Hi I'm Tomas from Real Guitar Success. Today
is day #5 in my 30-day of guitar coaching so welcome.
Today, I'm going to answer the question “How do you know when it's time to move
on?“ In other words, when you're learning
guitar and you're practicing exercise or a song
“How do you know when it's time to move on to that next exercise or that next
song? I've gotten this question a lot over the
years and I've developed out of it what I call the 80% rule. Now the idea of the
80% rule is that you practice something up
to a place where you think it's about 80% on the way to perfection then you move
on. You don't want to stay on one thing until it's perfect or
even almost perfect. You'll just get stuck there
and you're not really taking advantage of the additional learning and practice
you can get by using it in some other way at the
same time what's even more common is to move on before
you're actually at that 80% place.
And this is because I think a lot of people get bored of doing the same thing
over and over. But if you move on too quickly you're
very likely to feel over time more and more incompetent
and it's a perfect recipe for feeling overwhelmed and frustrated.
Of course 80% is not an exact number. Don't get hung up on that.
The idea is to learn to make judgments and you do it by making judgments.
You decide in your own judgment if this is about 80%
of where it should be and you can use you compare it to
videos or if you have a teacher what they're doing to see how it compares.
But the bottom line is you are developing your judgment muscle
and it really does work you'll get better and better at it over time.
So what about that last 20%. Well you'll find
if you go on to some type of progressive program
that you're going to show up that last 20% over time by using it
in other exercises and in fact I've often found that when I go back and
review some old material I'm amazed at how much I've
improved even though I've moved on to something else.
I want to talk for a moment about 2 types of learning. Sequential learning
and non-sequential learning. That sounds like a mouthful didn't it?
It's not really terribly complicated. Sequential learning
is step by step and non-sequential means not step by step. So think of the
difference between a numbered list and a checklist where you can check it
off randomly. In sequential learning, things build one on top of the other. You
want to make sure that you're competent enough on the
steps before otherwise you'll start getting lost later on so think of
math. You certainly want to be able to do
basic arithmetic before you go on to multiply and
division and needless to say if you want to go on to
algebra you're going to be lost if you can't do the basic
math stuff. Sequential learning works great for getting a good solid
foundation efficiently as well as you know basic
building blocks. With non-sequential learning, you'd apply
and integrate those building blocks. This is how you develop competency and
proficiency. Think about learning a language for a
minute. Now it'd be very helpful to have step-by-step grammar lessons
where they explained us concept and then built short sentences and then you
practice longer sentences certainly it'd be
helpful to have some kind of phrase practice where
you're adding words and using them. This is all sequential learning. You're
building one thing on top of another and then adding more.
At the same time it's important if you really
want to learn to speak another language that you have opportunities
to just speak to other people and fumble and
try to understand what they're saying. This process helps you integrate
the grammar and all the other stuff that you learned and actually be able to use
it and you could read a book and practice
it forever but you'd never be fluent in the language unless you
just got out there and used it. And when you're doing that, that's non-sequential
because things are coming at you in all different levels. You can't choose.
“No, I don't know that word yet. Could you not use that one? “ This 80% rule I'm
talking about works really well for sequential type learning.
So in my Real Guitar Success program we have a system called Beginner's Journey.
It's a very step-by-step path to get all the basics as quickly as possible.
Each of those lessons builds on the previous one before.
With non-sequential type learning, the 80% rule doesn't really
apply. We have different criteria. With that language example I used earlier
there's no way to actually gauge how much percentage you got
better from speaking to other people. But the way you can gauge it
is just how much time did you spend at because it's an important part of
learning to be competent at a skill like language
or playing music. In Real Guitar Success, we have something
called the Guitar Gym and that's where my students get the non-sequential type
learning. Students will spend a certain amount of time
without worrying about whether they mastered the session or not.
Jamming with other people and just picking up things off the street is
another way to get non-sequential learning. So how do
you know if you're at 80%? What criteria do you use? Well
here's the thing, you are developing your judgment
muscle. Of course you'll compare maybe if you're taking video lessons
look at the videos to see how close it is to what you're doing. Use your ears
see how it sounds. If you have a private teacher, you can
compare your playing and have them play it and compare
what it sounds like but ultimately you are learning
to make judgment calls and this is important.
It's best done by making judgment calls, seeing the results that you get
and then making more judgment calls. You can
always go back. So if you're doing a video program, you can go back if you
feel like you've gotten it over your head
and review. And then you'll know that maybe you moved on too fast in the past
and little by little you're gaining experience and you're
gaining the ability to make judgments that will be more and
more accurate. So you might say what if I'm stuck? or what the problem is
about 80% on mostly exercise but there's one part.
I just can't seem to get past. So this is where you pull out your
practice tools and the first one of those is to isolate
and work on the part. So if you're working on something that's
bigger, isolate the part that you're stuck on and work on that.
Another option might be to go back into previous material that used that
and see if maybe some review might be an order or
some more work on a previous lesson. I'll give you an example I'll just make up
one. Let's say you're working on an exercise
that's changing from the G chord to the C
chord and you got to strum to go with it too okay.
So you got several things going on. You're strumming. You're changing chords.
The strumming is going pretty smooth and you can play the chords
well enough individually but you stumble when it comes time to changing from one
to the other. Okay so the problem is changing chords. Maybe in previous
lessons, you didn't spend enough time in actually
working on changing chords. Or maybe the opportunity here
is to just isolate that. Take those 2 chords. Let's say it's G and C
and just practice maybe for days going from G
to C, G to C and try speeding up with a metronome. G
to C. G to C. There's no one right way to do this
and I'm more interested in getting the principle across than the specific
procedure. So 2 options, isolate and work on the
part or go back, review some material that
deals with the thing that's kind of holding you back,
or a little of both maybe. Hey that was fun hanging out with you. Before you go,
let me know what you think about the 80% rule. Does this make sense to you? Does
this look like something you'd be able to apply?
Do you have some other tips on practicing that have worked for you
and that we could all share? Let me know in the comments below. I look forward to
seeing you again soon. Bye for now.