Tips for learning guitar that will help you learn 10x faster!
Contents:
1 – Getting new things to memory
2 – How often do I need to revisit the new information to memorise it
3 – How often do I need to Physically practice something to be good?
4) – How much practice do we need to be competent at one new task?
5) – Other Tips for learning guitar that will help you learn 10x faster!
As a guitar teacher with plenty of experience with my guitar and with a huge range of students, I have realised that you never stop learning.
I have decided I am going to dive deeper into the world of learning and teaching so I can learn quicker and better myself, but also so I can be a better teacher and my students can learn quicker and without getting into bad habits.
The research has taken me into how the brain processes new information and therefore works as advice or guidance for any level of guitar player. Actually this advice works for almost anything you want to learn, memorise or improve.
Let’s get started.
1 – Getting new things to memory
The human brain is an interesting lump that we know fairly little about (at least compared to how complex it is) however we have discovered in scientific studies a few things about how we learn and memorise new information.
Things we learn are thrown into memory, only when we revisit this does it become easier to find the next time we need it.
Think about it like this. every thing we learn or experience gets written down on a sheet of paper and thrown into an unorganised room of new information. and I mean everything, this room is a mess with a tonne of information in it.
when we revisit this new information through practice or revision or the need to re-do something, we gather that piece of paper with the memory on it and we put it onto the ‘this could be helpful’ pile.
If we don’t revisit this again for a while, this pile also gets tall and messy and it becomes hard to find the information, however if we then revisit this again within a few days it goes from this pile into the room with organised boxes.
Again a lifetime of organised boxes will get disorganised and things will end up in the back of this room if they don’t get revisited every now and then.
2 – How often do I need to revisit the new information to memorise it.
To simplify the information, each time you revisit the information you will have it stored easy to find in the mind for a longer period of time. the system basically follows this pattern for 4x the last gap as long as you don’t leave the gap too long and forget things.
Day 1 – Commit as much to memory as possible
(this gives you about 24 hours 1 day)
Day 2 – Revisit the information and work at it like it is day 1 again
(This gives you about 4 days of retention)
Day 6 – Revisit the information and work at it like it is day 1 again
(This gives you about 2 weeks of retention)
Day 20 – Revisit the information and work at it like it is day 1 again
(This gives you about 8 weeks of retention)
Day 76 – Revisit the information and work at it like it is day 1 again
(This gives you about 32 weeks of retention)
Day 300 – – Revisit the information and work at it like it is day 1 again
(This gives you an additional memory of 3 years of retention)
These steps will only work if you do each step at the exact right time, but you can memorise something new for 4 years just with 6 revision sessions! However just to be clear this is memory only! this works for learning new theories, new words, new mental arithmetic, but it does not work for physical movements and memory.
Therefore this will be enough to get each new piece of theory knowledge to memory, but not even close to enough practice to get our practical skills up. Be that playing guitar, doing a martial art, hand drawing, juggling or anything that involves physical movements.
3 – How often do I need to Physically practice something to be good?
Now you have the memory of information down, it’s time to look at what you need to do to get your actual playing skills up to scratch.
When you learn a new activity you start with very weak connections between the part of the brain saying ‘I want you to move like this’ and the part of your brain that then tells the muscles what to do to make that move possible.
Each time you repeat the instruction and the movement, you strengthen the connection. Think about it like this. When you first do an activity you create a small thread of connection for the information to pass through. Each time you practice something you add a thin line of cotton thread. By the time you have practiced 10000 times, the connection has growth into a pretty thick rope that the information can move down at super speeds.
So to put it simply, unlike the memory aspect, the only way to get better at physical tasks is to repeat the same movements/actions as much as you can.
When we are learning to play guitar, we are also learning to use muscles that we don’t use in the same way for any other activity. Therefore we need to put in as much time and effort into learning to build those connections as we do when we first learn to walk and talk. The connections are basically not there at all when we start. However when we learn the piano it is easier to start. We have a similar group of connection for typing on a computer so the speed of initial progress will be faster.
My students that have seen a great amount of progress practice roughly for 1-2 hours a day, however these are not done in one sitting but instead in many little blocks of practice. I will cover this more later under ‘Practice Snacking’.
4 – How much practice do we need to be competent at one new task?
The short answer to this is roughly 20 hours of dedicated, focussed practice. so if you put in 1 hour a day every day you will have a new tasks down in a month. However the size of these new tasks is also relevant.
If you want to learn a new song from start to finish in 20 hours. That will be fine if you have already learned the individual chords, power-chords, or got your finger dexterity up with finger exercises. but from scratch, it may take 20 hours just to get your chord changes under 2 seconds each.
20 hours to learn chord shapes and changes, another 20 hours to get the strumming patterns and chord order down, and possibly another 20 hours learning to play that and sing at the same time. So if you have never played guitar before, you could possibly have an entire song under your belt in 3 months if you practice an hour every single day for those 3 months.
Unfortunately there are no quick fixes for building up these connections. AKA Muscle memory. It’s not muscles, but connections in the brain and these take time to build.
5 – Other Tips for learning guitar that will help you learn 10x faster!
5a) Sensory links to memory
When you learn something or experience something new, you brain will log the conscious experience with the subconscious experience. Therefore each memory has a smell, a taste, a background noise, a mixture of colours, a touch associated with it.
However if we learn something or revise it to memory in a quiet, plain room, with no particular smell, and at a time where you haven’t recently eaten, you won’t have as many things that stand out attached to that memory. This will make it harder to remember or recall at a later stage.
So what we can do is make sure we progress our memory is to revise things in different settings. different seats, clothes, rooms, smells etc will all effect our memory in a good way.
5b) Pactise snacking
It is far better to snack with practise than to pig out all at once.
Find as many opportunities to practice for just a few mins instead of treating practice as something you need to sit down and focuss on for half an hour or more at a time.
Take the opportunity to practice while the kettle boils, when there’s an advert you can’t skip, while you’re waiting for someone else to get ready. If you do this at every opportunity you will have added up to so much more practice than those that put a half hour or hour session aside every evening.