This is the FAQ from my Etc Kid Learns Stuff channel where I stream guitar practice…
Why are you streaming yourself practicing?
Three reasons…
(1) I’m hoping it’ll pique your curiosity and you’ll check out my main channel [twitch.tv/EtcKid](https://twitch.tv/EtcKid). More information above.
(2) Practicing is a meditative and motivating experience for me. Perhaps it will have a similar effect on you as you relax or work on your own projects.
(3) Although I am at the beginning of my guitar journey, I have over 15,000 hours of experience practicing instruments. Every practice routine should be customized to the individual musician, so most of what I do won’t be relevant to you, but you may find some of my approaches helpful to your own practice and learning.
What are your goals with guitar?
To be able to play the music that is in my head.
Why are you trying to learn guitar at your advanced age?
I’ve always loved guitar, but it just didn’t work out to try to learn it until now. When I was a teenager I was in bands that already had guitar players, so I learned other instruments. In my 20s I started to learn guitar and took a handful of lessons, but almost immediately hurt one of my fingers and then life got in the way and I never went back to it.
Ever since I started my main Twitch show in 2016 [twitch.tv/EtcKid](https://twitch.tv/EtcKid), I’ve wanted to incorporate guitar into the show since it opens up so many musical possibilities. I love how expressive and voice-like the guitar can be, the elasticity of its notes, the singular sound and momentum of strummed chords, and that the guitar can be played while singing. Also, since I’ll be moving myself and my Twitch show into a van this year to travel around the country, I appreciate its portability!
I started picking up guitar again in September 2019, but only started *REALLY* practicing in August 2020. I finally started playing guitar on the show Dec 11, 2021. I still have a long way to go in my guitar journey…
Why do you have all those effects on?
The compression, reverb, delay, and binaural panning are for your benefit. They smooth out my sound, gloss over mistakes, and hopefully make my practice more pleasant to listen to.
I, however, don’t hear any of those effects while I’m playing since they would make it harder for me to identify rhythmic weaknesses and tonal inconsistencies.
There is something I hear that you don’t: a metronome. Metronomes are great for methodically improving skills and exposing problems with your technique, but they are not the most pleasant sound to listen to if you’re not the one practicing.
Why are the logos covered on your guitar and all your equipment?
I deeply believe that gear should *not* be a major focus in music. At best gear is merely a tool in service of our creativity, and at worst it’s a distraction and an excuse not to be creative. If we gave our favorite musicians old, broken gear, they would still be able to come up with something amazing.
Unfortunately, gear companies and gearheads propagate the illusion that gear is going to make you a better musician. It doesn’t. If anything, when the time spent on gear is excessive, it’ll effectively make you a worse musician, since you’re losing time you could instead use to learn how to better express yourself through your instrument. I hate to see potential musicians never start to play music because they think it’s not even worth starting unless they can afford expensive tools.
Guitar culture in particular can feel as if the only reason to play music is so that you can buy guitars, amps, and pedals. A lot of ‘guitarists’ don’t even worry about the music part, and their collecting guitars is not any different than collecting Cabbage Patch dolls. There’s nothing wrong with collecting Cabbage Patch dolls or guitars. But that’s not what music is about. Music is first and foremost about expression, using whatever you have available to you, even if that’s just your body. The history of music begins with our vocal cords and clapping hands.
Of course music gear has a role in modern music. The nature of my main Twitch show requires gear. But I play music in spite of the gear, not because of it. And when I’m performing, I want the focus to be on the music. I don’t want music company logos everywhere.
I love playing my electric tine piano, but you could substitute it with another one and it wouldn’t make much difference to me. I do have some instruments that are important to me, but only because of the personal stories behind them, or because of the people who gave them to me, not because of some brand name or perceived economic value.
Why are you sitting on a table?
I’m going to be moving my life and my main Twitch show (twitch.tv/EtcKi) into a van this year. I like having a lot of head room when I work and play music, so a key to my van build design is that I’ll be working from the floor instead of using a chair. So I’m training my body and building up my flexibility to comfortably sit cross-legged for long periods.
What’s wrong with your face?
I developed a bad habit of contorting my face and chewing my tongue when practicing guitar. During practice, any sort of tension anywhere in the body that isn’t necessary to actually playing the instrument can cause problems, so I’m trying to stop doing this. Facial contortions and body movements during performance, however, is a different thing, since it’s often not related to the difficulty of what you’re playing and is about letting the body be a part of the performance and share the expressiveness of the music.
Why do you sway and move around sometimes?
During practice there’s two reasons I do that. When I perform I won’t necessarily be still all the time, so I want my hands and my body to be used to moving while I’m playing. And secondly, moving around helps to prevent muscle tension in parts of the body that are not directly involved in playing the instrument.
Why are you using a timer for your exercises?
Without timers I have a tendency to practice exercises for too long. I have a lot I need to get through every practice session, sometimes 100s of different exercises. The only way to efficiently get through everything is with a highly-structured, timed, regimen. Sometimes you’ll see me extend an exercise, but for the most part I have a plan that I set up at the beginning of my practice session with how long I’ll spend on everything and I stick to it.
What software are you using to organize your practice?
Let me start by saying that you do not need software to learn an instrument. Virtually every single musician since the beginning of time learned their instrument without any computer aids. The only effective shortcut to developing a high level of technical skill on an instrument is 1000s of hours of focused practice.
My current practicing approach involves painfully slow, but relentless improvement (fractional BPM increases) and using permutations and combinations to hit technical challenges from many different angles and hopefully overcome significant physical limitations. In a single practice session, I will sometimes work on several 100 different exercises. I do not like tracking these kinds of details, so I wrote software to track everything, control the BPM, and automatically step me through the exercises.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible for me to share the software – you’d need to buy over $1000 of 3rd party software to make it work and even then the software isn’t user friendly and has lots of quirks. If you’re a developer, and would like to make an open source version, I’d be happy to talk you through the features.
Why do you practice so slowly?
It depends on the current exercise. It could be that it’s simply as fast as I can currently play the exercise. Or it could be I’m focusing on playing fretboard notes, which is much more difficult than playing memorized fretboard patterns. Or, I might be focusing on reaching flawless technique (e.g. trying to keep my pinky under control when not in use).
It’s almost always more effective to practice slowly and accurately than quickly, but sloppy. The exception to that is a technique I call ‘practicing to failure’ where I will practice things at multiple speeds. The goal with lower speeds is to be as accurate as possible. The goal with the upper speeds is to push my fingers beyond what I can currently do and identify where the weak points are.
Playing too quickly all the time will mask all sorts of technical problems and slow technical development.
Why do you repeat exercises so many times?
For most people, and certainly for me, repetition is the most effective method for building technical skill. That said, repetition needs to be mindful, not mindless. If you mindlessly repeat something over and over and your playing is sloppy, all you’re doing is practicing being sloppy.
What’s the point of BPM with decimal accuracy?
I don’t know of anyone else that uses decimal BPM in practice – meaning it’s not necessary in the slightest. I don’t know if you can even buy a physical metronome that can do decimal BPM.
Why do I use it then? It’s about keeping up my morale when my rate of improvement is slow because of my age and physical limitations. I strive for steady and relentless improvement when learning an instrument, even if that means improvement at glacial speed. For many of the things I’m practicing, it’s simply not possible for me to increase my speed from say 90bpm to 91bpm in a single day, or even a week. But it could be possible for me to increase my speed by 0.5 or 0.1 BPM each day. Decimal BPM keeps me making progress even when that rate of improvement is extremely slow.
(I had to write custom software to track and control the BPM, since it’s not practical to do it by hand. Credit to my chat over on twitch.tv/EtcKid for requesting decimal BPM values for improv songs and giving me this idea.)
Why do you loop your guitar during practice sometimes?
When I’m looping, I’m carefully listening to what I just played and trying to adjust on the next iteration. It can be difficult to hear issues while you’re playing, so listening to a recording is very helpful.
What song are you practicing?
I’m most likely not playing a song. If I’m playing chords, I’m probably working through permutations of chords.
Do you only practice finger exercises, chords, arpeggios, and scales?
If I weren’t working under significant time constraints right now, I would take a more diverse approach. But for the time being, my practice time is spent almost exclusively on the physical aspects of playing guitar, and not on the theoretical or expressive elements. I have spent tens of thousands of hours practicing and performing on various instruments, so my most immediate challenge is to train my fingers to execute what I already understand theoretically and can express on other instruments.
For most people, my current approach would be a terrible way to learn an instrument. I believe the most important part of music is expression. Technical skill is merely the tool we use to express ourselves (and even then, most kinds of music do not require significant technical skill). So for almost anyone learning an instrument, it’s critical to spend a significant amount of your time playing actual music and not just technical exercises. [Some music pedagogists believe that we should try to be expressive even with our technical study, but I generally disagree with that approach with some caveats. See my answer to “What is practice” for more on that.]
Why are your technical skills improving so slowly?
Learning an instrument takes time and patience and is a slow process for most of us (and that includes almost every professional musician). Add to that, learning a new instrument at my age is much more difficult than it was when I was in my teens and early twenties. I estimate my learning speed is at least 2-5 times slower than it was in my youth, based on the hours I’ve spent so far on guitar compared to the hours I spent learning other instruments when I was younger.
We can be discouraged by that or work 2-5 times harder! Granted, I’m fortunate in that I genuinely enjoy practicing. But even if you don’t enjoy practicing, know that there are countless amazing musicians who have achieved extraordinary things despite not enjoying practicing.
Here’s a little secret: when I perform music (not practice), most listeners will assume I’m far more advanced technically than I actually am. Why is that? Because when I perform, my focus is on being expressive and using the skills I currently have, whatever they may be. If you focus on your limitations, your audience will focus on that as well. If you focus on expression, your limitations will have little meaning to your audience. Although it’s easier to do this with improvised music than with composed music, you can still bring that approach to any kind of music. Would you rather listen to a performance of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech where every word is pronounced correctly and in the correct order, but is delivered in a stilted, monotone voice, or a dynamic and expressive performance where the actor flubs a few of the words? Which performance honors the spirit of the play? Which performance will move an audience?
Is it possible to learn an instrument later in life?
Absolutely. You can be any age and express yourself on an instrument.
Whether your goal is simply to have fun with an instrument, or if you want to play professionally, if you pursue music first and foremost as an expressive medium, you’ll add something incredible to your life regardless of your technical skills and theoretical understanding.
There are musicians who can only play 3 chords, and don’t even know the chord names or notes, but who could change your life with their music and there are musicians who can effortlessly play 1000s of chord voicings who might leave you feeling empty, and vice versa. Music is successful because of the diversity of human expression that powers it, something that is unquantifiable, despite what music critics and theorists may try to tell you. If technical skill and theoretical knowledge were most important, wouldn’t almost every musician’s last album be their ‘best’? Yes, technical skill and theoretical knowledge are quantifiable to some degree, but expression is entirely subjective. And it’s the subjective nature of music and art in general that makes it valuable, and why we have some many different kinds of music and so many different musicians.
Of course, different styles of music have different minimum thresholds in terms of the technical skill and theoretical knowledge needed, but music as a whole has no such requirements. Music is simply expression using sound and silence.
Here are the primary obstacles that older beginner musicians face:
- Ego – it can be difficult to be a beginner later in life. Society tells us that the time to be a beginner is when we’re young and that by the time we reach adulthood we should be well on our way to mastery of anything we spend time on. And so too often, the fear of other people’s judgment and our own self-criticism, stops us from picking up an instrument or other new activities.
- Time – If our goals extend beyond simply adding music to our life, and we want to be able to play specific kinds of music, then it may require a substantial time investment that many adults simply do not have while working full-time jobs and having families and other responsibilities.
- Lack of representation – because of the first two obstacles, it means there are few examples of older people attempting new things, and even fewer examples of older people who have developed high levels of technical mastery later in life. This can discourage other people from trying since it seems impossible.
Here’s my response to each of these:
- Overcoming our ego – I don’t think I can add much to a subject that has been studied and discussed as endlessly as this one. But I can say that from my own experience, when I let go of my ego and let myself be a beginner, it’s incredibly liberating. You can actually become a professional at being a beginner. In other words, the more you put yourself in situations where you have limited or no experience, the more comfortable and confident you’ll be as a beginner, and you’ll develop intuitive methods and strategies that will help you learn more quickly.
- Working with limited time – Time is probably the most significant obstacle to learning as an adult and there’s no easy answer to it. When you’re a teenager learning an instrument, you often can learn in an unstructured manner, both because you have more time and it’s easier to absorb knowledge. You don’t need to be efficient. As an adult, especially if you have limited time, you may need to be much more rigorous and disciplined in your approach. And unfortunately, even with discipline you may simply not be in a position in your life to devote enough time to reach your goals. But in that case, I would ask you if it’s possible to modify for goals? As I’ve stated numerous times over the course of the FAQ, expression is the key to all kinds of music and expression is our birthright as humans. We all have it, we just have to let go and release it. Maybe you do not have the time to learn how to play highly technical music, but even if you can only squeeze in an hour a week, you can use that time to be expressive with the skills you do have. Even if you can only play one note, you can play it expressively and have a rewarding musical experience.
- Representation matters: There are many examples of novelists who didn’t start writing fiction until middle age, so clearly it’s possible to learn how to express yourself later in life and develop the theoretical skills to do so. But writing a novel doesn’t require any physical skill, unlike playing an instrument. Does the inevitable physical decline that accompanies age mean it’s hopeless to even try? Well, we know that many highly-trained musicians are able to stay at the top of their skills well into their 60s, 70s, and beyond. So unlike in professional sports where you rarely see athletes over 30 competing at the highest level, a senior musician can hold their own with a 25 year-old. The question then is not is it possible to play at a high level at any age, but rather is it possible to take our physical skills from a beginner level to advanced when we’re older. Unfortunately, I think that because of the first two obstacles, extremely few people even try. And because few people try, most people don’t know anyone who is trying, let alone someone who succeeded at their goal. But let’s think about sports like skateboarding or snowboarding… often a trick will seem impossible for years until one person does it. But then soon after more and more people are doing the trick as well. In other words, the first person to successfully land the trick did not have to be a one-of-a-kind freak of nature in terms of their physical skill, they just had to refuse to accept that something was impossible, and work until they proved it was possible.
If I’m learning an instrument, is this how I should practice?
There’s no single answer for this. It depends on how much experience you already have, how much time you have to practice, the kind of music you want to play, and your overall goals. Whenever possible, I encourage beginners to find an experienced teacher who can guide you through this.
There are three components of playing an instrument: your unique individual expression, your intellect, and your body. All music requires expressiveness, but not all styles of music require the same amounts of theoretical understanding or physical skills. A teenager can start learning guitar at 17, start a punk band the same month, and start touring within a few months. But if that same teen instead wants to play Mozart in an orchestra, it will take substantially more time to develop the technical skills required, or if that teen wants to play Bebop jazz, they’ll also need to develop substantial theoretical understanding. In other words, the way in which you approach learning your instrument, and the time commitment required, will depend significantly on the kind of music you want to play, and how quickly you want to be able to play it.
My approach to learning guitar would not make sense for most beginners. When you’re a beginner you’re not only developing the physical skills to use an instrument, you’re also learning the basics of music theory (literally or intuitively) and most importantly how to express yourself. So purely technical study like I’m doing would mean skipping out on these critical aspects of music. In my case, since I’ve practiced and performed tens of thousands of hours on other instruments, I’m focusing almost entirely on technique since that will most efficiently get me to the point where I can effectively use guitar in my live improv show. In a perfect world, however, where I had more time, I would have a more balanced approach.
The physical aspects of learning an instrument will almost always be the most time intensive part of the process. I can teach you the music theory necessary to play a C major scale on a piano in a few minutes. And it’s possible you could play it expressively immediately. But if you want to play that C major scale at a speed of 800 notes per minute, it’ll probably take you thousands of hours of practice. But here’s the thing: only a few styles of music require you to be able to play that fast (and even then, only on certain instruments and not on every song). In other words, the majority of professional musicians never reach that technical ability or have any reason to reach that level. So, while physical technical skill will usually require the most time to develop, too often beginners overestimate the amount of skill required to play most kinds of music and get discouraged when they’re actually not that far away from reaching their goals.
No matter what level you’re at on your instrument, it’s critical that you spend time playing expressively. If you’re a beginner and you’re learning Mary Had A Little Lamb, but you really want to be playing prog rock, you can still give everything you have emotionally to your performance of Mary Had a Little Lamb. Don’t wait to be expressive until you have the technical skills to play the music you ultimately want to play, be expressive with whatever you can play *right now*. If you wait, you risk being in a position where you might have developed the necessary technical skills to show off your incredibly nimble fingers, but no way to actually express something with those fingers that actually means anything.
One final note: If you want to play technically demanding music or if you’re trying to reach your goals as quickly as possible and you’re considering trying to practice 4-10+ hours a day, I strongly advise against quickly increasing the number of hours you practice in a day or you will risk injuring yourself. There are some instruments where you’re virtually guaranteed injury if you were to practice that much. Even for instruments where we regularly see musicians practicing extraordinary numbers of hours, it’s still critical that you slowly build up to that over many weeks or months. And even when you’ve been practicing like that for a while, it’s important to take periodic stretch breaks throughout your practice sessions and stay very aware of any tension in your body as you’re practicing. (And again, most kinds of music do not require this kind of intensity to achieve the necessary technical skills.)
What is practice and how is it different from other ways you can play an instrument?
This is how I differentiate the primary ways I spend time on an instrument.
(1) Practice – developing athletic and/or theoretical skills (e.g. playing scales). This is mostly what you’ll hear me doing on this stream. In general, I am not trying to be expressive during this kind of learning, at least in the sense of expressing emotion or musical storytelling. That would distract me from being rigorous and constructively critical of my fingers and technique. (That being said, many aspects of expression have related technical skills that can be practiced. For example, if someone were to read a sentence where they said each word as if it was it’s own sentence, it would sound awkward and stilted. In that same regard when practicing a scale, at times we need to obsess over every note, but if we only do that, then we can lose the relationship between the notes, and our playing will feel stilted. So in this instance technical expressiveness involves a musician’s ability to flow a scale together so feels like a complete sentence and not just a series of unrelated words).
(2) Practice performance – learning songs and repertoire (or improvising) where the focus is primarily on mastering the technical aspects of the music (e.g. taking a difficult passage of a song and practicing it over and over).
(3) Performance practice – playing songs and repertoire (or improvising) from start to finish (or at least long passages), and only stopping if absolutely necessary. This is preparation for performing in front of an audience. The focus now is on expression, and you only stop when your technique is preventing you from expressing what you want to and switch temporarily back into the previous stage. Or, if you’re close to the date of the performance, there’s no more time to worry about technique – you have to accept wherever you’re at technically, and you focus on transcending any limitations with the strength of your expression.
(4) Performance – performing music in front of an audience (that audience can be just yourself). No stopping the song unless your instrument explodes. In performance, expression is singularly important and any technique involved needs to be unconscious. If you make a “mistake”, but you are playing with authentic expressiveness it won’t matter – and it won’t even be a mistake because you’ll still be conveying what the music is about.
I believe that for almost all musicians a balanced approach that includes all four of these types of playing will be most effective. At different stages of musical development, the relative time spent on each will vary, but they all remain important
On one end we have practice where we confront our technical limitations head on, and on the other end we have performance where true expression transcends technical limitations. In practice “mistakes” exist. In performance, they only “exist” if the performer lets them exist. That doesn’t mean that every note played will be exactly how the performer intended it, but the power of our expression can transcend and render superficial any unintentional technical occurrences.
Some musicians and teachers believe that you can learn everything you need to know just by learning songs and repertoire, and that things like scales and arpeggios are unnecessary. I think that this can be true if a player is gifted with their physical skills and has an intuitive musical theory understanding. For the rest of us, however, focused technical study is necessary to making progress.
When I perform music, musical expression is my sole priority, meaning I will do whatever it takes to express what I want to in the moment, I will not hesitate to sacrifice technical precision or quality in the process, and I may use incorrect playing techniques that I would never use when practicing. With my writing analogy, performance is about expressing an entire story. If you try to tell a story where you agonize over every word and sentence as you say it, your delivery will be stilted and unnatural. But in practice you need to be that focused.
I find that the most effective practice focuses on only 1 or 2 things at a time. I will often break things into smaller components and practice them separately. For example, during my guitar sessions, there will be long stretches where I’m only using my left hand, so I can focus on fingering precision, or I’ll use my right hand so I can focus on picking precision. This is just a basic troubleshooting strategy where you focus on one component at a time. Typically, if someone’s computer isn’t working, it’s not that the entire computer isn’t working, but really it’s just that one or two components aren’t working. In other words, if your monitor stops working, you don’t have to throw out the whole computer. You just have to fix the monitor. But maybe it’s not actually the monitor that’s the problem. Maybe the cable to the monitor is broken. Or maybe the monitor isn’t plugged in. Or maybe the monitor port on your computer is damaged. Or perhaps your graphics card needs updating. Effective practicing is not throwing up our hands and saying, “This computer is broken” and “I can’t play this song.” Instead, it’s breaking the song into smaller parts or singling out specific techniques that the song requires and figuring out why we can’t play something and then methodically working out those individual components. If you play a song over and over, eventually you might learn to play it well. But it will be much more efficient if you first focus on the specific elements that are causing you trouble.
There are some musicians who do almost exclusively technical study for years before they actually try to play music. I advise against that extreme as well. That’s like learning every single word in the dictionary and thinking that’s all it takes to write a great novel. Would you rather read a story by someone who only has a vocabulary of 1000 words, but has a compelling story to tell? Or a story by someone with a 100,000 word vocabulary, but who has nothing meaningful to communicate?
There is no straight path to learning an instrument. To continue with the writing analogy, there may be moments where we need to focus our learning on the minutiae of how to spell words, or how to use an adjective or adverb, but ultimately our destination is the same, regardless of the style of music or the technical requirements or theoretical understanding involved. And that’s to tell a story that is bigger than the words themselves or the techniques used to combine those words.
I’ll end with 3 other ways to play an instrument…
(5) Casual playing / just messing around – often this is essentially jumping around between the primary 4 types I list above, in a casual, informal manner. This can be a lot of fun and in some cases can be an effective way to learn, particularly for people with natural talent.
(6) Composing music using the instrument
(7) Teaching an instrument to others
Ultimately, the best way to learn an instrument is with the method you’ll actually use. While in theory, targeted and disciplined practice is usually more effective than just casually playing your instrument, if technical practice bores you and you never do it, then it has no value. There are infinite paths to learning an instrument and adding music to your life, and this includes beginners all the way up to technical virtuosos. The only commonality is that every instrumentalist at some point picked up an instrument and played it.
Aren’t you contradicting yourself – you elevate expression above all else, and yet your approach to practice is highly technical?
This has a long and complicated answer, which I unfortunately haven’t finished writing yet. Hopefully soon…