The Right Way to Learn Guitar

I won't keep you waiting. I'll tell you the right way to learn guitar right now: There is no single right way to learn guitar.

And yet...

Many paths to the same clearing

Every guitar student is different. Each has different motivations, goals, tastes, schedules, and prior knowledge. Even within the same person, those things all change from moment to moment, and evolve over time.

Fretboard Foundation treats guitar fluency as a destination reachable by many routes, and its job is to maintain the trails, affix signposts, remove hazards, and scatter hidden treasures and provisions. Not to prescribe a single path.

Maximum freedom

The Fretboard Foundation philosophy is to maximize both efficiency, guiding students toward what works, and freedom, never dictating what to study next.

When these goals conflict, freedom wins. A student who chooses their own path and stays engaged will outperform one who follows the "optimal" sequence and quits.

Maximum efficiency

Even though every student forges their own path, there are some unambiguously faster and slower approaches, better and worse orders in which to learn things, more and less efficient techniques.

A great deal of research has been done in fields like learning theory, neuroscience, physiology, and pedagogy, into the fastest and most effective ways to acquire new skills. There are some findings that have been proven over decades of research, and which agree in many respects with the writings of centuries of master musicians about the best ways to learn an instrument. The book Practicing Music by Design, by Professor Christopher Berg, is an excellent survey of this research from the perspective of an eminent guitar educator and historian.

Related research on memorization with spaced repetition algorithms has assembled mountains of evidence through practical application in widely used software tools like Anki. And psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's groundbreaking research on "flow" has demonstrated the importance of balancing challenge and skill to remain "in the zone" to achieve peak performance, and the conditions required for doing so.

Many of these findings are just beginning to filter into public awareness, and some still seem all but unknown to the majority of guitar teachers.

The Fretboard Foundation materials and tools have been deliberately designed to make practical use of these insights, in an effort to help anyone become fluent on guitar as efficiently as possible.

Gardening, not building

When we study and practice, we are literally growing physical structures in our brains and bodies. Neural pathways, "muscle memory", reflexive connections between the sounds we imagine and the movements that produce them.

This is more like tending a garden than building a machine. We make small, deliberate changes, then wait for them to take root and grow before making the next ones. Like pruning a bonsai tree, knowing exactly what adjustments to make can speed the process up considerably, but there's a physical limit to how fast it can be accelerated because growth takes time.

What we are shaping, though, is durable infrastructure: channels carved into our nervous system that give our musical imagination a path to flow through in the moment of inspiration.

Knowledge and practice

One way to approach the acquisition of a new skill is to break it down into two components: knowledge and practice.

Acquiring skill with a musical instrument involves knowledge and practice of both music and the instrument.

Music knowledge can be thought of as music theory, and music practice as essentially listening to and creating music.

Guitar knowledge consists largely of knowing how to map music knowledge to the fretboard, and guitar practice is just what it sounds like: practicing on the guitar.

In the beginning, knowledge and practice are needed in about equal measure. But knowledge must guide practice, to ensure we practice the right things in the most useful ways. Once we’ve acquired a certain amount of knowledge, way more practice than knowledge is required.

Too much information

One of the most common ways education efforts fail is through trying to present too much information at once. This is not for lack of trying. (I’m well aware that the written materials on this site are a case in point.)

Guitar fluency requires an overwhelming amount of knowledge and skill. Even the simplest lesson introduces more new information than working memory can hold.

The only practical solution is to reduce cognitive load to the bare minimum by breaking everything into the smallest possible components, then guiding students to assemble those components into larger structures over time.

Chunking

Chunking means breaking information into constituent “chunks”, learning each chunk separately, then learning them in combination as a larger chunk.

Extensive research shows that people can only hold about five to nine things in mind at any one time. This seems like a pretty low limit, but fortunately each of those “things”, or “chunks”, can themselves be composed of chunks, each of which can be a composite of more chunks, ad infinitum. Experts can rapidly chunk together bits of new material because they can relate it to a foundation of prior knowledge.

The important thing is to master the smaller chunks thoroughly before moving on. Trying to learn more than a few new things at a time will result in learning none of them well.

Mental work

Knowledge is often best acquired away from the guitar, using our brains without the distraction of the physical world.

Visualizing ourselves playing the instrument is also surprisingly helpful. It turns out we can grow and strengthen the same brain structures that are formed through careful and deliberate practice, just by using our imagination.

Slow practice

Contemporary neuroscience research and the “old masters” seem to agree that the slower we practice, the faster we advance.

The main point is to carefully avoid mistakes in early practice, and to address mistakes by replaying them correctly several times over, so the correct information encodes itself into the physical structures of our brain.

Imagine starting a saw cut in a piece of wood, or scratching an irrigation channel into the dirt with a stick. The initial cuts must be slow, careful, and perfect, so later cuts can settle in where we want them. If early cuts are askew, later cuts will be more likely to follow and deepen them. If that happens we need to be extra careful to precisely deepen only the path we want to follow, until we've gotten it deeper than the errant cuts.

This is how we program our biological organism. Through repetition of the desired practice, we encode our intentions into physical structures in our body and brain. This allows us to make precisely the movements necessary to produce the sounds we want to hear, right at the split-second moment of inspiration.

Spaced and varied repetition

Studies show that repeatedly practicing the same thing over and over is not very helpful. It can actually be harmful in many ways. Instead of mindless repetition, a more effective approach is to analyze a particular subject and practice it from multiple angles.

Varying rhythm, dynamics, accents, and articulation keeps practice interesting, helps to solve technical problems, improves the ability to effect musical nuance, and trains us to make sophisticated adjustments in real time to adapt to unexpected circumstances. The appearance of fluid grace by expert performers is a sort of illusion created by these skillful micro-adjustments and compensations.

When acquiring knowledge, it’s more efficient to space the repetitions out over increasingly long periods of time, with the delay between repetitions dependent on how well we have memorized it. The ideal time to review a piece of information is just before we would have forgotten it. Algorithms and tools exist to try to predict this "forgetting curve", to help us review information at the most efficient times. Decades of research indicates that spacing repetitions in this way causes memories to be encoded more durably and accessibly. And it frees up a lot of time to learn other things in between.

Learning time and playing time

For musicians, the word time is often used to mean tempo.

During learning time, tempo should be completely ignored. The focus must be on playing things correctly; as slowly, deliberately, and repeatedly as needed to ensure we are doing things perfectly. We are literally encoding these skills into the physical structures of our brain and body. Repeatedly, and correctly.

During playing time, maintaining tempo is more important than being correct. We need to keep going, staying in time, even when we make mistakes. Especially when we make mistakes. Mistakes don’t matter during playing time, only landing correctly on the main notes in the rhythm in the correct tempo. Listeners don’t pay attention to every note, they notice the feeling and the structure and the main points. Their brains will fill in the bits in between with their own interpretations. But if the rhythm is lost, the illusion falls apart.

It’s important to practice both learning time and playing time. But if we make too many mistakes during playing time, we risk programming the wrong things into our brain structures and muscle memory. So we must balance it out with more learning time in order to encode the correct information, which then improves our playing.

Ultimately, playing is the whole point of all these efforts. Our goal is to make it as enjoyable as possible, and to spend as much time in playing time as we can.