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When I first started playing the guitar, I always dreamed about playing the incredibly fast and complex guitar solos performed by my favorite rock bands.  That was always my favorite part of the song and I was eager to learn how to play them.  However, as I quickly discovered, playing that quickly and correctly is incredibly difficult and would require an immense amount of practice.  A mistake I made early on was trying to go as quickly as possible; I wanted to skip the practice and immediately try and recreate the incredible solos I listened to, but it would never work.  The faster I tried to play, the more mistakes I made.  After realizing that I wasn’t learning anything going as fast as possible, I decided to slow it down.  I took the song bit by bit and went slowly, trying to master small parts at a time and slowly build up my speed.  When I started doing this, it became much easier and I was making far fewer mistakes even though I wasn’t going fast.  This is evidence of the speed-accuracy trade off developed by Paul Fitts.  Fitts proposed that during a motor task, when speed is increased, accuracy is likely to decrease.  When I was trying to play as fast as possible, I was making a lot of mistakes and wasn’t learning the song at all.  When I slowed down, I made far fewer mistakes and was better able to learn.

This GIF reminds me of trying to play a new song as quickly as possible but making lots of mistakes.

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One of the main reasons I took guitar lessons was so that I could receive help from an expert who would be able to help me grow as a musician. This kind of help is augmented feedback, feedback that can't be found intrinsically by yourself, but comes from an external source. In this case, it was my teacher telling me what I was doing wrong and helping me improve. Augmented feedback is not essential to playing guitar, it's possible to learn to play without the aid of a coach/teacher, but it certainly helped me improve my skills because my teacher helped me realize mistakes that I did not know I was even making. One big key to augmented feedback is reserving the criticism until after the performance is done.  If feedback is given concurrently, the performer is likely to play poorly and the feedback is not effective.  The feedback also draws the player away from their own intrinsic thoughts, and the criticism becomes an integral part of what is being learned.  If a teacher gives augmented feedback while the player is practicing, the player may begin to rely on the teacher and often turn their attention toward them during their practice.  When I played, my teacher would wait until I finished playing the song/scale and explain to me what I did wrong when I was done.  By doing this, I was able to evaluate the performance myself and compare my assessment to the notes my instructor gave me.  My teacher also used the summary augmented feedback technique, where the instructor waits until the end of a session and gives a summary of all the feedback that they had.  In my situation, I would play the song we had worked on for that week and my teacher would give me a summary of all the things I did wrong instead of slowly interjecting things I could do to improve bit by bit.

The picture below reminds me of when my teacher would show me specific parts of the song that I had performed incorrectly.

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When I first began playing guitar, I was a pretty horrendous player.  I always forgot where notes were and I couldn’t keep my fingers in the right position.  It took hours and hours of practice for me to finally be able to play consistent scales and basic chords.  Playing guitar, and most other complex motor skills, can be very complicated at first and it takes a while for someone to truly learn how to play.  According to Fitts and Posner, there are three basic stages to learning something; the cognitive stage, the associative stage, and with lots and lots of practice, the autonomous stage.

In the cognitive stage, the player will begin to learn the basics of guitar.  This is where I experienced dramatic increases in skill and where I learned to properly place my fingers and learned where each note was.  There are also lots of mistakes made during this stage, where it took me a long time to switch my finger positions to play a new chord.  Improvements in performance in this stage is based on determining what strategies are best to use.  In this stage, I learned that I had to arch my fingers very high in order to prevent covering other strings and muting sound.  Although lots of strategies are developed here, the player is not necessarily improving because they are getting better at these strategies, they are improving because they have determined what strategies work and which ones do not.

In the associative stage, the player will have established their basic motor patterns and have figured out which strategies work and which do not.  During this stage, I became a more consistent player and was able to switch chords more easily.  I could detect error fairly easily but I wasn’t able to immediately correct it.  Improvements here are more gradual than they were in the cognitive stage, but consistency does increase.

The final stage is the autonomous stage, this is an incredibly difficult stage to reach as it requires hours and hours of practice.  In this stage, the player would be able to seamlessly perform chords, notes, and key changes automatically.  I have yet to reach this stage but if a player does, they would be able to automatically perform with very few errors and if they did make them, they’d be able to correct them while performing.
In the following video, the guitarist has reached the autonomous stage in learning to play his guitar solo.  His movements are precise and no errors are made.

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When I first started learning how to play guitar, my guitar teacher told me that I should work on playing my scales every night.  For me, this was one of the most boring and tedious exercises to perform, but it was necessary in order to learn different keys and become a better player.  I was also given a chart of chords and was told that in order to be a good player, I should familiarize myself with each chord and be able to play any one of them when asked.  I was told to spend my practice sessions mastering the scales, chords, and whatever song we were working on that week.  There were two ways to go about practicing these techniques, a constant practice or a variable practice.  In constant practice, one would spend the entire practice session doing only scales, chords, or the song, while in variable practice, one would incorporate all three techniques and alternate during the practice session.  The best way to learn the techniques is to use the variable practice model, where you practice all three techniques in one session.  By doing this, one can get better at scales, chords, and a song, instead of spending each session just focusing on one.  It has been shown that you are better able to retain information by doing variable practice than you are if you spend entire sessions doing only one thing.  Some scales and chords may feel complicated in the beginning, and one may be tempted to spend an hour doing the same one over and over, and during practice you may improve, but it is better to do a variation of scales and chords in order to better learn both, and when it comes time to perform, the player will do better than if they had if they spend entire sessions doing one or the other.

In the following chart, a list of chords is displayed with the corresponding finger notation for each one.  These chords are some of the fundamental to learning how to play guitar and should be practiced often when first learning to play.  The best way to learn all of the chords is to spend practice sessions playing each one of them, instead of spending entire sessions doing the same chord over and over again.  By having variability in your practice, you will be better able to retain the information and perform better when it comes time to play.

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When I was in high school, I took part in my music programs jazz ensemble.  It was one of the first times I had been a part of a large group performance so I was pretty excited to join.  I was also pretty nervous too though, as I had heard that this group had a reputation of playing difficult music and I could foresee that intense practice would be necessary.  At first I struggled keeping up, but I soon got help from one of the other guitarists Bryce, an extremely talented player who often showed me where I went wrong.  However, something I noticed about Bryce was that he had trouble articulating how to perform correctly with words, he instead relied on simply performing the correct notes and teaching me how to play by having me watch him.  He could not use declarative knowledge to teach me how to play, which is knowledge that someone can articulate without performing the act, and can show by explicitly saying it.  Instead he relied on his procedural knowledge, which is the knowledge that is shown through the performance of a task There were so many complex notes and chords to play in succession that it was hard for him to describe exactly what to do.  This was also evident when he performed solos, where he performed pattern after pattern in such rapid succession that describing exactly what happens and teaching it to someone else would have been extremely difficult.  Bryce had used his many hours of practice and instinct to perform the correct notes and was able to recreate the performance by actually doing it, but struggled to explicitly tell me what was happening.

Explicitly telling someone how you performed a great musical solo can be pretty difficult, it’s sometimes easier to just perform the act based on your procedural knowledge.  In the following video, Jimi Hendrix performs an incredible guitar solo (part of it with his mouth) with his procedural knowledge.