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Learn Guitar – How to Learn Guitar In a 24 Hour Society

By Mike Hayes | February 18, 2010

Recently while a student was waiting for his singing lesson to
begin he proudly showed me his latest piece of technology, I’m
not sure what it was called I’m still having trouble setting the
timer on a microwave so when it comes to high tech stuff I’m
technology challenged.

Anyway, this guy explained it was a new device for storing
music, “How many songs will it store” I asked, after checking
the gigabytes or whatever bytes they were he replied “about 8,000
songs!” All of a sudden I felt very ancient as I recalled “the
good old days” when you went into a record store and came away
with your twelve inch disc tucked under your arm.

My trip down memory lane was brought to a screeching halt when
my next guitar student arrived and signaled the beginning of my
working day. Later that day I began to review the events of that
day … have we really progressed with our technological
advancements or have we missed something along the way?

I’m all for technology in science, medicine and transport etc.,
by I’m not at all convinced we are moving forward in the learning
and long term memory recall departments!

We need to understanding ‘how’ we learn; at the end of the day we
need to understand human limitations in a world that never stops.

How To Learn Guitar In a World That Never Stops

Let’s see, where are we now; we’ve got …

* YouTube
* MySpace
* Guitar Hero
* Guitar Websites (complete with Guitar experts)
* Guitar learning software
* iPods, iPhones and tons of other “new” “i” storage and
retrieval systems some of which can store 8,000 + songs

Boy we must be smarter than previous generations look at all the
stuff we have to help us!

Unfortunately the results do not support the theory of technology
based learning being superior, in fact quite the opposite.

We’ve been that obsessed with technology we’ve overlooked the
obvious

Here’s the facts:

* We have been outpaced by our technology – humans are not built
for the world we have designed. Humans beings do not function 24
hours a day, machines can and do!

* We have converted our world into a single technologically
integrated, round-the-clock- community … news, learning, what
ever you want 27/7/365

* Machine centered technology verses human centered technology -
currently we have machine centered technology and we’re going to
have more and more problems until we start creating ‘human’
centered technology … after all we are supposed to be running
the show aren’t we?

Here’s what I’m seeing

* Guitar players how can play faster (and louder) than ever
before but most have no idea what key, scale or even what tuning
they are in? They learnt it on YouTube … must be right
…right?

How could you ever form a band with these guys … they don’t
have the foggiest idea what they are doing but they are doing it
24 hours a day! They don’t speak the language of music.

* Guitar players who can’t remember the song they were learning
last week, let alone what band was performing the song … oh,
well doesn’t matter we’ll just download another one and forget it
just as quickly and yes, I can do that 24/7 too.

Talk about the memory of a goldfish … it’s serious stuff, why
bother learning something in the first place if you can’t
remember it?

As I said I’m not against technology, I love it, just somewhere
along the way we’ve lost a commonsense approach to LEARNING.

Okay, here’s surefire five ways to overcome the 24 learning
problems.

1. Turn off the computer – seriously it will save you so much
wasted time; wasted hours that you could actually spend learning
and playing the guitar.

Try tracking how much time you spend on the computer per week ..
you’ll get a shock, I’m betting it’s over two hours per week, now
you can become a heck of a good guitar player with two extra
hours of focused practice a week … think about that!

2. Learn to read music – “if you don’t know what you are doing
there’s no point to doing it!” No matter how much you appear to
be progressing with the monkey-see-monkey-do approach at the end
of the day the best you can hope for is a musical copy-cat.

3. Learn new material in short time frames – 2 to 5 minutes
maximum, set a kitchen timer for five minutes as soon as the
timer goes off stand up and take a break. You will develop your
long term memory with this approach.

4. Play with other humans – that’s what music is all about,
people playing for and with other people. There’s something weird
about pressing colored keys down on a fake guitar plugged into a
computer pretending to be a “guitar hero”. Whatever it is … it
certainly isn’t music.

5. Make sure you learn the names of the notes on the guitar
fretboard – if you don’t know this you won’t be going anywhere.

Bottom line: You need to know how to work with your nervous
system not against it, people need rest, motivation, enthusiasm
and fun … I’m not sure what machines need, but that’s another
story.

Now that you know how to learn it’s time to head to the practice
room with a fresh approach to learning the guitar.

Topics: Beginner Guitar Lesson, Guitar Tips, Learn And Master Guitar | No Comments »

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