audiot

hi there.

just a quick note that this site might not be available some time during the day. my provider does some database-updating-thingy, so i apologize for any inconveniences that might arise. of course, i should have posted this yesterday, because if you can’t open the site, you won’t be able to read this note. but at least the feedpeople should get it………and since they read the content without actually coming here, this is redundancy at its best, i now realize – ok, moving on…

there is also still the issue of the site being way too slow. i haven’t found out why – yet, but i found myself a cool and gifted netguy who’s willing to help me with this, so there’s a new light at the end of the tunnel. let’s hope it’s no upcoming train…

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…

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…

this is something that lots of musicians don’t think about. and if they do it, it’s often for the wrong reasons. i know a lot of musicians who teach, but most of them do it for the money and that’s just wrong. you shouldn’t become a musician to make money and you shouldn’t become a teacher for that reason either. if it’s money you seek, work as a banker (maybe now’s not the right time to start…), lawyer, doctor or whatever else. if you’re a musician because you want to make money, you’re either a moron or Paul McFriggin’Cartney. don’t get me wrong, if you happen to make money as a musician, that’s great! if you make a living by playing music – awesome!!! this is the no.1 dreamjob. period. but if you are even thinking about money during ‘work’ – you’re in trouble.

well, why teaching at all then? first of all, to spread the art – to enlighten – to help others grow. not your cup of tea? alright, the next reason is for the me-people out there: to learn something! ahuh. i’m serious, since i started teaching (back then it was for the wrong reasons, i admit) i have learned so much, it’s still hard to believe for me. when i started, i thought ‘hey y’all, i’m so good at what i’m doing that i’m gonna show you how it’s done and you’ll pay me to bathe in my wisdom.’ ugh.

the first thing i learned though, was that i was not half as good as i thought. i guess today i’m half as good as i thought back then (and that’s a lot :-) :-) :-) ). then i learned that teaching is more than just talking about how you do it – you need a plan, a concept. you need to set goals and you need a way to achieve them – and, most important, you need to have a plan b for everything. because in almost ten years of teaching, i never ever had a single student whom my concept worked on without adjustments. every student is different, especially when it comes to the voice. so by adjusting, improvising and figuring out new ways to deal with problems you’ve never encountered before, you learn. and not just as you would learn from a book or something – more like new horizons. we always get used to things, it’s our nature. but that means once we have found our way of doing something, we don’t think about it anymore – and therefore, don’t learn anything. but dealing with problems we never had ourselves forces us to think and to make up alternatives and that’s how we learn.

i would even venture to say that teaching is the next step in learning music. once you’re a decent player/singer, it becomes the next thing to do.

i should mention that not everybody makes for a good teacher, and if you simply don’t like the idea, then you probably shouldn’t teach. but there’s still two things you should do. first, learn about teaching – or better: learn about learning. learn how learning really works, that alone is worth so much… and second, create a concept on how you would teach someone. yes, even if it doesn’t come to it….

and who knows, maybe you even make some money ;-)

in the last entry i mentioned a very common mistake people make when they’re hiring a teacher. it’s simply a matter of what to expect. many people think that, as soon as they have a teacher, they’re off the hook – meaning they don’t have to learn it themselves. they rather think the teacher just fills their heads with the knowledge and the abilities needed in order to perform the task, like filling up an empty bottle – in which case there would be an active part (the teacher) and a passive part (the student). now this is exactly how it does not work. learning requires something from you. at the least it is to be (and stay) motivated and open-minded for the things to come. our brain wants to learn, it has a desire/an urge to learn – yes, yours as well – there’s just one catch: it has to be important!

when it comes to learning a new language, the vocabulary-drill is what people dislike the most. why is that? because it’s boring and not very effective. you’re reading a list of words over and over again, hoping to remember some of them in the end. your brain notices you don’t like it/find it boring, it concludes that this is not important for you and therefore goes into standby-mode. well, not exactly scientifically correct but something like that. now another example: imagine a campfire. now you reach out and hold your hand directly into the flame. in a split second you have learned something you will never forget for the rest of your life. that is efficiency. and why? because this lesson is important. now you don’t have to get wounded every time you want to learn something, it’s sufficient to just be motivated. make your brain believe that you want, want, want, want to learn this, that there’s nothing more important, sexy, joyful to you right now than this – and your brain will gladly comply.

now back to our question: you should expect from a teacher to show you what, why and how to do something in order to learn it. the doing itself though is up to you. of course he/she should know how to motivate, but with you giving a sh!+ about it, it’s all just wasted time…

a few more things: he/she should be able to protect you from doing harm to your voice, hands etc. and should know how to break things down into smaller steps or how to take a different approach if something is too difficult for you. he should answer your questions (ask them by the dozen – important !!! ). nobody knows everything but finding a way to solve your problems is his job. that’s one of the things i love most about teaching: questions i can’t answer right there, because that means i get to learn something too, yay!

and finally (for now…): it’s about you, not him!

Image via Wikipedia

alright, this is actually so freaking easy, but almost noone seems to care about this. it’s about how we learn….and i’m not talking about learning in school because that doesn’t really work. this is different in every country of course – even from school to school – but most of those systems aren’t very effective. well, there’s not much you can do about that and if you’re not in school anymore, it wouldn’t help you anyway :-)

so if you want to learn something, anything, you’re pretty much on your own. yes, you could find yourself someone to teach you – that’s where lots of people make the first mistake, but i’ll get to that one in another entry. but still, it mainly depends on you. now what? buying books? or dvds? there’s great ones out there but this is not what i’m getting at here. there is one thing that’s more basic, easier, doesn’t need any time or effort at all and it’s also for free. join my sect and i will lead you to the final enlightenment…..oops, sorry that was meant for another blog…

let’s take a look at how children learn. now what is the single most important aspect in that? come on……….correct: imitation! you just won a free lifetime-sect-membersh…dammit! now you might think: wait a minute! to imitate something or someone, time, effort, action is required! and you are right of course.

however, there is one aspect of imitation that is different: the subconscious one. to not get things mixed up and because it describes it better, i like to call this being stamped – shaped or formed are also fine. maybe there’s someone at work who says ‘oh, my god’ or even ‘o-m-g’ about ten times every minute and it’s driving you insane. and then after a few weeks you say this yourself. don’t believe it? investigate. you might be surprised about all the things you pick up along the way, but beware, you might find out things about yourself that are not pretty at all…

believe it or not we are being stamped all the time by our surroundings. our friends, colleagues, favourite tv-shows etc. are stamping us every single moment. don’t panic! because this can be a good thing. if this is good or bad basically depends on you. there is no way to stop this stamping-process, so just don’t bother trying…feeling helpless? need someone to light your…OH, FOR GOD’S SAKE!!! but what you can do – and that’s so ridiculously simple…you can choose who’s permitted to stamp you.

ok, you might not be able to choose your workmates but the rest is up to you. you decide which radio or tv station sprinkles you and you decide whom you’re hanging out with. if you have a violent temper, the texas chainsaw massacre might not be the best choice when you’re about to meet some nerving relatives of yours. go for Bob Ross instead.

needless to say this works not just for moods but virtually everything, meaning you can use this to become better at an instrument as well – or for whatever other thing you can come up with. so if you want to become a better drummer, listen to as much great drummers as you can. actually, you don’t even have to listen. just surround yourself with them, put their music in your stereo while you’re doing the dishes or even watching tv. it doesn’t have to be loud, let it be background noise – your mind will pick it up. don’t concentrate on it, don’t make it time- or energy-consuming, even ignore it. just let it be in the background while you’re driving, reading, making phone-calls…simply all the time and it will stamp you. guaranteed.

one more thing: it’s likely that you won’t notice your progress, at least at first. but others will and if you give it a little time, you will too…