Practise strategies

Get the most from your practise time
  • Make sure your instrument is set up properly, practise time on an unplayable instrument is wasted time.
  • Know that it’s up to you. Your playing is not improved by lessons, it is improved by practising in between them.
  • Schedule your practising – assign twenty minutes a day rather than ‘When you feel like it’.
  • Layer your practise – separate your tone and timing rather than trying to nail both at the same time – it’s not realistically achievable.
  • Always practise to a rhythm. When practising scales count through them evenly, when you are practising a chord change do so within a count of four to encourage rhythmic rigour. Rather than speeding up the count add more strokes of each chord to reduce the time available for the chord changes in increments.
  • Avoid speed. Trying to play fast before you can play accurately will truncate your learning. Accuracy makes speed achievable, not vice versa.
  • Practise the passages which need practising. It is pointless to practise a whole piece of music if the same four bar section is consistently giving you trouble.
  • Take notes of points you are consistently struggling with and discuss these with your tutor.
  • Set yourself goals. Focus on a piece to improve the standard within a set timeframe if you can.
  • Keep it varied. Don’t keep going around the same few pieces. Even if you don’t get bored your brain will and you will stop improving.
  • Keep it interesting. If you are getting bored with your set pieces tell your tutor and seek alternative pieces. Play music you love.

‘Magic’ guitar mastery methods

Guitar gurus everywhere

Beware the guitar gurus

Social media has noticed I’m a musician. It’s also noticed that I teach. So – as a thank you for my services – social media bombards me daily with dozens of posts advertising the latest guitar method which lets you ditch all that fiddly stuff like theory, scales and practise. I’m sure it’s out there for other instruments as well but for now guitar seems to pretty much have the monopoly on this particular brand of snake oil. They all have one thing in common – an underlying monetisation system that looks after the ‘teachers’ interests, not the students. Some of these people make frankly staggering amounts of money and a little cross referencing reveals a less than satisfactory track record.

Think outside the herd

Don’t be a sheep

Are you thinking about online courses? Are you seeing a lot of adverts for courses promising that you don’t need music theory or scales? That you are practising in the wrong way or too much? Are the people selling these courses telling you what utterly brilliant professional musicians with decades of experience? Are you seeing lots of comments from apparently random individuals agreeing that the course in question is utterly brilliant and the best money they have ever spent?

Wake up, sheeple. There is no way to properly know your instrument without theory and scales. Yes, they can be boring, but suck it up. You need this stuff. Structured practise is important, but are you taking advice about your personal learning journey from someone who has never had a conversation with you? Really? Do you think the ‘members of the public’ raving about the utter brilliance of this course or that might be plants or worse still paid to lie to you? Hadn’t occurred to you? Oh dear, you’re about to waste a lot of money.

Why am I teaching?

Why? Good question.

The most important question almost no student ever asks their teacher is why are you teaching. Because you’re passionate about your subject? Because you want others to experience what music has given you? Because you want to part gullible people from their hard earned cash?

I actually kinda fell into teaching by accident. I was running my own building firm and had been screwed so badly by so many people that financial ruin was around the corner and I needed an alternative. So I took employment as music tech at the local school as part of which I became a peripatetic guitar teacher. I eventually ditched the peri work and went freelance to teach people multiple instruments. I’ve always been very mindful of giving people good value for money and have never priced myself at the top of the local market.

I developed a way of teaching which is predicated on sitting in a room and playing together, so online lessons were out of the question for me. I did give these closer consideration while we were under lockdown thanks to covid but moved away from the idea. I also teach without a set curriculum. As a one to one teacher I have the luxury of treating my students as individuals and this is central to my teaching -I identify individual strengths and weaknesses and plot out lessons accordingly. It works. Not everyone I teach turns into a virtuoso, but everyone makes personal progress. A few students a year get very, very good and these are the ones who keep me going, the others can be a lot more effort.

Making impossible promises

What I do not do is make promises I can’t keep. I don’t tell my students I have the method that will turn them into a blinding musician. That part is in their own hands. I don’t try to appeal to peoples laziness by promising they don’t need theory, scales, practise or any of the other boring shite involved in actually learning an instrument properly.

If you wan to learn an instrument it will take effort. The more effort you put in the better you will get. There is no magic method to sidestep this. There is also no magic method that sidesteps knowing a bit of theory and technique. You need that stuff.

What is even worse about a lot of these online ‘tutors’ is that they will appeal to your laziness by telling you their method involves no theory and no scales. They will then present you with a package that has simply taken that theory and those scales and called them something else. The have rebranded? Why would they do that? Because they want your money and are less interested in whether you will actually benefit from the transaction. They are lying to you to get you to part with your money.

One to one tuition forms relationships

Probably the most important aspect of tuition is the relationship formed between the tutor and the student. Over the months and years the relationship which is formed is central to the process. Individual needs and wants are identified from musical preferences to learning needs the list of benefits is long. As a teacher I can identify the individual strengths and weaknesses of my students, I can learn to interact with their personalities, nurture their learning journey and produce lesson materials and scores to cater for their particular wants and needs. It is much harder to achieve this with online courses, and I would argue it is impossible to achieve these things with a set curriculum fated out by someone who has just worked out how to make as many people part with as much money as possible. If they are telling you otherwise they are lying to you, it’s that simple.

Make your own way

I’m not here to tell you online tuition is a waste of time. Plenty of people get good results on Youtube and personal tutors are not the only way. But beware of people making impossible promises, question their motives and know that, ultimately, how good you get is in your own hands, not theirs.

Who needs Music Theory anyway

Some background

Me learning my craft at a local session many, many years ago

I cut my musical teeth on the folk session scene. Everything I learned to play – guitar, mandolin, songs, reels, etc I learned by ear and this was the basis of everything I understood about harmonic theory – chords and melodies, and rhythmic theory – time signatures and such. I certainly could not understand scores and sheet music.

After over 20 years of playing I found myself as music tech at the local secondary school. Among the dizzying array of things expected from me for surprisingly little pay was the production of scores for student performances and classes, so I learned the basics of theory and scores on the coal face, producing scores on Sibelius software. It was a great introduction to theory – Sibelius being rather traditionalist does not allow you to set things out which are incorrect.

This job led me on to private tuition and the production of scores and lesson materials for my own purposes. I did, of course, need to get a proper handle on theory as I was the one now teaching the stuff.

Scores vs Ears

Learning by ear? Good luck.

So which is better – the organic oral tradition approach of learning everything by ear or classical rigour and sight reading. Well – neither. Both have their own advantages.

Playing by ear is a skill not to be underestimated. It allows me to decipher and learn (within reason) almost any piece of music in minutes. It allows me to hear patterns in melodies and chord structures and immediately know what is going on. Classically trained players are often amazed and mystified by what seems like a magical ability to someone who has been brought up to sight read and respond to the dots on the page.

But playing by ear has limits. The way we hear music is largely subjective. the result of this is that we hear certain highlights and underlying structures and immediately make assumptions about what we are hearing. It’s a natural and inescapable part of how we break down and process music we are learning by ear. Where this falls over is when a piece of music subtly changes time signatures or starts using less easily decipherable chords. Once things reach a certain level of complexity having an understanding of theory and what a score is telling you becomes indispensable.

On balance, I would say that I am now equally reliant on both as a musician.

Music Theory will stifle your creativity, man

Don’t break my flow, man

I’m not in the least bit embarrassed to admit I used to believe this, but it is fundamentally not true. Like having an understanding of science when looking at the world around you music theory gives you a framework which unlocks the finer complexities which you might otherwise miss. I can say from experience that learning music theory has been liberating and has done nothing but expand my abilities for writing music. A musician without music theory will always be limited. I learned this the hard way and I now understand that I would have learned music a great deal quicker had I not been restricted to oral tradition.

Music theory cannot describe everything

Describe everything you say?

Very true. The music theory we learn in Europe and America is very much based on the musical styles of 18th and 19th century European musicians and composers, so it is a very Eurocentric view of music. There is a tendency to use music theory to analyse and critique music in order to make value judgments about it which is verging on racism and white supremacy but the truth is that western music theory as it should correctly be called begins to break down as soon as you look at musical styles in the middle east, the Indian subcontinent, Africa and east Asia and the ancient music styles of aboriginals and native Americans as it is not able to properly describe the pitch and rhythm elements of these styles of music. Western music theory also struggles to describe rap and electronic music fully. It is important to not fall into the trap of making value judgments based on this. Western music theory’s ability to describe a piece of music is not the same as assessing its worth.

But this in no way invalidates the value of western music theory when growing up among western music. And if you grow up in Indian or Japanese music it is of course more useful to understand the theory underlying their respective classical music styles which divide pitch and rhythm quite differently to the west.

How much theory do I need?

How much?

I would be the first to argue that you do not need all of it. There is a limit to the usefulness of understanding baroque chord sequences and melodic counterpoints and the rules governing composition of a sonata when you are playing and writing songs with an acoustic guitar. But a basic understanding of time signatures, key signatures, scale degrees and chord theory is absolutely essential.

It is not that hard to understand how western theory divides rhythms and to understand the differences between 4/4, 3/4, 6/8 and 9/8. My students understand these principles within a few weeks of starting lessons with me. It’s not that complicated to understand the basic musical scales, scale degrees and how the major scale defines harmonic theory. It is also not that hard to extrapolate this and understand chord theory and how to build chords from scratch without needing to refer to a chord book.

It was exactly these fundamentals which I lacked in my early musical days. I could play a 4/4 or 9/8 rhythm but I cannot honestly say that I understood either. I knew what chords I could play in a given key to the point of coming up with 12 chord sequences, but I did not understand why. I could solo in various keys and had a feel for harmonising melody with chords but did not in fact understand how any of it worked so I was hobbled, limited by my restrictive understanding and these are the knowledge gaps which not form the cornerstones of what I teach my students because I want to make their musical journey easier than mine.

Unexpected benefits

Win-win

The benefits of being able to count a rhythm and decipher a chord structure are fairly obvious, but there are some less obvious benefits to a little theory knowledge.

I am a multi instrumentalist. Before learning any theory I taught myself to play guitar, mandolin, fiddle, bodhran, whistles and vocals. I was writing on all of these instruments but thanks to my ignorance of theory, I was doing it the hard way. Since learning theory I have also picked up piano, bass, bouzouki and 5 string banjo and it has been a much easier ride. Having an understanding of theory on your instrument gives you a transferable body of knowledge which you can use to decipher any instrument which adheres to western theory principles, making it much easier to learn.

I am massively into world music and do not slavishly adhere to western music. This has exposed me to some crazy time signatures and rhythms as well as chord work which I could never have deciphered without applying some theory to it and committing it to score. It has enabled me to learn pieces like the Stairway to Heaven solo which is a little beyond ear playing for most mortals. It has allowed me to produce transcriptions to set Moonlight Sonata to guitar and Brahms’ Hungarian dances to mandolin.

It’s just a language

Languages are for communication

The best way to see music theory then is not as a set of absolutist rules and value judgments but as a descriptive language which allows you to decipher the finer points of the music you play and hear and it gives you a vocabulary with which to communicate with other musicians. It is as important to understand its geographical and stylistic limitations as its ability to describe, decipher and communicate.

Whether you don’t think you need music theory or believe it is all that matters you are equally deluded and you are limiting yourself. Oral tradition and scores matter equally and are equally important elements to becoming a whole musician.


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