We’ve been that obsessed with technology we’ve overlooked the obvious

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Recently while a student was waiting for his singing lesson to begin he proudly showed me his latest piece of technology, I’m not sure what it was called I’m still having trouble setting the timer on a microwave so when it comes to high tech stuff I’m technology challenged.

Anyway, this guy explained it was a new device for storing music, “How many songs will it store” I asked, after checking the gigabytes or whatever bytes they were he replied “about 8,000 songs!” All of a sudden I felt very ancient as I recalled “the good old days” when you went into a record store and came away with your twelve inch disc tucked under your arm.

My trip down memory lane was brought to a screeching halt when my next guitar student arrived and signaled the beginning of my working day. Later that day I began to review the events of that day… have we really progressed with our technological advancements or have we missed something along the way?

I’m all for technology in science, medicine and transport etc., by I’m not at all convinced we are moving forward in the learning and long term memory recall departments!

We need to understanding ‘how’ we learn; at the end of the day we need to understand human limitations in a world that never stops.

How To learn guitar In a World That Never Stops

Let’s see, where are we now; we’ve got…

* YouTube

* MySpace

* Guitar Hero

* Guitar Websites (complete with Guitar experts)

* Guitar learning software

* iPods, iPhones and tons of other “new” “i” storage and retrieval systems some of which can store 8,000 songs

Boy we must be smarter than previous generations look at all the stuff we have to help us!

Unfortunately the results do not support the theory of technology based learning being superior, in fact quite the opposite.

We’ve been that obsessed with technology we’ve overlooked the obvious

Here’s the facts:

* We have been outpaced by our technology – humans are not built for the world we have designed. Humans beings do not function 24 hours a day, machines can and do!

* We have converted our world into a single technologically integrated, round-the-clock- community… news, learning,food what ever you want 27/7/365

* Machine centered technology verses human centered technology – currently we have machine centered technology and we’re going to have more and more problems until we start creating ‘human’ centered technology… after all we are supposed to be running the show aren’t we?

Here’s what I’m seeing

* Guitar players how can play faster (and louder) than ever before but most have no idea what key, scale or even what tuning they are in? They learnt it on YouTube… must be right…mmm?

How could you ever form a band with these guys… they don’t have the foggiest idea what they are doing but they are doing it 24 hours a day! They don’t speak the language of music.

* Guitar players who can’t remember the song they were learning last week, let alone what band was performing the song… oh, well doesn’t matter we’ll just download another one and forget it just as quickly and yes, I can do that 24/7 too.

Talk about the memory of a goldfish… it’s serious stuff, why bother learning something in the first place if you can’t remember it?

As I said I’m not against technology, I love it, just somewhere along the way we’ve lost a commonsense approach to LEARNING.

Five surefire ways to overcome the 24 learning problems.

1. Turn off the computer – seriously it will save you so much wasted time; wasted hours that you could actually spend learning and playing the guitar.

Try tracking how much time you spend on the computer per week.. you’ll get a shock, I’m betting it’s over two hours per week, now you can become a heck of a good guitar player with two extra hours of focused practice a week… think about that!

2. Learn to read music – “if you don’t know what you are doing there’s no point to doing it!” No matter how much you appear to be progressing with the monkey-see-monkey-do approach at the end of the day the best you can hope for is a musical copy-cat.

3. Learn new material in short time frames – 2 to 5 minutes maximum, set a kitchen timer for five minutes as soon as the timer goes off stand up and take a break. You will develop your long term memory with this approach.

4. Play with other humans – that’s what music is all about, people playing for and with other people. There’s something weird about pressing colored keys down on a fake guitar plugged into a computer pretending to be a “guitar hero”. Whatever it is… it certainly isn’t music.

5. Make sure you learn the names of the notes on the guitar fretboard – if you don’t know this you won’t be going anywhere.

Bottom line: You need to know how to work with your nervous system not against it, people need rest, motivation, enthusiasm and fun… I’m not sure what machines need, but that’s another story.

Now that you know how to learn it’s time to head to the practice room with a fresh approach to learning the guitar.

-By: Mike P Hayes

And now I’d like to invite you to get free access to my “How To Remember 1,000 Songs” eCourse. You can download the course for free at: http://www.guitarcoaching.com

You’ll learn about hit song templates, easy chords, simple scales, red hot rhythms, and successful practice strategies in text, audio and video.

From Mike Hayes – The Guitar Coaching Guy

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