Ever since I took up the ukulele, I've wondered whether switching between the sizes is a good or a bad thing, particularly while learning.
I noticed that the soprano scale became much easier to manage after practicing more on the tenor for a while, but I also wondered if the frequent jumping around between soprano, concert, and tenor wouldn't slow down progress (especially with accuracy in mind). I sort of concluded, without any real knowledge to back it up, that flexibility (and adaptability) would be a Good Thing.
But is it?
The other night I was finishing the excellent book "Guitar Zero" by Gary Marcus. It's about his journey of learning guitar at the age of forty without any background or talent (same age, and same lack of talent, when I picked up the ukulele). It's full of wonderful anecdotes, assorted bits on the science of learning, results of studies, thoughts from musicians, and so forth. I really enjoyed that book. So, anyway, there's a chapter that deals with all the skills needed to play guitar expertly, and it clashed with my "theory" that playing all sizes may assist with learning.
Here's the relevant excerpt:
Becoming an expert musician requires the alignment or calibration of at least four distinct sets of representations (five if one happens to read sheet music): the notes the musician hears, the notes the musician wants to play, the location of those notes on the instrument, and the physical actions that the fingers must undergo in order to play the right notes at the right time (and, if applicable, the notes to be read).
The musician must draw direct mappings between a mental representation of the instrument and a physical location of where those elements (say, the frets on a guitar or the keys on a piano) are instantiated on the instrument being played at a given moment. The player must have both “egocentric” representations (of where his own body is) and “allocentric” representations (of where things lie on the guitar, independent of how the guitarist is holding the guitar)—and, most important of all, fluent mappings between the two, which must be updated in real time as he and the instrument shift position. (All this is bumped up an extra level of difficulty for a guitarist who plays different guitars, since different guitars often differ in their precise physical layout; the strings on a classical guitar, for example, are farther apart than the strings on an electric guitar.)
One of the most important yet seemingly moronic pieces of advice that an aspiring rock guitarist may hear is “Make sure your strap is adjusted so that the guitar is in the same relation to your upper body when you stand up (onstage) as when you are sitting down.” Guitarists who don’t heed it are often skewered by the discrepancy between the allocentric and the egocentric coordinate frames. Alignment is all.
That particular piece of advice is so important because the brain’s ability to map between representations is generally crude: more trial and error than sophisticated three-dimensional trigonometry. Consider, for instance, what happens when you try to help someone else put on a tie and face him: the usual relation between hands and eyes becomes reversed. Effectively, all you’ve done is invert directions, the equivalent of simply multiplying an equation by –1, but most people feel entirely flummoxed.
In principle, you could imagine memorizing the fretboard in the abstract and then using some sort of formula to calculate exactly where your fingers should go, factoring in your own posture and the three-dimensional angle and position in space of the guitar at a given moment. A robot might do exactly that, but the human brain doesn’t work that way. Instead, our brains solve these sorts of problems not so much by running equations as by tapping large databases of experience, retrieving similar episodes from memory. (The data for this come from experiments in which researchers performed prism adaptation experiments on human beings: participants relearn mappings between visual and motor space bit by bit, rather than by formula.)
The upshot is twofold. First, the fact that our maps between visual space and motor space are piecemeal means we need an enormous amount of practice. Second, our knowledge of the relation between the fretboard and the dynamics of one’s fingers is fragile; tiny alterations from what we are accustomed to can slow us down or lead to error.
This is one reason why even expert musicians should do warm-ups before going onstage. Warm-ups have a physical role to play— increasing the flow of blood to the fingers, wrists, and forearms— but they probably also have a mental role to play: a warm-up refreshes the brain’s memories about the calibration between the abstract (egocentric) representation of notes and the precise (allocentric) physical movements needed to play them.
(Excerpt from Guitar Zero, located in the chapter "What Experts Know That Novices Don’t", by Gary Marcus.)
What I take from this is that sticking to one scale length (and ideally to the same neck width, and really, optimally the same instrument with the same type of strings) is much easier for the brain to deal with and, if I understand this correctly, should have beneficial effects on one's learning progress (as well as allow for a higher level of performance).
What are your thoughts on it? And your own experiences?
I noticed that the soprano scale became much easier to manage after practicing more on the tenor for a while, but I also wondered if the frequent jumping around between soprano, concert, and tenor wouldn't slow down progress (especially with accuracy in mind). I sort of concluded, without any real knowledge to back it up, that flexibility (and adaptability) would be a Good Thing.
But is it?
The other night I was finishing the excellent book "Guitar Zero" by Gary Marcus. It's about his journey of learning guitar at the age of forty without any background or talent (same age, and same lack of talent, when I picked up the ukulele). It's full of wonderful anecdotes, assorted bits on the science of learning, results of studies, thoughts from musicians, and so forth. I really enjoyed that book. So, anyway, there's a chapter that deals with all the skills needed to play guitar expertly, and it clashed with my "theory" that playing all sizes may assist with learning.
Here's the relevant excerpt:
Becoming an expert musician requires the alignment or calibration of at least four distinct sets of representations (five if one happens to read sheet music): the notes the musician hears, the notes the musician wants to play, the location of those notes on the instrument, and the physical actions that the fingers must undergo in order to play the right notes at the right time (and, if applicable, the notes to be read).
The musician must draw direct mappings between a mental representation of the instrument and a physical location of where those elements (say, the frets on a guitar or the keys on a piano) are instantiated on the instrument being played at a given moment. The player must have both “egocentric” representations (of where his own body is) and “allocentric” representations (of where things lie on the guitar, independent of how the guitarist is holding the guitar)—and, most important of all, fluent mappings between the two, which must be updated in real time as he and the instrument shift position. (All this is bumped up an extra level of difficulty for a guitarist who plays different guitars, since different guitars often differ in their precise physical layout; the strings on a classical guitar, for example, are farther apart than the strings on an electric guitar.)
One of the most important yet seemingly moronic pieces of advice that an aspiring rock guitarist may hear is “Make sure your strap is adjusted so that the guitar is in the same relation to your upper body when you stand up (onstage) as when you are sitting down.” Guitarists who don’t heed it are often skewered by the discrepancy between the allocentric and the egocentric coordinate frames. Alignment is all.
That particular piece of advice is so important because the brain’s ability to map between representations is generally crude: more trial and error than sophisticated three-dimensional trigonometry. Consider, for instance, what happens when you try to help someone else put on a tie and face him: the usual relation between hands and eyes becomes reversed. Effectively, all you’ve done is invert directions, the equivalent of simply multiplying an equation by –1, but most people feel entirely flummoxed.
In principle, you could imagine memorizing the fretboard in the abstract and then using some sort of formula to calculate exactly where your fingers should go, factoring in your own posture and the three-dimensional angle and position in space of the guitar at a given moment. A robot might do exactly that, but the human brain doesn’t work that way. Instead, our brains solve these sorts of problems not so much by running equations as by tapping large databases of experience, retrieving similar episodes from memory. (The data for this come from experiments in which researchers performed prism adaptation experiments on human beings: participants relearn mappings between visual and motor space bit by bit, rather than by formula.)
The upshot is twofold. First, the fact that our maps between visual space and motor space are piecemeal means we need an enormous amount of practice. Second, our knowledge of the relation between the fretboard and the dynamics of one’s fingers is fragile; tiny alterations from what we are accustomed to can slow us down or lead to error.
This is one reason why even expert musicians should do warm-ups before going onstage. Warm-ups have a physical role to play— increasing the flow of blood to the fingers, wrists, and forearms— but they probably also have a mental role to play: a warm-up refreshes the brain’s memories about the calibration between the abstract (egocentric) representation of notes and the precise (allocentric) physical movements needed to play them.
(Excerpt from Guitar Zero, located in the chapter "What Experts Know That Novices Don’t", by Gary Marcus.)
What I take from this is that sticking to one scale length (and ideally to the same neck width, and really, optimally the same instrument with the same type of strings) is much easier for the brain to deal with and, if I understand this correctly, should have beneficial effects on one's learning progress (as well as allow for a higher level of performance).
What are your thoughts on it? And your own experiences?
