The Power of Slow Learning

In this food for thought lesson, we'll talk about why it's important to slow down your guitar journey and why that will make you a much better guitar player.

In this information-rich world that we live in, many of us feel like we can and should learn a lot the whole time. Everything goes by so fast; there is so much to learn! But we forget most of what we learn. Some studies suggest that we lose as much as 90% of it!

How to fix that? By slowing down!

Practice Makes Permanent

I'm hoping you heard me say Practice Makes Permanent before. It sure doesn't make Perfect like the old saying our parents told us! There's even a famous quote often attributed to Einstein that defines it beautifully, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

So if you want to make what you practice go into your memory and muscles permanently… you need to get it right! And you'll do that by slowing down!

The mantra I would encourage you to remember is:

Practice Makes Permanent
So Practice Perfectly
And Perfectly Starts Slowly

Code It Carefully Once

If you've ever written any code, you know it's far easier to take your time and get the code right the first time than to spend hours debugging it and looking for some dumb syntax mistake!

When you're learning a new thing on the guitar, you are writing very complex code - imagine how many lines of code would be required to get a robotic arm to play and change between chords! Take a minute and think about it.

Once you write the code correctly, it's relatively easy to speed up the reading of the code. For things like learning scales and licks, it's the same! You should always learn things very slowly.

Once you can slowly play them 20 times from memory without a mistake, you'll usually find that mistakes are very uncommon as you speed up. And if you do make one, it would usually be caused by a technical deficiency!

Overwriting A Mistake

Unfortunately, all humans make mistakes, and when we do, it's important to know how to get over them.

It's obviously far better not to make them in the first place, but if you make a mistake when learning something, it's better to stop than keep going. Tell yourself it was a mistake, then start again and get it right. I'm not sure anyone knows why that is so much more effective for learning yet, but it certainly is from my own experience and that of many students over the years.

💡 My guestimation is that it takes 20 correct play-throughs to overwrite a mistake. So try not to make any!

I had a teacher in high school who wrote a scale diagram out wrongly. Even if I knew it didn't sound quite right, I practiced it. And I STILL make that mistake sometimes. After more than 30 years of playing it right, if I ever make a mistake in Pattern 5 of the Major Scale, it's the B string - my 3rd finger goes down instead of the 2nd. Dammit! ;)

Retain More.

But this is not just about getting it right! It's also about how much you retain. Most of us feel the 'hurry' in life to learn things, but if you're not going to retain and be able to use the information - what is the point? Why would you waste hours of your life learning something you will have forgotten in a few weeks or months?

When we learn slower, the retention rate goes up massively. Over the long term, slow learners retain much more information than fast learners.

In his excellent book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (pron. Car-nay-man) says, "Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed."

Let's put that into a musical context of musical intelligence. Licks, scales, chords, and anything else are no use to anyone unless they're in your head and ready to use, right I don't remember seeing Clapton on stage with a lick book. :) You gotta get that stuff in your memory, and slow learning will help!

It's also incredibly frustrating to spend hours doing something and then forget it! It makes us feel like we're wasting our time and that maybe guitar 'isn't for us' when it's much more likely we are learning it wrong!

Chunk It!

Also important is trying not to learn too much too soon. It's much better to learn a small new idea and be able to use it to make music than some super long complex thing that you'll likely never use!

If you want to learn some long and complex piece, such as Coltrane's Giant Steps solo, break it down into manageable chunks and work on each bit individually. For example:

Figure out how to play each 4 or 8 note lick;
Figure out a solid fingering;
Understand how it works harmonically.

When learning a more complex song, take the time to understand what it's played over, how you might use it in your improvisation, and anything else relevant. If you got all the chunks good, putting them together won't be too difficult, and you will have learned a load of useful and interesting things, not just one big long show-off solo!

Timers, Revisiting and Explaining

Three points related to this slow learning and retention are using timers to practice, revisiting material over longer periods, and explaining what you learn. Let's talk about each one of them!

#1 - Using Timers

Using timers to practice is very helpful for focus. Keeping focussed will help stop you from making mistakes, but it can make us feel rushed, so try to stay cool, relaxed, and unhurried when you're learning. And make sure you take a short break after a practice burst to clear your mind and help retain what you just learned.

#2 - Revisit Old Materials!

Revisiting material over weeks and months will also help you remember it and shift it from your brain's RAM (short-term memory) to its hard drive (long-term memory). That is The Spacing Effect, and we'll talk more about that another time!

But don't learn something once! Schedule a reminder and learn it again in a couple of weeks and you'll be amazed and how much you then retain. It's quite incredible! Remember that an hour a day for 10 days is almost always more effective than one 10-hour cramming session.

#3 - Explain The Things You Learn

Explaining what you learn is also incredibly valuable. Teaching someone else what you learn is a great way of doing it and finding gaps in your own knowledge that you might need to fill. But I also write myself essays on new things I learn (which I'm unlikely ever to publish) just to make sure that I understand it properly.

Writing it down is like slow thinking too, making sure I write things clearly and concisely really helps get things clear in my mind. I'm doing it here. I do it with many Stoic Philosophy ideas that resonate with me and with new techniques I learn in BJJ. If I can explain it clearly, I can be confident I know it well.

Summary

To conclude and make sure you understand what you can practically do to learn faster and retain more:

When learning something new, learn it so slowly that you make NO mistakes!
Only when you can play something 10 times without a mistake should you start to speed it up.
Learn one thing well and use it musically before moving on. Don't be in a hurry to move on to something new.
Use a timer when practicing (max 30-minute bursts).
Revisit things you want to remember (everything!?) a week later, a month later, and then 6 months later!
Write a lesson (or essay) on everything you learn, even if you won't share or teach it!

Hope this helps you make the most of your precious time, and also that you stick around with this course. Next, we'll get started with Altered Tunings!