I am really enjoying your guitar theory book. I have been playing for many years and your book is really helping to fill in the missing pieces. My question is, how long should a person reasonably spend on each lesson before moving on? For example I am studying the intervals and it appears that i should memorize the locations on the neck before moving on. I know everyone learns differently, but just an on average how much time should i spend on it? Maybe I can just work it into a daily routine and keep moving through the book.
Difficult to answer, like you say everyone is different, but more importantly everyone has different goals.
My personal approach to ‘general’ learning is simple – have I learnt something today that I didn’t know yesterday (no matter how small) … and that’s pretty much it. All those small things add up and grow exponentially because the more you know, the more everything else makes sense quicker and more easily – it’s accumulative.
Let’s talk about intervals for example. How useful are they to you? Knowing what they are and understanding them might be all you need to know. If all you do is strum chords to your favourite songs then you don’t really need to know them at all. If you are trying to improve your chord knowledge and chord tone soloing then they become a lot more important, as does being able to find them quickly on the fretboard. If your thing is jazz then the more you have practised them the better. If your thing is blues then just knowing the minor / major thirds and sevenths will be ‘mostly’ enough.
Everything you learn has to be retained. What you learn and don’t use often will get forgotten to an extent. With that in mind I wouldn’t spend too much time concentrating purely on one thing at a time only – I think it’s best to learn and work on a variation of things and just think about them all when you are practising. Slowly building your knowledge with a lot of variation is my preferred method because many things will overlap.
When I wrote the theory book, even though I know all of that stuff, it wasn’t all from purely memorised information. I spent a lot of time revising and double checking a lot of the information – if you don’t use it you lose it. The main difference is that I’d already spent years learning theory and unravelling all the contradiction and confusion so anything that I needed to revise was quick and easy to confirm – but I still needed to do it.
I think we can say the same thing about playing guitar. Things I used to practise a lot are still there but might require some thinking because I no longer use them. The overall knowledge however makes it easy to figure things out when I might need them, it’s just not everything is instant.
I guess what I’m saying is choose things that you think will be useful to you, spend ten minutes on it, or an hour or whatever and then move onto something else. The next day do the same. I find this the best way to learn and retain information. For an analogy it would be something like climbing the stairs. The first day go up one step. The next day go to the second step, day three back to the first and second, day four up to the third, next day back one, up two and so on. This way you are always improving while also refreshing what you learned previously. By the time you are halfway up, all the previous steps has made everything ‘new’ easier to digest and make sense of – so the overall learning progress is quicker.
Above all, my main motto is simple and I apply it to everything I learn, not just music. “Do I know something today that I didn’t know yesterday”. If yes, I’m doing well.
