That’s right, I said it. It’s a squiggle. Not a curve and definitely not any sort of linear progression. In over 35 years of playing guitar and nearly 30 years of teaching it, I’ve experienced the “squiggle” from both sides of the music stand.
As a newly minted “guitarist”, I had a bit of a head start on my peers since I had played trumpet and some other low brass instruments in the high school band. My step-mom was also a semi-professional trumpet player for a while in the 1950’s and my step-siblings also played music, so I had an environmental advantage as well. I rode that advantage into the ground but at a certain point (when I was in college for my first music degree actually) I hit the end of my rope and actually had to start dealing with the fact that progress is hard. I went from feeling pretty good about myself as a musician to thinking that I probably wasn’t ever going to become a proficient enough player to make a living. I worked my way through that but self-doubt can be hard to get past and it derails a lot of potentially great artists.
I tell my students that I have read that roughly three weeks worth of daily repetition is necessary to make a newly learned task into a “habit”. I can’t remember where I read it but it sounds good, and it actually seems to be a decent yardstick for planning out a students’ lesson program. If I can work on something consistently and mindfully for 3-4 weeks it will usually become internalized well enough that my performance can incorporate the new concept or “chop” musically. Sometimes it takes longer though. A LOT longer. And sometimes I get things pretty quickly. We can go down the rabbit hole of examining all of the different reasons why this could happen (and I have) but at the core of it all it comes down with the fact that I need to be both persistent and patient. It eventually happens, but usually not on my schedule.
I just used two “P-words” in one sentence. I am merely OK at the first and horrible at the second. But I have personally been through the process enough times that I am able to grit my teeth and get to work. For my students of all ages getting through this process the first few times can seem impossible. Definitely not fun. Much of my time as a guitar instructor (especially with adult students, who currently make up the bulk of my teaching business) is spent as much on being a therapist as it is a music teacher. If I can manage frustrations and expectations then I can definitely guide the student through the actual lesson. And any human that has ever pursued an instrument or sport or any other endeavor worth spending your life on that requires physical and mental coordination has experienced periods of great and rapid growth as well as the virtual famines of the soul that long periods of “non-progression” create.
As a person who teaches for a living, I am pretty patient with my students. I understand how this works. As a person who has returned to music school after playing at a fairly high level for three decades, I find myself making the same pitiful sounds that I hear from my own students in the lessons that I am gratefully required to take for my new music degree. Real progress is uncomfortable and never as quick as you want it to be. For all of the advice that I have given students over the years, I am hearing the same stuff from my own professor every week. It is hard to deal with, but the hardest is the idea that I am back to fumbling along like I did when I was 19 years old. My experience and drive to succeed (and hopefully “exceed”) are keeping my progress moving along at a rate that seems to make the university faculty happy but every time I play a bad solo or screw up sightreading something that the 20-year-old trumpet player next to me plays effortlessly it’s like a knife through my heart. And honestly, it should not be. And that is what I tell my own students. As long as you work hard consistently, you will move forward. I can guarantee that it won’t be as fast or as far as you want, but it will happen. It just sucks to not move at the pace your expectations and ego set for you.
Time is an important factor to unpack here as well. I grew up with this image of great musicians living like monks, practicing their instruments in isolation 8-10 hours a day. I’m not sure about you, but my focused concentration is good for about 30-40 minutes. Even 2 hours straight would be wasted for me. But if I find chunks of time throughout my day I can actually make pretty good progress on whatever material I am working on. And my day is set up where I can find 3-4 chunks like that. I am 48 years old with a wife, two children under the age of 14 and a mortgage to pay as well as being a full-time music student. The days where I might have even considered practicing 4-6 hours a day are long gone but in trying to keep up with school, gigs, and teaching I’ve discovered a schedule that works for me. And in trying to “ride the learning squiggle” you need to figure out what works for you personally. We all have different obligations and time constraints so in the effort to manage the “persistence and patience” problem you have to not only figure out what is practical for you to expect in terms of available practice time but also to accept the reality that your rate of progress will be whatever it will be. It goes somewhat faster the more time you put in, but a smaller amount of time each day consistently throughout the week is more effective than 4 hours just on Sunday before your lesson.
The pictures strewn throughout this post are just pics that I would post on Instagram over the last year or so when I would need a break from practicing. The point of these pictures are to show that (in order) I end up practicing in practice rooms at school, on Saturday night when I didn’t have a gig (hence the adult beverage), in the hallway between classes at school, between my own students in my home studio and in the band room at school before a class. Life for pretty much any modern human is so complicated and jammed full to bursting that you need to not only figure out how and when you can make time for the things that are important to you (and I hope that means playing music) but also in how to adjust your expectations to your reality in terms how fast you will progress and how that relates to your overall progression towards your goals. Always strive to be better but do not let the process wear you down to the point of failure. You WILL improve. And I discovered long ago that whenever I conquer a goal there will be another one right behind it to start the process all over again. And that is one of the things I love about all this mayhem. If you truly enjoy it, it never ends.
