Guitar Players/Researchers in need of your help!

Thanks for all the input gang! this stuff is great. I'm not sure what happened to that link but thanks for fixing it! As for the "downtime in playing over the years" issue, it had never really occured to us in the intial design of the questionnaire that this would be a common thing, but its seems there are quite a few older players reporting similar accounts and questions. I want to discuss this more, but the office is hectic today I've got a lot to get done before the weekend, but I'll be back Monday to finish my thoughts on your concerns and to get more feedback from. The main point of this study is to really tap into the motivational processes of guitar players and "downtime in playing" definitely shows a change in motivation along the way for whatever reason (life gets more busy, kids get in the way, work, etc.) thanks so much for teh feedback folks, this will all help in the future if we ever replicate the study, and for our suggested future areas to investigate. Keep the ideas coming!!

I am envious of the resources available to newcomers to guitar these days - wish GN had been around when I was starting out! Pocket calculators and digital watches were all the rage back then - now they're giving 'em away with breakfast cereals!

Vic

Amen to that! The amount of readily available material now is wonderful. As I page thru the artist songbooks I bought in the '70's this really stands out. Back then I just tried (and failed) to cope with the Ab, Eb and other piano oriented chords printed over the piano music because that's all there was and learning what to do just wasn't happening for me.

I've made a lot of progress in the last few years and resources like GN are why it's been possible. (Thanks Dave!)

As for the "downtime in playing over the years" issue, it had never really occured to us in the intial design of the questionnaire that this would be a common thing, but its seems there are quite a few older players reporting similar accounts and questions. I want to discuss this more, but the office is hectic today I've got a lot to get done before the weekend, but I'll be back Monday to finish my thoughts on your concerns and to get more feedback from.

Fantastic! :D You don't know how impressive it is to see somebody in your position showing that attitude, instead of the usual tendency toward dismissing anything that doesn't fit their pre-conceived ideas as wrong, irrelevant, missing the point, not of interest, etc. You deserve some kind of medal for having both the balls and the smarts to be able to say that your initial design may have room for improvement.

The main point of this study is to really tap into the motivational processes of guitar players and "downtime in playing" definitely shows a change in motivation along the way for whatever reason (life gets more busy, kids get in the way, work, etc.) thanks so much for teh feedback folks, this will all help in the future if we ever replicate the study, and for our suggested future areas to investigate.

Changes in motivation seem 100% inevitable to me. You either lose it altogether and stop, or your motivations and views change as your development and/or career does. This would apply even for those working full time as musicians. I doubt that anybody's motivation would be the same at 60 as it is at 6 or 16. (my wife who does strategic planning and evaluation for a living, and has two pysch degrees and over 30 years practical experience, would probably tell me that their ‘reinforcers' would change over time :wink: )

Keep the ideas coming!!

You may regret saying that, but here goes.... :mrgreen:

It appears to be true that most people who start out to learn to play an instrument don't succeed in attaining their initial goals. This can be masked by the fact that, if asked, some won't admit to having failed, but will prefer to see it as a ‘break' or diversion. A high apparent failure rate isn't unusual though. For instance, most new start up businesses fail (I've seen figures of around 80 -85% quoted) but it's reasonably easy to put a box round that situation, because they stop in an easily measurable manner by going broke and/or just ceasing to trade. I would guess that the percentage of kids who start out with vague dreams of being a good player and then fail to get their performance skills up to the level they'd initially hoped for, is probably not all that different.

But musical success or failure is hard to measure - partly because it has no end point. Not just for some players, but for all of us. There's no juncture at which (unlike, say a maths problem or a crossword puzzle) you can say “I'm 60% of the way” or “It's all done now!” There was no time at which even the most skilled players in history were able to say that they had completely ‘solved music' and could learn no more skills, or that there were no more musical possibilities to explore. Their personal imagination or motivation may have run out but music itself certainly didn't, and it never will.

We all begin as music students, and stay that way. One of the by-products of this is the lack of a clear pay-off in an easily acceptable time-frame. I'm sure that most of us start out without expecting to have a totally clear view of the finishing line. But we're still very used to the idea of finishing a task in a reasonable time, and then getting the rewards for completion. At some stage in the learning process for music it probably dawns on many students that we're going to be running laps more or less indefinitely and that we're going to have to find other ways to stay enthusiastic while we wait for the stadium gig.

However, our goal at the start wasn't ‘Get all excited about nearly nailing a bar chord' it was more like ‘Woohoo! Get up there and rock'!

So, what next?.. Stay tuned....

Cheers,

Chris

Sorry, but I did warn you... :shock:

I come from a generation where it was common to have numbingly dreary piano lessons inflicted on you as child (over 50 years ago now). They succeeded only in convincing me that I must be musically dyslexic, rhythmically challenged, and harmonically deaf dumb and blind. They put me off music for decades. Not bad for a few hours disinterested work by a mediocre teacher. :? Since then I had a couple more brief attempts. I bought a guitar in the early seventies and also took a few piano lessons in the late eighties. I fiddled briefly with the guitar (I'm talking minutes or hours, not weeks or months), decided that I didn't really then have the time needed to learn and so never took a lesson or bought a book. The guitar went into storage. The later piano lessons went on for a few weeks, but never became enjoyable, and never seemed like anything but a confusing chore.

Then, about four years ago - at age 58 - a reasonable chunk of time opened up in my life and I had the opportunity to concentrate on something new for a few hours a week. I came across the guitar case, stuck away in the roof space, and decided to give music one last shot.

I tried a few lessons, but (despite finding a very good teacher this time) it fairly soon began to feel like school and homework rather than fun, and I started to dread having to front up the next week. So I stopped taking lessons. But I don't like the idea of failing. Besides, I had started a number of new businesses during my working life, and none of them had failed, so I rather fancied myself as a ‘succeeder' rather than ‘failer' by now. So I tried to figure out what I needed to do to succeed at music, after 50 years of sporadic false starts.

I wrote out what I thought was the “Conventional Wisdom”, and it looked something like this:

Start young

Establish a Disciplined Practice Schedule

Take Regular Lessons

Build a Repertoire (i.e. learn whole songs, not just bits and pieces)

Set Goals

Then, one by one, starting from the top of the list, I had to tear strips off the page. Despite the fact that I come from an engineering background where thorough planning and discipline are essential, I just couldn't seem to work that way with music. My quantity estimations were so accurate when I built my own house that I had almost no materials left over at all at the finish. But when I picked up a guitar I couldn't even tell you which note or chord I was going to play next. I just noodled about instead. (Even odder was the fact that it seemed in some way to be working...). Strange, and intriguing.... 8)

But before throwing away the last piece of paper I paused, and set just one goal. It's still the only part of the list that really matters to me, and it was only two words - Don't Stop.

So it seems that we have a common interest in motivation. What is it? Where do you find it? How do you repair it when it gets sick? Are there common motivators, or aspects of motivation, that fit all of us? If so, can they be satisfactorily bottled and labeled? Is it like an engine that if properly built will give years of good service without only occasional maintenance, or is it like fuel that needs to be topped up every week?

I've managed to figure out what works for me, and I'm finally playing on a regular basis, but I'm still very interested in knowing what works for others, and even more interested in knowing what will keep me still moving forwards in another four years.

Cheers,

Chris

LAST CHAPTER.... :roll: ...REALLY....

So what happened to turn me around?

As a ‘self-taught' player - with what looked like a track record as a serial musical incompetent - I needed some answers. Now ‘self-taught' is something of a misnomer. I don't have a face to face teacher, but I certainly don't re-invent music in a vacuum. As well as experimenting, I also learn from books, friends, listening to CDs, watching guitarists' hands, and so on. I bought books. Lots of books.... and it rapidly seemed like I'd just bought the same book ten times. They all told me what to play by showing me some dots and numbers, charts and pictures and, in come cases, by rolling out yards of instructions and chirpy anecdotes. But what I REALLY wanted to know wasn't there. :(

It felt like buying a kit of some kind and then discovering that one of the bags of nuts and bolts was missing. I felt like shaking the books to see if the parts labeled “Motivation” and “Music Learning Strategies” would fall out. Where were the instructions on how to work through all the necessary hundreds of repeats and make them enjoyable and instructive instead of frustrating and dull? Come to that, where was the chapter that explained how to turn an accurate rendition of the dots and numbers into real music with heart and soul? Not just accidentally misplaced it seemed, but another case of “Batteries Not Included”. Clearly, the power and the spark had to be found elsewhere...

I asked my wife why she thought that the music books all told me what to do, but gave no useful information about HOW to do it. (Lame exhortations to "Practice, practice, practice" and "Have fun!" just don't cut it...) She laughed and said that it might just be because that's the easy part - the concrete, easy to write out things that the punters can see. Whereas the abstract things, which deal with slippery stuff like concepts and attitudes, motivations and reinforcers, can be a lot harder to pin down and articulate clearly and unambiguously. Plus, what works for one isn't necessarily going to be as powerful for another.

Well.... at least I knew that I'm not alone in having to work hard, not only at learning to play, but also at figuring out how to keep the drive to learn alive. I'm happy to report that it's working now though.

I still don't have a practice schedule of any kind, or regular lessons, and I still don't have a repertoire of songs. I can't even play the songs that I've written myself, without at least the lyrics in front of me. It's all still random, scruffy and irregular. Yet I can (and now do) play with a group of other players, and I'm slowly but surely (and with great enjoyment) building up quite a handy range of skills. I still don't have a ‘repertoire' of specific songs, but if you stick a score/chord sheet or whatever on the stand, and play the lead, then I'll play the chords. If I'm playing alone I'll spice the chords up a bit. When pressed I might even attempt to sing. If one of the chords is out of my current range I'll substitute one that isn't. I may not have the oratory powers of Eric Clapton or Mark Knopfler, but, dammit, I've proved that I can talk music by using my ears and fingers. From now on it's about extending my vocabulary, improving my phrasing, and learning to communicate a more detailed musical story.

What happened was that I learned that there's nothing wrong with my method - which does NOT involve drawing a line on a map and breaking the journey down in advance into A-B, B-C, C-D and so on, but which looks more like a dog dashing madly round a park following whatever scent turns up in front of them. The journey varies every day, and the destination changes moment by moment. What works for me is the thrill of the chase, the fun of solving the puzzle of where the trail leads, finding it out for myself rather than reading a "How to Cross the Park Directly from A to Z Without Getting Mud on Your Shoes" book. I'm hooked on the ride now, I couldn't really care less where it's going to....

Well, whoopee for me. But the interesting thing is that I think a lot of people learn music like I have done - informally, erratically and unsystematically. Not just amateurs like me, but some of the notable players too.

That's what I was trying to say. I couldn't answer your questionnaire because I just don't fit it, and neither could Vic.

No big deal, but the thing is, I have a feeling that half the famous guitar players that we all like couldn't either. Perhaps sampling types who fit a profile that suits the filling in of forms might not tell you what you really want to know?

Sorry about all the words... :oops:

Cheers,

Chris

P.S. I also think I figured out why my apparently erratic method seems such a good fit for me. Why I can cheerfully launch into some new exploration without fearing that it might be ‘Wrong' or ‘Not by the Book', but instead prefer the approach of ‘I wonder what would happen if I put that there and did this, or tried that?' or 'That was interesting, now where could I find out more about that...'

I think I've finally realised why I'm happy to build on whatever seems interesting to try at the time, and then change direction based on feedback from the new information - whatever it happens to be. It's because I have such happy memories of successfully learning to walk that way, and then discovering how to talk that way, and later how to ride a bicycle in the garden (regularly falling into flower beds as I went), and how to drive a car (in an open paddock where no direction was wrong and everything was possible), and even how to find a girl-friend and then a wife in an era where there was no book or DVD to tell you how to do it. I just love freedom of choice.

The intriguing thing is that not everybody works well that way, and many seem to do better with a structure that's been provided or suggested by somebody else. Perhaps I just like clinging to the old ways...Or maybe I just never grew up... :mrgreen:

Lot of interesting comments here - I'll throw in my two cents on a few aspects of this.

Gender As a guitar teacher, I've seen the number of women climb steadily. When I started teaching in the late 1970s, women made up less than 10% of guitar students. By a couple of years ago, women made up half of my students. And among older students, women are now a clear majority.

A few of these students have told me they always had a desire to play guitar, but their parents disapproved - instead, they played piano, flute, clarinet, or some other instrument that was more socially acceptable to their parents. I think this cultural bias was driven by how women were marketed in contemporary music - men could choose to emulate someone with a wholesome image (e.g. Glen Campbell) or not (Keith Richards). Women were limited to figures that were counter-cultural (Joni Mitchell) or sex symbols (Charo). This had nothing to do with musical ability - Charo is actually one of the world's best flamenco guitarists... but she isn't exactly the average parent's image of who their daughter should grow up to be.

Age At our music school, about 60% of students are school band age (10-18), 25% are younger, and 15% are adults. The youngest students are much more likely to be taking lessons because their parents insist on it, and most of these are taking either piano or violin lessons.

Beginning guitar students are younger than they used to be, as a general rule. It's always been the case that new guitarists tend to take up the instrument because they liked the sound of the instrument, or the social image of some famous guitarist. Thirty years ago that was driven by popular music, and as a rule kids didn't start developing those aspirations until they were socially aware of popular music. When I was 7 or 8, the music I heard was classical, jazz, or sacred. I'd visit grandma's house and hear opera. I didn't get a steady diet of contemporary rock/pop until I got my own radio, probably around age 11 or so.

But today's young child has the Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers on TV, and Rock Band and Guitar Hero at their fingertips. This has rapidly pushed down the age of the average beginning guitarist - 20 or 30 years ago, the median age of a beginning guitar student was probably 14 or 15; today it's about 9.

Practice time As a general rule, I've found guitar students practice less than musicians with other primary instruments. I'd guess the average beginner on guitar puts in about 80 minutes per week; the average beginner on other instruments tends to do about twice that. There's a strong correlation between practice time and a student's motivation, which begs the question: why are guitarists less motivated than flautists or pianists?

Having known hundreds of young beginners over the years, I've come to the conclusion that they aren't less motivated - they're less pushed and/or more frustrated. Parents who want their children to have the benefits of music study will ensure that practice is done; those parents tend to select the instrument for their child, and the choice leans heavily to piano, with violin in second place.

People who practice more tend to be goal setters. They may not go into the detail of the process to the extent Chris did, but they have a desire to be better. But learning to play an instrument well takes a lot of effort over a long period of time; the yardstick you use for measuring your personal progress has a lot to do with whether you continue on an instrument.

The majority of proficient musicians started young. This makes sense from two different angles - a 30 year old musician who started at age 10 has had twice as much time to develop skill as one who started at age 20. And since music is a language, there are probably neurological reasons at work too - starting while your brain is still organizing itself may make future skills easier to acquire.

But the highly motivated student can learn anything, at any age. I know people who mastered a foreign language in their 30s (or 50s) without any prior experience. They're rare, but they're out there. They succeeded because they stuck with it, and they stuck with it because they were motivated.

Back to the yardstick - adults as a rule measure their musical abilities against musicians they hear; these musicians tend to be professionals - recordings, concerts, etc. Children tend to measure their abilities against their peers - the other kids in the school band, or the ones they jam with in the garage.

David is spot-on with the estimate that the average guitar student takes lessons for four months. I've seen a published figure of 17 weeks as the average before a guitar student quits or changes teachers. This will vary a great deal depending on the teacher; my own average is about 30 weeks. Some students stay for years, others take one lesson and quit.

I haven't seen published numbers, but I would guess the typical piano student takes about 50 lessons, and the average student on a band or orchestral instrument about 75-80. Explaining the differences requires looking at the yardstick used for measuring your progress and sustaining your motivation....

The typical guitar student is self-motivated. They have made their own instrument choice; most students choose to play guitar because it looks like FUN. But developing motor skills on any instrument requires discipline; it's not as easy as Guitar Hero makes it seem. As I see it, students making an instrument choice that depends on self motivation will show the same distribution of results as people in any other field - for example, their are lots of entrepreneurs... and most aren't millionaires.

The typical pianist is parent-driven. Because there is an outside discipline, they stick with it longer on average... because they HAVE to! I've heard many parents say "Julius really wants to play guitar, but we're making him take two years of piano lessons first". I used entrepreneurs to illustrate self-motivation; this is more of a necessity motivation... people need to eat, so they get jobs. A high percentage of them do what's required to keep their jobs - but a high percentage of those folks won't do much more.

It's the band/orchestral students who last the longest in lessons. I think that's because of the yardstick: they're in the school band. They have a near daily opportunity to compare their progress to something that's realistic - unlike adult beginners on guitar or piano (who compare their progress to the music they hear - i.e. that performed by professionals). Unlike their piano peers, they tend to choose their own instrument. They also have more frequent performance opportunities - pianists get a recital now and then; recreational guitarists have to be self motivated enough to seek out an open mic opportunity... which can be counter-productive, because unlike the school band performance, the folks they share the stage with aren't in the same cohort as far as ability goes. This allows band/orchestral students the motivating factor of competition, which I think is important to sustaining motivation over the long haul. It's not a sport with a clear winner, but like any field, there are winners - folks who keep improving. And those folks tend to measure themselves against a realistic peer group; whether they do it in dollars or beats per minute is beside the point.

Pedagogy This is the last big factor as far as guitar goes. Other instruments tend to have a long established logic behind the presentation of skills - the fundamentals that must be acquired for long-term progress, the logical sequence of their presentation, and the reasoning behind the physical approach to the instrument (most piano teachers understand WHY the student has to keep their fingers curled, etc).

The teachers I know in orchestral and band instruments have a common background - they know the pedagogy. I'd guess that over 90% have done formal on it. It's a little lower for piano teachers, but still up there - maybe 75-80%.

Now we come to guitar teachers. Most guitar teachers I know fall into one of three categories:

- the old pro. These are guys who used to gig constantly. They have good chops, but they'd rather be performing. But the venues aren't there like they were 30 years ago.... and the 60 year old guitarist who hasn't had a day job since the 1970s isn't going to find many other career options. They teach by default. Many of these teachers know only one method: the one they learned from.

- the young pro. These guys also have chops, and see themselves on the way up. Teaching is a way to make some money while waiting for superstardom. Many of these folks are self taught. Perhaps 10% know something about pedagogy; the rest can only teach what they play - as a rule you won't learn jazz changes from a rock guitarist, or vice versa. Some of these teachers do a lot more harm than good - last week I had a new student who's been taking lessons for over a year. He plays pretty well - but doesn't know the names of ANY chords he was playing. I asked if he could read music, and he said yes - but it turned out he thought all music was written in tab.

- the music teacher. Less than 10% of the guitar teachers I've met teach because they want to teach. They study the methods and think about the approaches. But those teachers are blazing trails... there is no established standard pedagogical method, because teaching the guitar (other than classical) is still a young field.

Bottom line: music students are best motivated when they have performance opportunities that allow for a realistic measurement of progress against true peers, and have access to instruction from someone who understands effective methods of teaching.

Bottom line: music students are best motivated when they have performance opportunities that allow for a realistic measurement of progress against true peers, and have access to instruction from someone who understands effective methods of teaching.

Thanks Tom - yet another fascinating NoteBoat post. :D

Interesting to read that the amount of lessons that I took are pretty much the average. I wonder what happens to all the others who stop taking paid lessons. Do they mostly stop playing? I suspect that some will continue self teaching for a while and slowly play less and less, and only a very small number will keep going for the rest of their lives.

Over the years I've had dozens of friends who had piano lesson at school. Some reached quite a high standard and were touted as having professional potential, yet only a handful played on much into adulthood and none became pros. Most got rid of the piano along the way, and I can think of only 4 who even still have one in their house. Not one of them still play it regularly. As you suggest, a big part of that is probably because they have no natural audience or group of peers to perform either with or for.

When I was a kid I caught the tail end of the ‘piano in the parlour' era and the days of ‘pub piano' were still going. People still did have sing-songs round the piano in pubs, and families did apparently make music together at home more than they do now (although my own family had nobody with musical ability). Most of those pianos were thrown out, smashed up, or simply left to go out of tune and fall apart. I suppose they were replaced by juke-boxes, video games, CD players, rock bands and so on.

But, as you say, there's a long established tradition of piano pedagogy and piano remains a great instrument to learn music on. The layout of what's called ‘theory' is far simpler to see on a keyboard, and it's also much easier to play a melody line and then experiment with various harmonies without needing to get a second player or a recording machine. You can just spread the jobs across both hands.

But the traditional pedagogy can be as much a weight as a light to illuminate a well established path. When I spend time on piano forums I'm struck by the degree of angst and tension I see there. It seems as if a big percentage are stuck away in lonely rooms, tethered to an immobile instrument, climbing a learning ladder that just gets harder and harder, and more complex and demanding, watched by the imagined but still critical eyes of centuries of prior exponents. Much of the playing seems stiff and wary, instead of free and enthusiastic, and the number who are prepared to step off that treadmill (because treadmill is how it looks) and play more freely is surprisingly small. Few seem satisfied with where they are now, or have devised a way to really enjoy themselves at that level. Most seem to just plug grimly away “while the family is out of the house”, or in lessons.

Posts about ‘hitting the wall', losing motivation etc are common, perhaps because their goal of being able to play the 2,786,987th mediocre rendition of some Chopin piece starts to feel rather empty? There also seems to be a strong tendency to spend the majority of their time in some kind of ‘struggle zone', and as soon as things start to flow they ramp up the demands until it's tough and tense again.

With guitar, especially the less classical styles, the lesser amount of established tradition seems both a drawback and yet also an advantage. The lack of decent teachers, who really understand the craft of teaching, as opposed to just being able to knock out a tune themselves, is undoubtedly a big problem. Of all the guitar teachers I've met only one told me that he always wanted to teach. All the rest wanted to be performers and now teach to eat. Yet the freedom to play without feeling the invisible ruler of tradition constantly poised to whack you on the knuckles is one of the joys of learning an instrument such as guitar, where both the playing and the instrument itself are both still developing.

So, between all the lonely pianists and the wannabe guitar rock stars who get dispirited and stop, what are the few who keep going doing differently? When the initial enthusiasm wears off, or Mum and Dad's lesson money dries up, how do they stay motivated?

The competitive aspect of school bands, recitals for grades or whatever, must surely help in the early stages, but I suspect that it might be the camaraderie aspect of music that is most needed if you're to sustain the interest. Music to me really is like another language. I don't have to compete with my mates over our skills with grammar or sentence construction to enjoy a good verbal chat, and it doesn't seem important to me with music either. I actually did contemplate learning another spoken language instead of guitar. I didn't feel daunted by the challenge, and certainly didn't think I lacked the ability to succeed, but what stopped me was that I knew that I'd not find enough real world opportunities to use it. I don't have anybody nearby with whom I could converse regularly in French or Italian for instance, and without a practical opportunity to frequently use the language I'd knew that interest would be extremely hard to keep going.

On one piano forum some of the members on the Adult Beginner section have set up regular ‘recital' threads (they're up to #14 now). You don't actually need to be an adult or a beginner, but the idea is to prepare something, as best you can - any piece, at any level - and submit a recording by the target date. They're then collated into orderly zip files and everybody comments, encourages and applauds. It's a great idea, and it underlines the fact that there isn't nearly enough offline opportunity for that same type of experience in a fun, low stress way. It was also suggested and begun by one of the least conventional players there - a permanent noodler and improviser who never sticks to a score, yet plays with great skill, charm and joy.

One teacher I know runs regular mini ‘gigs' for his guitar students where they get to perform together in a small local hall. Even the lousy ones get to join in the action (even if he does fudge it a little by judicious use of the knobs on the mixer and a little ‘augmenting' from his own unseen backstage guitar.... :wink: ). So perhaps that's one possible answer to the motivation/drop-out problem - more opportunities to get together and play, especially in a supportive, low stress, relatively informal fashion?

Most of us know that we aren't really headed for pro careers. But finding a way to fit socially interactive music into the rest of our life time-tables, and match up with like minded musical buddies is not as easy as one might like. The formal, professional path is still there (albeit apparently shrinking rather than expanding) but the less formal social path appears to have largely fallen apart. Maybe finding ways to rebuild that might go a fair way toward helping maintain motivation, and provide a useful alternative to the ‘Fame and riches or nothing' mindset that seems to have crept in?

Cheers,

Chris

WOW, we are absolutely over the top excited about the discussion our little study has generated and we have throoughly enjoyed reading all your comments/suggestions and thoughts. Thanks to chris and Tom for all the input. I (Jason) am currently designing a special survey just for those who found it hard to fill out the first survey. This new survey is far more qualitative with hopes of accessing the same information but with far more freedom for the participants to fully explain themselves , their thoughts and feelings on the topics. I should have it finished witin the next few days and I'd love it if anyone who had difficulty conforming to the restricitions of survey one woul dliek to take the time to fill out survey two which I've designed with all your suggestions and concerns in mind. Stay tuned for more details. and Thansk again to everyone for their participation and interesting discussions!!

Thanks to chris and Tom for all the input.

Thanks for reading. :) You've provided what I think is the most important motivator of all - an audience for my waffling on... :wink:
I (Jason) am currently designing a special survey just for those who found it hard to fill out the first survey. This new survey is far more qualitative with hopes of accessing the same information but with far more freedom for the participants to fully explain themselves , their thoughts and feelings on the topics.

Great to hear. I'll look forward to completing it.

Designing ‘tick the box' questionnaires is always tricky because it's hard to avoid the trap of the designer's questions pre-judging the possible answers before you even get any. But leaving it too open ended can make it a lot harder to collate. There's also the problem of multiple versions of events, because there's always at least three:

1) What people think they did.

2) What they will tell you they did. Either consciously or subconsciously there's a normal tendency to bend the answers. This might be towards what they think you want to know or hear, or it might be as simple as either overstating or even underplaying their performance.

3) What really happened.

The three almost never line up. :? If you give subject a diary to fill in, you'll allegedly get more accurate results, but then the act of filling in the diary will prompt them to behave differently. Genuinely accurate measurements are nearly always hard to get. For instance, I've spent the last 15 years working in the area of intellectual disability and I've seen numerous instances of optimistic claims for therapies that simply don't hold up. The belief in the therapy is genuinely held, and the initial results apparently support those beliefs. But what has usually happened is that the desire for the therapy to work has both prompted the carers or parents to put more time and care in, and also to be somewhat optimistic about what they think they see.

Independent trials then fail to reproduce the ‘findings' - because the alleged improvements were either imagined (everybody involved has a huge investment in believing in success), were naturally occurring developments (wrongly ascribed to the therapy) or else were produced by the extra attention and time given, not by the therapy itself.

Oops.... back to music motivation... :oops:

I think it's mostly pretty simple. Music is another language and we all start out with high hopes of using it to communicate thoughts and emotions.

But dreaming and talking to yourself only takes you so far - you need somebody to converse with, or it all becomes rather pointless. Whilst you have a group of like minded musical mates, or a good teacher, there's a natural audience for your conversation (meaning both your playing and the associated chat). Remove that and the necessary reinforcement tends to dry up. I've seen it over and over and over again, even with players of considerable skill.

One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen is the assumption by many of us that a certain level of skill is needed before you can ‘talk' musically. Unfortunately, that's often seen as a level that's still up the road a bit from where we are now... :( But it's just not true. I had a few lessons on clarinet from a terrific young woman who had me playing a duet on the SECOND LESSON, when I only knew how to finger three notes. I squeaked out my three notes in roughly the right order and she just played round me. I was terrified, astonished, and delighted in equal measure! My contribution was rough and modest in the extreme, but I never forgot what the underlying message there was . Later I had that reinforced on guitar when a friend invited me to join a couple of mates in playing once a week in his music shop. I discovered that my handful of basic chords (which sounded pretty thin on their own) were not only adequate enough to be able to join in, but that they added very useful colour and substance to the joint music. Woohoo!

I enjoy making progress. Learning new skills is definitely motivating. But finding somewhere to apply them seems to be the real deal. It's often overlooked, but having somebody to ‘talk to' musically is what really keeps me going. So thanks for prompting me to work it through again - it's given me the necessary spur to refresh a few things. And thanks again for reading too. :)

Cheers,

Chris

you're more than welcome Chris, we're glad to help and have such great feedback and rich insight into your personal guitar story. I do have an update on the "new qualitative study" version I've been designing for those like yourself. Turns out the new design strays further away from the formatting we layed out in our original ethics approval and for this reason I need to fill out anew application and wait for it to be processed and approved before we can put the survey online. This process normally doens't take too long (about a week) so it will still be a few days before we have anything ready for you, and others, to fill out. The professor and I are blown away at the comparisons you've been drawing and the ideas you've had concerning music and language learning. We are second language acquisition researchers by profession (Dr. MacIntyre has been at it for over a decade, myself more recently) and thats why we designed this study, we too started to see the connection between learning a new language and learning a new instrument, specifically guitar. So when we read your comments its very validating and exciting for us to find someone else out there on the same wave length! We apprecite all you've done and shared with us and we hope to have the new survey up and running within the next week or so.

Cheers!

Jason Legatto

Jason, music is definitely a language - and vice versa. The obvious illustrations are tonal languages, where a change in pitch changes the word (Chinese, etc), but every language conveys nuance through pitch. A simple rise in inflection changes "I'm going to do it!" into "I'm going to do it?" Other subtle changes in pitch within the sentence speak volumes about the subject, intentions, and attitude of the speaker. I'm convinced we're wired that way.

On a high level of musical ability, improvised music is a conversation. Just watch jazz masters trading ideas... compare it with watching an animated discussion in a language you don't understand. We interrupt, interject ideas, sway others to our side of the musical argument, etc.

Chris, you make a good point on comeradery vs competition. My point is that musicians who excel thrive on the competitive aspects - they vie for first chair, or to be the fastest on the block, or whatever (the same is true in sports).

As far as traditional pedagogy being a drag at times, I'm not sure I agree. There's a difference between tactics and strategy; pedagogy is strategy - what goes where in the learning process. Teaching methods are tactics. I use different tactics with different students - and different method books and handouts to go with them. Many people will get turned off by one method, but would do fine with another. Some of that has to do with the choice of materials a particular method uses.

But pedagogy is deeper than that. On piano, if you want to play the harder Chopin etudes (I forget the number of the one I have in mind, and I'm too lazy to look it up right now - it's the one with the parallel sixths) you've got to acquire certain fingering skills first... that piece can't be taught "off the shelf" without the proper preparation. And pieces that develop that preparation are pretty tedious for an intermediate/early advanced pianist... so as a teacher, you do well to include that work much earlier on.

There isn't a single guitar method (strategy) that I like across the board. The skills of musicianship are best acquired in one order; the techniques of guitar are best acquired in a different sequence. As an example, I think it's essential to read standard notation - it lets you understand music theory at a much higher level. But the easiest stuff to read is in the key of C; the easiest stuff to play will be in the keys of G, D, or A. As a result, the tactics of teaching guitar (get them playing fast, so they enjoy it and keep coming back) are somewhat at odds with the long term strategy (develop sound fundamentals so they can go as far as they can). Other instruments have done a much better job at thinking through these issues and developing a "best practices" consensus. With the guitar, we're still hewing the path.

RE: music as a language, and the learning of same:

Here is an excerpt from a book that Victor Wooten wrote a couple of years ago. The book is written as a novel, but explores the journey of learning to be a musician, rather than just an {insert instrument here} player.

I heard him speaking about this topic at a clinic in Toronto just after the book came out, and what he said made a lot of sense to me. I just wish I could apply it to myself (or more properly, find a way to motivate myself to apply it).

RE: music as a language, and the learning of same:

Here is an excerpt from a book that Victor Wooten wrote a couple of years ago.

Thank you so much for posting that link. Great story. :)

Yesterday must have been a good day for coincidences.

Firstly, I had just bought one of Harry Manx's CDs (we both like him, but my wife in particular is a big fan) and I was listening to it for the first time. Vicki wasn't home yet, and I'd spent some time earlier staring at the guitar neck thinking about how the way a guitar is designed and tuned affects the patterns in which the notes are laid out. (I've only played chords and rhythm up to now and I'm about to start having a go at learning to solo). Rather than jump straight into learning ‘boxes' and ‘forms' from the various charts and diagrams that are so poorly explained in the books that I've bought, I thought I'd try and get a feel for what the original designers had in mind.

Anyway, I'm a firm believer in - as Wooten put it - getting into the ‘groove' of the music first . One might say: learn to measure the flour out before you start trying to ice the cake. So I picked up a guitar and started tapping my foot and plucking a few notes in time with the song. Exactly as in the example you linked to, I had no idea what key the song was in (and no clue how to work it out either...) so I just concentrated on the beat and let my finger jump around on a very simple pattern. I didn't expect to find much out except the beat of the song, but it only took a few seconds before the odd note started to line up here and there, and by keeping it simple, and dropping the ones that didn't seem to be fitting, and continuing to experiment with the ones that did, I found a simple pattern of notes that seemed to be working almost all the time. Most enjoyable.

It did occur to me that if I remembered the pattern and also kept my finger in place at the end of the song I should be able to work out what key I'd been playing in, but I got lost in the pleasure of the experiment. By the end it didn't seem that important to know that particular answer right then anyway. Instead, it felt like I had learned something very useful - not about a box or key, but about a method of learning that I had found extremely appealing. So I'll be going back to try that again for sure. :) :note1: :note1: :note1:

Cheers,

Chris

The second coincidence was dropping in at a friend's house to retrieve an umbrella Vicki had left there.

One of the daughters was home (babysitting her niece). Molly was a good music student at school. She learned piano, clarinet and saxophone, and had been good enough to play clarinet and sax in the school band. She'd even been on tour with the band (playing tenor sax) when they did a tour to parts of our State's north. But she left school a couple of years ago, went to Uni etc and I hadn't seen her on her own for quite some time. I asked how her playing was going. The answer, which was sad but unsurprising, was that she didn't play any of them any more. In a couple of years (actually probably a couple of months or even weeks) another promising musical journey, on 3 different instruments, had simply withered.

But there was some good news too. She's just started playing music again - on bass guitar. But why bass guitar? Because somebody wants to talk to her... on bass.... Her brother in law is currently trying to revive his own musical life and has got together to play with a mate (and his young son is also learning violin). They needed a bass player and invited Molly to fill the spot, despite the fact that she'd never touched a bass.

Now, this guy is pretty good on guitar. He was Conservatorium trained and for a while professionally played in a duo using the sort of repertoire you'd expect to hear from John Williams and Julian Bream. They were Good with a capital G. But there just wasn't enough work to sustain them locally. If they'd gone overseas to find better markets the competition would have been ramped up by an even bigger factor than the opportunities. Plus, they didn't want to shift. So they split up and stopped. Several years later, he's now driving an ambulance for a living. His potential career as a professional musician went out of the window. The sad thing is that a substantial chunk of who he thought he was, and what he thought he was about, went right through the window along with it.... :(

But he has also started to find somebody to talk to musically again. For the last couple of years he puts on a family concert of Carols by Candlelight. He and three or four others play and about a hundred of us sit around in a natural amphitheatre in the orchard and eat, drink, and sing our socks off. It's a wonderful way to enjoy music. But that's only one day a year - still a long way to go between chats. So he's gradually started playing with others, in a more modern and electrified style. He tells me that Molly is rocketing along on bass. Why wouldn't she?... They've all got somebody to talk to again.
:mrgreen:

Cheers,

Chris

Hey all!
Well we've had a great turn out for our study! Thanks to everyone who has taken part! We've gotten such a great amount that we're going to be closing down the survey earlier than expect (July 8th). We could however use at least another 25 to bring our sample up to an even 300!! As for our secondary survey with open ended questions for those who felt the first version was too restrictive in its response options, I've sent our application off to the ethics committee for approval and should be hearing back from them within a week and will immediately make the survey available to you all (only for those who have not already participated in the original format survey). Stay posted for the details and links to the new survey. And again, thank you all very much we should have a complete analysis finish by summer's end and we will make the results available to whomever is interested