Day 3- The Learning Process

Learning to play guitar as quickly as I did involved quite a bit of self teaching. This is because the class at my high school was taught in an ensemble format, meaning that the twenty or so students in the class were taught to play in tandem, almost like a guitar orchestra. This limited the amount of quality learning I could do for two different reasons. The first is that this capped the amount of one-on-one instruction I could get, as the teacher had 20 different students to attend to in one hour. Even the most advanced students could only hope for around five hours of one-on-one instruction per semester. The second is that the nature of ensembles is such that everyone must play at around the same level, which was relatively rudimentary given that it was an open enrollment course at a public school.

While being self taught allows for one to learn quickly and  with extreme freedom, the presence of an instructor prevents you from developing weird learning habits. For example, classical music, the genre most commonly taught in college music schools, traditionally involves the use of sheet music in instruction. When teaching my self, I never even glanced at sheet music, and    instead relied on instructional videos and  guitar tabs. Consequentially, I am pretty bad at reading music. This has been the most intense learning curve in my transition from being a casual high school competition player to an actual music student.

The advantage of sheet music is that it allows you to observe both the rhythm and pitch of the music. The pitch is displayed vertically on the sheet with deep notes going lower on the page while higher ones go more toward the top, and the rhythm is displayed horizontally with different shaped notes signifying different durations. Essentially, one could learn everything they need to know about the piece just by looking at the sheet music. Prior to enrolling in college, I would do my best to avoid the use of sheet music at all costs, relying instead on simultaneously listening to a recording of the music while reading tabs, which signify the pitch but not the rhythm. This made my learning process generally arduous and  overcomplicated, deterring me from developing my repertoire as much as I probably should have.

There is no doubt in my mind that I would not have made the music program here had the instructor known the extent to which I could not read music. It took him around one month of lessons to figure it out though, because he would assign music to me and I would learn it very quickly. What he did not know was that I learned the first song that he assigned me solely by watching videos of people play it. Having figured it out by seeing how long it took me to locate a certain phrase within the sheet, he now has made it my mission to “eat my vegetables” as he says and  finally figure out how to do something that any degree seeking musician must have down to a science.

Above- Slightly different versions of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in Sheet and   Tab.