[Newsletter] If you don't know the point of what you're learning on guitar, then why are you doing it?
George Benson on how to practice; Do more with less
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Something to think about
If you don't know the point of what you're learning on guitar, then why are you doing it?
In his book, Intelligent Music Teaching, Robert Duke reflects on a beginner piano class he observed for non-music majors.
University students needing an arts credit show up to take an intro piano course. Part of the curriculum is learning scales. Okay, sounds about right. Students do their scales during class time, go home for the rest of the week without a piano to practice on, and show up the next week to do it again.
Duke finds this funny. He knows it takes more time and effort than this to get comfortable playing scales.
He puts it this way: the point of practicing scales is to make the physical motion (and the concept itself) automatic. For guitarists, instead of thinking "note, note, next string, note, note, note, next string," you want to get to the point where you think "scale." For the students in this class, they will only be able to reach a certain level of automaticity within the class time and, in all likelihood, won't continue to play piano after the course.
If the students in this piano course will only reach a point where they play scales slowly and with tons of thinking involved, there is no point in learning scales. If the point of practicing scales is to make them automatic, the students will never accomplish it in this setting.
Keep this story in your back pocket.
If you're convinced you must practice this, or know that, or learn this, but you're not sure why it's so important, reflect on this story.
This is one reason teaching yourself guitar online is challenging. But think about the root cause of what you're learning: is this important? Why am I learning this? What is this going to help in my playing? Will this connect to something else I know and play?
Think about the purpose that's being served in what you're learning. A lot of times digging in deeper to why you should learn something is more useful than just learning how to do it.
In the story above, the instructor emphasized practicing scales because that's just what piano players do. Maybe if the class was full of music majors, this would make sense. But the class was full of novices. Being able to kind of play scales isn't that useful, so the instructor could have thought, "What would be higher impact for these novice pianists to know right now?"
The instructor could have discussed how scales are just patterns, how you combine notes in the scale to make chords, how you can hear scales and chords interact in most of the music students listen to, and how knowing this information about scales might make them listen to music differently and change their experience with it for the rest of their lives.
Something to watch
It's always interesting to hear how successful guitarists learned to play.
In this clip, George Benson talks about realizing he could practice 10 things and remember one, or practice 100 things and remember 10. This seems like bad advice for most people - most can't expect to pull the thing they practiced months ago out of thin air in a musical setting. But according to him, these forgotten concepts and techniques were triggered in musical settings.
What works for one person might not work for the next, but there are probably some common threads.
Benson mentions condensing things down to their simplest form. By working from fundamentals and first principles, all those concepts and techniques probably connected together more deeply than if he just picked random stuff to practice at random times.
Successful guitarists know the importance of mastering the basics and working on them even as advanced players.
Something to practice
Try to do more with less.
Take advantage of the boxy nature of the pentatonic scale. There are all kinds of little 4-note boxes that have a different sound depending on the key. I like to take one of these little shapes and, with this strict limitation, do ear training and musical dictation.
For this example, let's think about these notes: 3rd fret, 5th fret on the low E string; 3rd fret, 5th fret on the A string.
I will start by playing the notes in the box in different sequences. I'm just getting a feel for how the notes sound together.
Then I'll start coming up with simple musical phrases - just small three or four note melodic ideas.
Next, once the ideas are flowing, I'll start singing the notes as I play them. By audiating the notes, it strengthens my ear within this pattern.
Finally, I'll sing some musical phrases first using just these notes and play them afterward.
This is a lot of mileage out of four notes. For bonus points, I'll put on a backing track in the key I'm in (in this case D minor), or pick a related key and hear how these notes sound in a different context (like A minor, for example). Once I get bored of this, I'll pick a different 4-note box in the scale.