[Newsletter] Massed practice: the illusion of getting better at guitar
Charlie Hunter and Carter McLean being rock solid; The technical exercise stays constant, but the category changes.
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Something to think about
Massed practice: the illusion of getting better at guitar
A common thing guitar students believe: "I should work on one thing at a time and drill it until I can play it better."
This myth seems to show up not only with learning guitar, but with lots of other subjects and activities. It makes sense, though, doesn't it? Obviously to get better at that song you're learning, you should play it over and over until it sticks? This is called massed practice. In his book, Make It Stick, Peter Brown gives an example: two people are at batting practice. One person practices hitting the same pitch over and over. The other person practices hitting different types of pitches without knowing which one is coming at them. The first person is doing massed practice, while the other person is mixing it up.
Who do you think will be a better batter at the end of their practice?
The paradox is it seems like you're learning more slowly, but you'll actually be better off.
You will make rapid gains during a session of massed practice, but you will also do some rapid forgetting.
In the example above, the first batter hitting the same pitch every time seems to be better off after the session. But when it comes time to play an actual game, the second better outperforms - by a lot. A statistic from Make It Stick: mixing up the problems during practice boosts final test performance by 215 percent (even though it seemed to slow down progress during the practice session).
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Good guitar practicing involves working on multiple things at once over a longer period of time
To take advantage of how your brain works, you probably just need to rethink how you organize your practice time.
Break down technical exercises, sections of songs, chord progressions, or whatever else you're working on into smaller pieces.
Mix up these chunks into a little routine. It doesn't really matter how long (there's no rush, right?), just make sure you're playing and thinking about a few different things in your session.
Pay attention to what you're doing. If something is difficult to play or understand, but you feel like you're just on the cusp of getting it, this is the perfect Goldilocks zone of learning.
After you're done, close your eyes for a minute or two and let your mind wander. Everything you just practiced really benefits from a little break like this.
Now, when you do it again the next day, you'll be taking advantage of retrieval practice. In her book, Uncommon Sense Teaching, Barbara Oakley says this is the best way to put new information in your long-term memory. You learned the material yesterday, now you link it and strengthen the neural pathways by working on the same material after a period of rest.
I’ve written an article on this topic with way more detail. If you want to know how to practice better to improve faster and with less effort, check it out!
Something to watch
If you're not familiar with Charlie Hunter, this is a great introduction.
From 1:09:00 to 1:16:00, Hunter and Carter McLean play a medley of two different tunes, "Fine Corinthian Leather" and "The Root." What's incredible isn't the fact that Hunter is playing the bass and guitar on the same instrument, it's that the groove is so rock solid and the way these two mix themselves and interact is so in sync.
Especially the transition between the two songs (at around 1:13:00). These two take the fundamentals of musicianship all the way. The rhythm and time feel is great. The tones they are getting is such a vibe. You can always tell the quality of musicianship when they sound great from a shitty camera microphone and coming through shitty laptop speakers.
In my opinion, this type of performance is extremely nutritious for any musician and guitarist to get a sense of what is important.
Something to practice
With avoiding massed practice in mind, design exercises to take advantage of the benefit.
In this mindset, the question becomes, "How many concepts can I jam into this exercise?" Here's an example: you want to find and play the major scale in two or three different positions on the neck. As you play through them, memorizing the different finger patterns, choose a way to identify those notes as you play (note name, interval, singing the notes)
Play position 1 while saying out loud the note names
Play position 2 while saying out loud the interval number
Play position 1 again while singing the notes
Etc.
You're not focusing solely on your technique. Your mind is engaged with what you're doing and an engaged mind is essential to make it all stick. Interleaving the positions and bringing a different level of categorization to each one helps these neural pathways strengthen instead of mass practicing one position over and over.