audiotthoughts on music

so small beats large, eh? didn’t i talk about that already? well, this time it’s more like short beats long and i’m talking about periods of time. did you know that it’s impossible for us to really concentrate on something longer than a few minutes?  it’s true, although i don’t know the source of that information anymore. we think we could do something for hours and being focused the whole time but we can’t. by the way, this might be the reason that the ideal length for a song, which is played on radio, is somewhere around 3:00 minutes – keep that in mind when you record your next 70s-sound-alike-mammoth-intro…

anyway, learning is most effective if you do it for short periods of time – about 5 to 10 minutes and then take a break. there are two reasons for this: first, the above mentioned ‘concentration-span’. and the second reason: remember the puppeteer-and-datahighway-building-guys? those fellows are quite assiduous people. when you start learning, they start building – nothing fancy here but when you stop learning, they go on building for at least a few more minutes. ok, if you’re learning for five hours and then you win 5 more minutes, it’s nothing. but if one of your learning units is only 5 minutes and you still get a 5 minute bonus, that means – well, you do the math. depending on how long you need to dig in, learning periods of 10 minutes might be better, you need to check this out for yourself.

so go ahead and make up a plan by first breaking down the task into small pieces (that can be done in 5-10 minutes…), then do one at a time -  slowly and focused and after each of those periods give your brain a break, so the tiny workmates up there can finish up. you don’t need to doze off into standby mode, just do something else you don’t need to focus on. for example, you’re working for 7 minutes on that new arpeggio, playing it slowly and focused up and down the guitar neck. then, as a ‘break’, you crank up the amp and thresh your favorite punkriffs out to the universe. and after that mr. brain is ready to take another bite…

yep, i wanted to add a few words to the last entry of this series. first of all, the doing-it-very-slowly-thing is especially for learning new things. then, it’s not only about doing it slowly but also about doing it well aware and concentrated. so to avoid any misunderstandings, i wanted to clean that up. learning something new on a drumset is a great example because with this instrument, the moves you make are huge compared to a guitar for example. big moves mean you can easily see what exactly’s going on. maybe you want to hit the hihat with your right stick and then hit the lowest floortom afterwards. that’s quite a long way for poor mr. stick. now, if you practice this at normal playing tempo, chances are, your motion is far from perfect. you mostly concentrate on getting this done in time. doing it slomo, however, gives you nice visual feedback on what it is you’re doing. you will immediately see, if the motion is unbalanced, weird, wacky, whatever. and you will be able to correct that aka replace it with a nice round beautiful motion that will not only help you staying in time, but also look a lot better to bystanders :-) – it will sound better (trust me on that), feel better and your hands, arms, shoulders, back, neck will thank you. and one more thing: you will be able to play this a lot faster once you really figured it out and got rid of all wackyness.

of course this goes for any instrument, drums just happen to show it more clearly…

yeah, and i’m sticking to it. i know, i know, these times recommend speed – maybe above all. but learning doesn’t. so the next tip would be: do it sloooooooooowly!

i’d like to mention a picture i got from Vera F. Birkenbihl (yep, her again). imagine you trying to learn a task, like playing guitar for example. learning means new nerve tracts are being built in your brain. so you have a piece of music you want to learn. and now let’s take a look at your brain. there are the guys up there that build new nerve tracts and then there are the puppeteers, those who move your muscles. on the other hand you have only a limited amount of processing power (guys). what does that mean? right, the more puppeteers you need, the less guys are left to build those nerve tracts needed and vice versa. so the slower you play it, the less puppeteers you need, the more guys are available to build the new datahighways. makes sense? cool. this is of course in no way simplified or otherwise manipulated, it’s exactly what happens in your brain…

lots of people try to learn new things by doing it way too fast and repeating it over and over and over again. but this is not efficient at all. almost all the guys are busy playing the puppet (you) and that leaves almost nobody left to build the nerve tract, which is just another term for learning. learning = building new nerve tracts. maybe you know the feeling of practicing hours and hours and still don’t get the results you want. chances are, you made exactly that mistake. the next time, try doing it slooooooooowly – as slow as it gets. overdo this.

there’s one more advantage to this: if you play every single note slowly and well aware, you will play a lot more precise or cleaner, without unnecessary movements etc. and because you’re doing this while the builders are already at work, they include this too. you’re learning better technique as a bonus without any additional effort – how cool is that?

ha! to tie in with yesterday’s entry, here’s the next tip:

no.2 get the big picture.

you can’t tell which one comes first, because it depends. if there is a big picture available (like a song for instance), then you should of course concentrate on that before you break it down. in this case it’s best to provide your brain with an overview and then go from there. but there are situations when there just is no big picture (those are usually the ones where mr brain up there smoothly glides into standby-mode). scientists, for example, need to work with things and understand things without knowing what the end result will be or how it’s all connected. in a situation like that, you need to deal with what you have by using the breaking-it-down-technique, so you can then work on unveiling the big picture. this also happens with music. think drums: you can learn and practice rudiments to achieve certain skills like precision or speed and then later discover that other things, you never understood before, make use of exactly those rudiments… it’s impossible for you to get an overview of all rudiments including all possible uses for them in the first place. so you work on one at a time and then discover what you can do with them…

now, what’s the priority?

no surprise here, if it’s possible to get the big picture first, then by all means do so – it makes the following a lot easier. to give you an example: if you’re reading a book (apart from novels of course), it really helps to focus on the table of contents first. give your brain the chance to see what it will be dealing with, where the journey goes. that way, it will be prepared, open for things to come and a lot less stroppy…

never fight your own brain – it’s a fight you can’t win :-)

finally i’m back online, the provider solved the problem without (and now the funny part) even knowing what the actual problem was and (even better) how they solved it, yay. anyhoo, as long as it’s working again, i give a rat’s a$$ about how they did it…

well, i was thinking a lot about teaching and learning lately – as you can read here for instance – so i’m gonna give some learning tips that might be useful to you (at least i hope so…). please remember 1. that not everything works for everyone of course and 2. that you need to try it before you can say it does or doesn’t work. this is not about music exclusively, so check it out on other things you want to learn as well… i’m only giving one tip at a time to give you the chance of thinking about each one and checking it out. there’s plenty of ’20-tips-on-how-to-entries’ in the blogs out there but i usually feel overwhelmed with them and just read them through instead of really working with what’s said there. and by the way, this one-tip-at-a-time-strategy is the first tip i’m giving you:

no.1 – the larch :-) anyone remembering that one?

seriously, the first basic tip is – whatever it is you want to learn, break it down into very small steps and do one at a time. if it’s about a guitar solo for example, depending on how complicated it is, you could even go down to single notes. most of the time, tough, it’s most useful to have small phrases of maybe one or two measures. once you’re able to do the first piece, learn the second one and then combine them with a focus on the crossover-section. for singers it’s usually lines (not what you think!), but also words or single notes are possible. don’t panic! you will get pretty good at this quickly, so the pieces become a bit larger, which saves you time. but no matter how good you become, the breaking-it-down-technique remains.

now, why does this work? it’s quite easy, because our brain likes things it can manage. if you overload it with a whole mass of input, it loses track of it and needs time and energy to sort things out first, to find a pattern, to make sense of it. learning things that don’t make sense to us is almost impossible, we might be able to repeat it so many times that we can recite it, but we’ll forget it again soon or just won’t be able to put it to use (instead of just blindly reciting). so if we don’t understand what we’re trying to learn, it’s only wasted time and effort. but to make sense of it, it needs to be divided into small pieces of input, so our brain has the chance to figure it out. as soon as you know/understand what it’s really about, it’s just mechanics from there.

don’t confuse this with getting the big picture, which i will talk about in the next entry…

Image by audiot.eu via Flickr

of course there is! but since that had to be a personal workout for every single guy, i can only make this up for my students, or at least for someone whose voice is familiar to me. what a bummer, right?

ok, i’ll give you a different answer: of course there is! just make one up for yourself :-) here are some tips on how to do this right. first of all, you are the one who knows your voice best, so act accordingly. a workout is something that should fit you, meaning always keep in mind what you can and cannot do. it’s supposed to bring you forward, so it should 1. enhance or improve the skills you already have and 2. broaden your horizon or push your boundaries in order to develop new skills. that sounds a bit technical, i know. the point is, repeating something you already can do over and over and over again (as lots and lots of people do), is boring and inefficient – at least to your brain (your learning-organ). to your ego it’s pretty cool for it gives you reassurance about how great you are. but you want to learn something or get better (yes, that’s possible), so it’s important to focus on something that can be improved or newly achieved.

that being said, it’s of course wrong to set your goals too high – that would become frustrating pretty fast. so where to begin? it’s easy, just take a record that you’re familiar with. you should know the songs including lyrics. because a workout should keep you motivated, it makes sense to use a whole album instead of just one song. there will be parts that you like and don’t like, parts that are easy and parts that are harder to do – that’s perfect. i have a bunch of albums that i know inside out, meaning i can sing the whole cd from the first to the last word without pause and – if it’s live – even the passages in between songs. this makes it easy to dive-in and be less distracted.

but if you shouldn’t choose something that you already can do? how can that…i mean….ain’t that a contradiction? no. for two reasons. one, practicability: i find it important for my workouts to be usable everywhere, especially (for me) in the car. that means sheets i’d have to look at, lines i’d have to think hard about to even remember, melodies or passage orders i’m not certain about are k.o. criteria. you’d only need to listen to this record more often to achieve those things, that has nothing to do with a workout. and the second reason is: you take that, what you already can do, only as a starting point to begin your workout with. then go from there in terms of concentrating on an aspect you want to improve/learn and try to push yourself in that direction.

to be continued…