Week 38 - A week of focus on (the laws of) music practice

1. Stuff done this week

This week was rather busy with work, performances, chores and parenting. I feel a bit exhausted and desperate. I'm giving myself a hard time. I requested my HR department to calculate how much it would take me back if I reduced the amount of hours I am working. I feel I finally found in music something that has my passion. I am kind of worried though that this is perhaps not a wise thing to persue.

I did not go to band practice thursday; used my time to squeeze in a work-out. Need that to ease up a little.

Read and re-read some more music theory from Nickol's Learning to Read Music.

Need to memorize the key signatures; that will be helpfulin my music practice.

Further explored scales up the neck on mandolin; it is a tedious exercise, but I am beginning to get rather proficient at finger shifting. I play the octaves on the E, A, D and G string without the shift being noticeable. Further getting three octaves smoothly across the strings for the G scale.

Also practiced The Star of Munster; relaxed at home I play it virtually without mistakes. Last weeks demo was not up to scratch. I could only play the A-part.

This week I messed around with my Gold tone electric banjo. Found some resources on clawhammer style banjo and came across an interesting article on how to change a brain - any brain - into a musical brain using biological laws of neuroplasticity.

It gave me hope. I can become a good musician by studying smarter. It gave me the idea that you are never really too old to learn an instrument (my subconscious worry).

So check this site out: https://clawhammerbanjo.net/brainjo/

It is hosted by a musician and phD in Neuroscience, so I believe he knows what he is talking about.

2. Listening done this week

This weeks top three. Sorry folks, all folk this time....

Just needed to listen to this. It just hits me everytime. Bon Iver has succeeded in cristallizing love in vain....really. 

Check out this hair raising vocals by bluesman Charley Patton with High Water Everywhere part 1:

And finally LaVern Baker with this proto rock n roll song Voodoo Voodoo:

I friggin' love this stuff!

3. What I learned

This is a summary of Dr. Josh Turknett's article The Immutable Laws of Brainjo: Deconstructing the Art and Science of Effective Practice (2016). Turknett is a neuroscientist who developed a smart banjo-learning system that incorporates fundamental biological insights in learning. I would like to structure my musical development on these principles, for they are appliccable to anything that you want to learn. Mandolin in my case.

3.1 To learn to play like the masters, you must learn to play like the masters.

Humans get good at stuff through hard work, not through genetics or talent. Its not just about how much we practice, but actually more about how we practice.Those who reach mastery faster are better at changing their brains. They practiced more effectively, in a manner that fully capitalized on the biological mechanisms that support learning. Most people give up when their progress slows or even seems to revert. That will happen and is a natural "plateau". That doesn't mean your brain has stopped functioning. Under the hood, a lot of rewiring is going on.

Here, Pareto's 80/20 rule is also applicable: the 80/20 rule states that 80% of your results are achieved through 20% of your efforts. In other words we can achieve most of our gains in for instance first 2,000 hours (provided it takes 10.000 hours to reach mastery). After that, we start facing diminishing returns on our time investment. The final stages of mastery, which take up a disproportionate amount of time, are about putting in long hours for gains that are often imperceptible to the casual observer. So the greatest proportion of improvements occur early in the learning process. That should therefore not be a reason to quit.

3.2 The primary purpose of practice is to provide your brain the data it needs to build a neural network.

The goal of practice is to signal the brain that we want it to change, and provide it the inputs it needs to do so effectively. During practice we carve out neural networks ("zombie subroutines") in the brain, so it will make us play music subconsciously.  If we practice hastily (because we want to become masters quickly) we run a risk. Practice a sloppy run on the mandolin over and over again, for example, and we end up with the wrong kind of network. A “sloppy-run” neural network is successfully carved as a path in our brain, but the problem is it leads to the wrong place.

In going too quickly by, for instance moving to more advanced techniques before the basic ones are grounded in and fully developed, before those pathways, which serve as the foundation, have been laid, you end up with a bunch of networks that don’t do what we want them to do. So we have to....

3.3 Work on one new skill at a time until it becomes automatic

Automaticity is tested for experimentally by having a subject perform a learned task while paying attention to something else. Turknett (2016) advises to use a metronome.

3.4 Test for automaticity by playing alongside an external timekeeping device

When playing with the metronome, you’re performing a learned skill (for instance a scale or piece of music) while your conscious mind is focused on something else (the metronome). And, to do this successfully, you must perform the learned skill just as well as you would without the metronome clicking away. In other words, the learned skill (your playing) mustn’t degrade even when your attention is directed elsewhere. If you try playing along with the metronome and it doesn’t go so well, all it means is that the skill has yet to become automatic. This then requires more time in the woodshed. So:

1. Practice the new thing until it gets easier, then
2. Test for automaticity by playing along with an external timekeeping device

3.5 Listen often to the sounds of the music you wish to make

Turknett (2016) refers to the language acquisition process in children. Children listen a lot before they start emulating the sounds they hear. Listening to music creates associations between sounds in our head and movements of our two hands (so that those sounds come out of our instrument).

3.6 There is no failure, only feedback

Creating customized neural networks from scratch requires feedback. Lots and lots of feedback. Feedback that says “you’re on the right track”, and feedback that says “this still needs work.” And this network building process is iterative: the brain creates a bit of the network, tests it out, then refines it based on the results. So if you are making mistakes, you are busy at becoming better. You have to become like a child in your approach. Adults are (for different reasons) afraid to make a mistake, but a child seeks them out and is not discouraged by them. Regard making a mistake rather like getting feedback.

3.7 When practicing something new, practice until your attention starts to fade. For most, this will be 20 to 25 minutes

The brain is selective about when it changes, and when it doesn’t. For instance you will not remember wat clothes you wore on monday two weeks ago. Because it was not important enough information to store. To remember, it would require focussed effort.

It’s been shown in brain research that 25 to 30 minutes of focused practice time is enough to produce the structural changes in the brain that support skill acquisition.

Without attention, memories aren’t formed and skills aren’t learned. Once the mind wanders, further efforts are wasted.

3.8 When practicing new skills, quality beats quantity. Twenty to thirty minutes of focused, distraction-free practice is sufficient to ensure consistent progress.

After a certain amount of time, we face diminishing returns, as our attention wanes and we run the risk of spinning our wheels. This goes on too long and we start to compromise the quality of our inputs. This again ingrains the wrong kinds of neural pathways.

3.9 The meat of your practice sessions should occur during the time of day when you’re at your sharpest (for most, this will be late morning to early afternoon, though this can vary further according to your chronotype)

Additionally: reativity peaks when we’re a little bit tired, during periods when our attention tends to wander a bit. This is your best time for free-form noodling, when your random and uninhibited meanderings around the fretboard might lead you to a serendipitous discovery or two that you can add into your bag of tricks.

Sleep is the time for growth and restoration, both physically and mentally. And there is some evidence that the brain, when it triages the events of the day, gives priority to the activities performed closer to sleep. So, all other things being equal, you may be able to get a little more bang for your practicing buck closer to bedtime. Even just a brief, 5 minute session to reinforce anything you’d practiced earlier in the day should allow you to still reap the benefits from this phenomenon.

3.10 Visualize while listening to your recorded playing to build sound to motor mappings

Step 1: Record yourself playing a tune

Step 2: Play back your recording at a later time, and visualize while you do

According to Turknett (2016) the absolute best time, when possible, is right before going to bed.

3.11 Maintain focus not on your end goal, but on making consistent, incremental improvements

With learning an instrument, in the early days, when you have zero prior skill, your initial achievements feel monumental. That will have a motivating effect, but as time progresses this motivation can fade. Motivation is sapped by unmet expectations. If you make unrealistic goals, you will always have a sense of failing. It takes dogged determination, according to Turknett (2016): The biggest key to getting better, to moving from a beginner to an expert in any field, is simply the act of showing up every day. 

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.“– Calvin Coolidge

Satisfaction with your results comes from improving relative to where you’ve just been.

“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.“– Creighton Abrams

3.12 Master musicians have found their voice, and have developed the technical skills needed to deliver it. 

3.13 Musical fluency and improvisation is predicated on the ability to map musical ideas (and the neural networks that represent them) onto motor programs.

So if developing the neural networks that support fluency primarily involves copious listening and the development of instrument-specific motor skill of increasing complexity.

3.14 Musical notation (including tab), when used wisely, can be a helpful aid in the learning process, provided that you practice in ways that doesn’t incorporate it into instrument playing networks.

1. When learning a tune from tab, get your eyes off of it as soon as possible.
2. After you’ve learned a tune, visualize yourself playing through it while away from your instrument.
3. Listen, listen, listen to lots of music. As your skills grow, imagine yourself playing along while listening. What would you play? How would you play it?
4. Pick out tunes by ear. Start simple and build this skill. Start with picking out simple melodies (just the basic melody itself, not a player’s arrangement of it). Then start working on creating your own arrangements from that melody.
5. Practice jamming (without any written music). Attend a local jam, or just practice along with recorded tracks.

Written notation for a piece of music is a representation of the thing, while a recording of a piece of music is the thing. Ultimately, we want to build playing neural networks that operate independently of tab.

3.15 When encountering challenging sections of a new tune, use the “Labyrinth technique” to improve practice efficiency.

This involves singling out the difficult passages and practicing these. Do not spend too much time on stuff you can already play.

3.16 Speed develops as a natural byproduct of a solid learning process

Speed will come naturally. It is important to play slow and correct (to develop the neural pathways). Once they are ingrained, the speed will come. This concept is also embedded in the mantra you’ll hear repeated in music conservatories: “the secret to playing fast is playing slow.” Work on proper mechanics and timing at the speeds that allow for it, preferably with an external timekeeping device, and ultimately increasing speed is trivial.

The idea is to let the idea of speed go. Also: laying fast for the sake of playing fast always sounds worse.

3.17 Musical memory develops as a natural byproduct of a solid learning process

Here, as with the ability to play faster, the ability to memorize new tunes easily occurs not through any sort of dedicated memory practice, but rather as a byproduct of the creation of brain circuits that support musical fluency.

4. Sources

TURKNETT, J. (2016) The Immutable Laws of Brainjo: Deconstructing the Art and Science of Effective Practice [Online]  Available from: https://clawhammerbanjo.net/the-immutable-laws-of-brainjo-deconstructing-the-art-and-science-of-effective-practice/ [Accessed: 22th August 2016].