Sting famously learned to play bass using this sort of technique with music on LPs, lifting the needle and dropping it back a bit in the track over and over again as he gradually worked out the notes and fingering.
Probably almost any method is effective at learning guitar, as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
I started playing electric bass in college, around 1984. I too used the record and lifting the needle technique. The only reason I'm commenting is that early on I learned a LOT of Police songs. Why? Because
(1) the songs were already in my head,
(2) Sting would have two or three cool hooks per song, and this is the important part,
(3) the hooks would played over and over during the song. That meant I could play the song all the way through and get to practice each riff 10 times or more with just a single needle lift.
> Probably almost any method is effective at learning guitar, as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
There are a few pedagogical points here to keep in mind:
first, there are local maxima in terms of learning something like guitar where you get bad habits and the only way to progress is to undo them.
Also, different ways of learning have different values in terms of what goals you're aiming towards and very importantly what kind of practice will keep you motivated in a sustainable way. Sometimes, taking shortcuts in some ways means you might slow down your growth rate but you'll have better overall growth because you'll keep at it for longer
> Some of the fastest and most famous guitarists had shockingly bad technique.
The universe didn't offer a manual on how to play guitar, so how are you determining that their technique was bad? Given what you say about them, maybe they actually had the perfect technique?
The universe didn’t offer a manual, but mankind has largely arrived at some orthodoxy for the most efficient and ergonomic ways to fret, bend, pluck, tap, strum, etc. In many cases, these are objectively better techniques to use once mastered, but they’re not the only way.
> In many cases, these are objectively better techniques to use once mastered
Given a certain set of quantifiable measures that is no doubt true, but then that only pushes the question to how are the measures determined to be objectively relevant? If the aforementioned fast/famous guitar players had started with a different technique there is a chance they wouldn't have become fast/famous. In that case, given the criteria of reaching notable speed/fame, it is possible their "bad" methods were actually best of all.
But also, even where everyone agrees there is a better way, that doesn't equate to an alternative being bad. So the original question still stands: How do we determine "shockingly bad" as opposed to "different"?
I see this "bad technique" angle expressed quite often when talking about self-learning. I tend to think it is overblown a bit. I started learning piano by myself during covid. Then I went to two teachers. Neither one had anything bad to say about my technique.
Teachers of beginners understand that keeping them motivated and practicing is the primary problem. Cleaning up your technique is simply not a goal. Doubly so if you are an adult learner.
Piano is also a lot harder to have very bad technique than other instruments since it is mostly a discrete, one-to-one mapping. If you want a chord with some particular notes, a lot of the time there is only a single fingering that will do. If you push the key hard enough, you will get the correct note, and it won't be wrong if you push harder.
By contrast, in guitar, if you push too hard, your note will be off even though you fretted in the correct place. Or, for example, everybody in guitar teaches barre chords up near the nut, when that's extremely difficult and likely to injure a beginner who has neither the strength nor control to get that right, instead of teaching barre chords near the body on fewer strings. etc.
I will say that I'm also speaking from personal experience, where I was self taught for about 12 years before taking my first lessons for my piano minor in uni. A single lesson resetting some habits I'd gotten into about hand posture and fingering reasoning and it was like a 50% increase in speed in a way that meant that songs that were near the top of ability almost felt effortless. It was wild
>If you mess up, redo the part you messed up correctly 5 times in a row.
I think it may be important to note _when_ to redo this. I started off this way, but after working with a guitar teacher (a Berklee graduate), he recommended that I continue on with the song and return to the problematic parts afterwards. If you constantly stop at the problematic parts to replay them and get it right, you'll have no idea what other parts you'll have trouble with further into the song until much later. In addition to that, being able to move on and continue playing the song after making a mistake is an important skill itself. If you build that skill, it's usually only other musicians that will notice -- a regular audience won't.
I can be pretty bizarre without even trying, I'll take both ;)
Practice makes perfect is a thing, but that's not exactly rehearsal.
With practice you expect to improve, broaden, or maintain instrumental or musical ability for the long term. There should be no deadlines or need for actual listenability.
OTOH rehearsal is the run-up to a smooth listenable performance with a decidedly short-term objective by comparison. Unless you are rehearsing to absolute perfection, you do not halt for anything, the show must go on and that in itself requires you to practice covering up and compensating for your mistakes or shortcomings as you go along.
With practice you are actually trying to become a better player overall, but rehearsal is more about making the next performance as good as it can be and that's it.
If you're not actually as good as you would like in either regard, having a bit of commitment to simulating what you need most can give some direction itself to add to the mix.
When learning a new piece you should play all the way through once. You should play through it again, stopping at all the problematic areas and making note of them, but continuing. After that there are a lot of ways to go about practicing a piece. I think repetitions on the problematic areas in conjunction with working backwards, especially if you want/need to memorize the piece, is fastest.
Playing through the whole song from the beginning over and over again is not an efficient way to learn a new piece of music.
Not the whole song, just the part you mess up. For instance, in the guitar part for Under the Bridge by RHCP, there's the simple melodic part that only requires learning the chord forms and picking patterns.
That transitions into a more rhythmic chord progression with a few embellishments, which also isn't terribly difficult at first, but then a few verses later that ramps up a good amount and becomes moderately difficult.
If you stumble on that transition / passage, then that is where you would stop and then practice until you do it correctly 5 times.
The next day, once you've rested and let your brain absorb the info, try it again and you'll find it much easier to get right on the first try.
Stopping and working slow is the only way you'll find and improve hard things. If you just blunder past them each time, you're only learning to blunder. Able to play the easy things but never improving the hard.
But if all you do is stop at every mistake, all you're learning is how to stop at every mistake. Live music doesn't stop, you need to know how to pick up and keep up, no matter what. (This was my mistake for decades.)
There's a lot more to learning a piece of music, but I think both kinds of passes are necessary. Well, unless you're good enough to fly through that piece prima vista with results that you're happy with. Then you get to hone the expression or interpretation or just cash in, I guess.
This is the one I use, both for myself and the kids. How you practice will become how you play, so it's important to make sure you have good form and technique.
There's another, similar saying used in fighting-related disciplines: train how you fight.
Same idea. You're building muscle memory and technique, so make sure your training/practicing matches how you'd do it in a performance (or fight). It's one less thing to have to think about when you're under stress.
> as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
And at least for me, frequency beats duration. I make more progress when I play consistently for even 10 minutes every day than when I play for 90 minutes on Sunday afternoon.
Add some distance and sensitivity. I used blunt / brute force repetitions and somehow wasted years. Music is very subtle, and keeping a focus on small details is worth thousands of hours.
Probably almost any method is effective at learning guitar, as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.