  additionally failed to warm up beforehand. We will draw a veil over that visit - If nothing else it taught me I absolutely have to warm up - no exceptions. And if things aren't going well, dial it way back.   However recently I am finding  I'm playing more of my pieces much closer to how I play them at home - not totally without mistakes, but that rarely happens anyway.    And just today I played at least half the pieces pretty close to how I normally play them.   This comes right on top of another first - at folk camp over the weekend one the teachers asked me to play something for them, and I did!  It's been one of my goals - to be able to comply if someone says "play something for us"!    Maybe I will even think about playing an open stage or open mic this year - not because I am at all interested in trying to perform, but I want to know I can do it.
Was there a particular secret to making progress?  Not really.  It was mostly getting started then persevering.  For me that involved finding a venue that wasn't a huge leap up in stress - ie a place where I didn't feel judged.  And then it was a case of keep doing it until the stress started to settle, After that, gradually working on better preparation (still got a long way to go there). The biggest thing was having done it once, it was in the back of my mind that I'd done it before so I could do it again.

So that's the good stuff.  So far as playing goes - I don't know.  I was talking with some friends about it at camp, and it's funny - we were all coming to the same conclusions.  When we started to learn our instruments, it was enough just to be able to play a tune or two. We weren't too interested in doing the technical work.  Now we are realizing we need to go back and apply ourselves to the technical work to make those tunes worth listening to!  So I guess that's progress of a sort - you need to know what you need to know....and once you know,  you can go ahead and work on knowing it!!!  :)

Ouch! that hurts!

You know, the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you receive criticism and you haven't figured out what to do about it...   I get this feeling when I think I have done a reasonable job playing a piece and then discover all the things that are wrong with it, in fact how truly bad it was, it's probably hopeless, perhaps I should give up ...   Yup that's the way my brain goes - ever on the downward spiral.   Even when I have asked for and want this critique, and am truly appreciative that someone is helping me to get better, a primitive part of me wants to burst out crying, run and hide, and give in to negative thoughts. It turns out there is a scientific reason that people respond to criticism differently -  this article talks about studying the way your brain responds to criticism using fMRI to track which areas of the brain are active.  Some can just brush it off, and others of a more neurotic bent have to spend time processing, and this is reflected in different patterns of brain activity.
Of course in order to improve we all need helpful critique.  When I find there is still (unexpectedly) a lot of work to do on a piece,  I've found it best to just leave it alone and sleep on it - sometime in the intervening period my brain climbs up from the abyss and is ready to start working on ways to address the problems.  It seems to do its thing in the background even when I'm not consciously thinking about it.  On the other hand if I rush straight back to the piece,  I've found I'm rarely in a place to carefully analyze the issues and move forward  - I try too hard,  hurry too much, get frustrated and often end up making things worse.   I'm still looking for a way to move straight to this point without the intervening delay, but so far it's just not happening!