I wonder if anyone else feels similarly about their progression on guitar.
I’ve kind of reached an intermediate stage where given enough time I can learn most of the songs I want to without major technical barriers. Super fast shredder stuff is probably the main area where there’s still a technical/physical barrier.
Im therefore finding that the main thing holding back my progression is plain memory. I’ll retain several songs, riffs, solos at once but with the time, repetition and dedication required to learn something new, there’s usually something squeezed out to make room for the new stuff. I also find that sitting down and learning something new is an exercise in memory more than a technical challenge and it’s the mental strain of memorisation that sometimes puts me off practicing!
Anyone got any sage advice?!
Comments
Focus on something else and let your mind play the song on auto-pilot. When I see players waggling the guitar neck I think it's sometimes a trait that puts the actual playing in the periphery of the mind. I used to play bass and sing so performing a number like White Room for example necessitates playing the bass on auto-pilot while one reels off the lyrics.
The best thing I do to memorise parts I can't do automatically is to make long-hand structural notes, then condense those into a summary, then a flashcard memory trigger, then take that away. It's as much the process of making the notes in the first place that actually helps, rather than reading them afterwards. I assume it engages a different bit of your brain than just the "ears/hands" bit.
I play in a lot of covers bands so have to remember a lot of songs, a few hundred basically. The trick is to learn to instantly recognize intervals ... like the sound of an E chord or E note changing to an A for example then you can play the song without remember the chords or the specific notes of a riff. It also means you don't have to worry about only knowing the song in one key as knowing your intervals means you can transpose on the fly. Now this can be tricky if the riff uses open strings as pedal tones or ringing tones ... like Muse's Hysteria or Killers Mr Brightside but the majority of songs can be key shifted without sounding too different
I learn the above by endlessly playing along to music, not just my music but the radio, TV, wife's disco playlist and the kids Tot's TV and Postman Pat
if it takes a large amount of dedication to learn the music that you aspire to, then try working on bits of music which are way below your technical ability. Take a really simple melody and concentrate on just learning it. If it seems trivial to do this then the upside is that it shouldn’t take much dedication. While you’re learning one trivial tune you might have capacity to crack on and start learning another trivial tune. This isn’t much different to what @Danny1969 said. Don’t be fussy about what you’re playing, just keep doing it.
Oh, and get good sleep too, it’s very important for transferring the memory of things you did today into long term safe storage.
We add a song or two to our setlist every week, and one of the problems of being a quick learner is that I can pull apart most pop songs and figure them out after a couple of passes, often during the first time I hear them.
That means I can physically play songs which I have no hope whatever of remembering halfway through Saturday night's gig, because I would have only heard it once it twice.
There is no substitute I'm afraid for listening to the damn thing over and over again after you've figured out how to play it.
On the other hand, the stuff that you’ve just learned...to get it into long term memory it needs lots of repetition and sleep. If you’ve learnt something and then repeated it less than a dozen times since, then I think..
1. What do you mean by ‘I learnt it’. Did you really learn it, or just get vaguely familiar with it?
2. You need to repeat it more. If I’d learnt a piece and then only played it a few times after that, I wouldn’t expect to be very familiar with it after a couple of weeks break. It needs more repetition and more nights of sleep to get something safely stored.
So it depends on what you’ve memorised. If you can’t remember something then you might need more contextual information.
I completely agree. Once it becomes normal practice, it works very well I find. The "hands" part is very important. The act of note taking quite naturally involves the motor cortex, which is thought to play a siginifcant role in bolstering Working Memory during the encoding phase, after it was demostrated via a functional MRI (fMRI) to be activated during recall.