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Old 12-14-2016, 08:45 AM
WonderMonkey WonderMonkey is offline
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Default Should I stay or should I go now? When to move forward on lessons

In my flatpicking learning group thread we were discussing (included below) when it's time to move on to other exercises or to stay and keep learning what the current lesson is.

Qualifier: Assume that either a person is a beginner or near beginner and the things that are being learned are new to them.

In this book we are learning flatpicking and the exercises are teaching alternating bass and walkups. It's important to have this down before continuing because most other things derive from it.

So... one approach is that you keep working until you can fumble through it and assume that as you go through the rest of the book you are going to improve because 1) You will come back and repeat the exercises as part of warmups <or> 2) It will naturally occur as you go through the other lessons.

Basically how do you know when to forge ahead or when to stay and keep working?

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Originally Posted by WonderMonkey View Post
I'm still on exercise 9, working on the walkups. I'm not sure how "good" I'm supposed to get at the exercise before I move on. I've been thinking that I should move on to exercise 10 and a few others because they are related but then keep coming back to them to keep incrementally improving. One thing I don't want to do is to rush ahead and then find myself unable to even minimally accomplish the lesson because I didn't put in the (fun) work now.
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Originally Posted by Clallam View Post
That's a question I've asked myself too and I'm going to be interested in the answers you get. It sounds like you are starting at a much higher skill level than I am at so you don't have as far to go to get to where you can safely move on.

I think the critical thing for me is going to be getting the right hand automatic enough that I can focus my attention on what my left hand is doing.

I'm spending several minutes working on exercises 1 through 6 every night. I'm working with a metronome on the first five exercises since I have learned that I need both a certain number of repetitions and a certain minimum speed before I can do anything automatically. I still can't play exercise 6 with a metronome without crashing so I foresee a lot more work ahead of me there. My intention is to do those six exercises until I can do them automatically at the speed I would need them at in order to play songs at the correct speed for the song.

I've looked through the rest of Volumes 1 and 2 and think that is the foundation I will need to make the rest easier. Certainly, not having that foundation has made trying to move on to the next exercises difficult. I started to work with exercises 7-9 but I found it rough going. I'm not going to do much more while I get the foundation of the earlier exercises solid.
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Old 12-14-2016, 10:35 AM
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The question "when do I move on?" is one I struggle with constantly. Few of the books or DVD's I use offer enough guidance in this area.

Am I able to strum 8th/16th notes fast enough to move on? Does my strumming sound "musical" enough? How fast do I need to be able to fingerpick these patterns? Are these chord changes smooth enough? Buzz free enough? Mistake free enough?

I had all these questions going through Justin's beginner course, have them with the Travis Picking book I'm currently working on, and expect them with the Flatpicking Essentials 1 & 2 I ordered a few weeks ago. (Just got shipping confirmation as I am writing this)

I'd love to find a good, convenient and cost-effective solution to this.
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Old 12-14-2016, 10:44 AM
reeve21 reeve21 is offline
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The correct answer for me is both.

It's not like a textbook based class in school.

I'm constantly going forward and backwards in both of my current courses (the flatpicking book you are in and a Travis picking into book).

The early stuff is fundamentals, they need to be constantly reinforced. The later stuff can be attempted even prior to mastery of the earlier material, for it is never truly mastered except by constant repetition.

Think of athletics. Basketball players practice lay up drills their entire careers, even though the shot is no longer difficult for them. Pro golfers almost never miss 2 foot putts, because they practice them. Hackers seldom do, they take gimmes, and often miss when required to make one.
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Old 12-14-2016, 12:24 PM
WonderMonkey WonderMonkey is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Pine View Post
The question "when do I move on?" is one I struggle with constantly. Few of the books or DVD's I use offer enough guidance in this area.

Am I able to strum 8th/16th notes fast enough to move on? Does my strumming sound "musical" enough? How fast do I need to be able to fingerpick these patterns? Are these chord changes smooth enough? Buzz free enough? Mistake free enough?

I had all these questions going through Justin's beginner course, have them with the Travis Picking book I'm currently working on, and expect them with the Flatpicking Essentials 1 & 2 I ordered a few weeks ago. (Just got shipping confirmation as I am writing this)

I'd love to find a good, convenient and cost-effective solution to this.
The book offers a bit of guidance in that is says something like "Keep working until you can smoothly etc etc" and I can do that when the BPM is slow. They also have a recording of each lesson in both slow and faster speed. Possibly for this book the answer is when I can play along with the faster speed.

That's going to take a while!
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Old 12-14-2016, 12:31 PM
WonderMonkey WonderMonkey is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by reeve21 View Post
The early stuff is fundamentals, they need to be constantly reinforced. The later stuff can be attempted even prior to mastery of the earlier material, for it is never truly mastered except by constant repetition.
Great answer. I think that makes the difference between someone who wants to and can actually play versus someone who hacks through the songs.

This stretch of foundational material.... when I get to the end of it I think I'm going to use it to create an exercise that I do x amount of times per week, and initially each day. Heck maybe always everyday depending on how well I actually master it.
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Old 12-14-2016, 01:18 PM
raggedymike raggedymike is offline
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The epiphany that came to me after playing guitar (poorly) for 40 years was that I needed to practice everything correctly and if you can't do it correctly, you need to slow it down. Do not practice your mistakes.

(BTW the epiphany was to finally listen to the many folks who said that, not that it came to me in a dream. It was said to me many times during that forty years, I just did not listen. I'm kinda slow that way.)

This does not mean that you need to work on just one thing until you get it perfect. Just don't build on a skill you don't yet have. Make recordings and listen to them critically.
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Old 12-14-2016, 01:34 PM
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Originally Posted by raggedymike View Post
Just don't build on a skill you don't yet have. Make recordings and listen to them critically.
Thanks. The line above says a whole bunch.
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Old 12-14-2016, 05:29 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WonderMonkey View Post
Possibly for this book the answer is when I can play along with the faster speed.

That's going to take a while!
That's the answer.

Play along with the slow version and memorize the exercise. Do speed bursts and slowly work it up to full speed. Do not sacrifice accuracy for speed, if you do you aren't playing it faster, you're just playing it poorly.

Speed comes with time put in, even going slowly. For some reason when I work on something new that is beyond my speed, after a while of working at it, it actually sort of gets slowed down by my mental processing and what seemed blazingly fast doesn't seem so fast anymore as my playing speed catches up. Then I start hearing little nuances that I can also do now that the speed is where it should be.
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Old 12-14-2016, 09:19 PM
WonderMonkey WonderMonkey is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TBman View Post
That's the answer.

Play along with the slow version and memorize the exercise. Do speed bursts and slowly work it up to full speed. Do not sacrifice accuracy for speed, if you do you aren't playing it faster, you're just playing it poorly.

Speed comes with time put in, even going slowly. For some reason when I work on something new that is beyond my speed, after a while of working at it, it actually sort of gets slowed down by my mental processing and what seemed blazingly fast doesn't seem so fast anymore as my playing speed catches up. Then I start hearing little nuances that I can also do now that the speed is where it should be.
Thanks for the input. I am getting better and better at the exercises even with the time I've been able to devote to it (Christmas program). I don't have to think quite as much and if I look at my hands I can do a "not horrible" job at playing a bit faster. I'm resisting looking.

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That's a Mel Bay joke that I just made up.
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Old 12-15-2016, 02:20 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by raggedymike View Post
The epiphany that came to me after playing guitar (poorly) for 40 years was that I needed to practice everything correctly and if you can't do it correctly, you need to slow it down. Do not practice your mistakes.

(BTW the epiphany was to finally listen to the many folks who said that, not that it came to me in a dream. It was said to me many times during that forty years, I just did not listen. I'm kinda slow that way.)

This does not mean that you need to work on just one thing until you get it perfect. Just don't build on a skill you don't yet have. Make recordings and listen to them critically.
This, this, THIS! I've done the same thing, over many years. The answer is very simple. Whatever it is, first learn it, then practice it slow enough to play it correctly AND rhythmically (for most stuff we all want to play, if it's not rhythmic, it's not music). Then speed it up as your chops allow. Amen to "Do not practice mistakes"!
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Old 12-16-2016, 11:10 PM
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Another tip is when you have the mechanics worked out and you are playing a piece at a decent tempo, record yourself and see how it sounds. If it sounds musical and appealing to you the listener, you are probably ready to move on.
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