no Pain, no gain
I’m a teacher in a secondary school and I also enjoy learning and playing the guitar. I’m currently trying to branch out from blues, rock and prog into gypsyjazz, á la Hot Club style. I was reading your ‘100 Ways To Be A Better Guitarist’ feature (issue 429) and in the very first tip you struck a particularly resonant chord with current educational professional development, and theories on learning to learn.
Something that we share with our students of all ages, is a concept called ‘deliberate practice’ and its role in ‘mastery’ models of learning. In a nutshell, I tell my students that there is a stark difference between ‘deliberate practice’ and ‘performance’ – in the sense of carry out a performance. A performance, let’s say playing a song, is usually an enjoyable thing to do. But without the preceding practice, it is not possible.
Deliberate practice is not necessarily meant to be an enjoyable activity in itself – we can think for example of learning scales. It’s not very musical, but it is necessary on the road to mastering an instrument, in both musical terms and in technique. It was interesting to read that you recommend setting up a ‘space’ for practice. I think we, as practicing guitarists of all levels, should do this, both in the physical and also in the psychological sense, where we set aside ‘space’ in our schedules and our mindsets to go and deliberately carry out some not necessarily enjoyable drills to help us master parts of songs, etc.
A really good tip to share alongside yours is using YouTube. I recently learned that you can slow down a video using the settings in YouTube. Just open a video, click on the settings and choose a playback speed. You can then choose to slow down the song and it stays at the same pitch as the original, to allow you to start slow, practice and build up to performance speed.
I’ve found this to be a great aid, and have already managed to add at least one new song, in an unfamiliar and challenging (for me) style, which will help my wider playing in my live band. Keep up the good work. Dave Leask, via email Thanks, Dave – there’s probably some analogy with sports here. In order to really enjoy playing football or rugby at a semi-serious amateur level, some form of general fitness regime would seem necessary. And while the discipline of the gym might not be the most fun in the world, it might well help you get more from your real passion. Thanks for the YouTube tip too, our Senior Music Editor Jason Sidwell is also a big fan of this non-obvious function as well.