by Josh Turknett, MD

Knowing What You Don’t Know

Some of the things about learning to play the banjo are obvious.

You must know which strings to pluck, for example. Or where to place your fingers on the frets.

Other things are not so obvious.

Not surprisingly, those not-so-obvious things are oftentimes overlooked, creating hidden barriers to progress that may seem impenetrable.

Because to learn anything well, we actually first must know what it is we need to learn. Put another way, we must know what we don’t know to understand what we still have left to learn.

It’s the things we don’t know that we don’t know that often present hidden barriers to progress. In fact, one of the primary benefits of a teacher or a system of instruction is to alert you of the things you don’t know you don’t know (dizzy yet?!).

In this installment of the Laws of Brainjo, we’ll be covering one of those hidden barriers – arguably one of the single most important skills a musician needs, yet one that many never practice.

Magic Secrets Revealed

In prior episodes, I’ve talked about one of the seemingly magical things that a seasoned fiddle or banjo player can do, which is to conjure up an apparently endless stream of tunes to play on their instrument.

And there are really two fundamental skills required to perform such feats of musical wizardry.

One is musical fluency, a concept we’ve addressed several times in prior episodes. Here, musical fluency is defined as the ability to take imagined sounds in the mind and map them onto movements of the limbs so those sounds come out of our instrument.

Developing the neurobiological apparatus that allows us to accomplish such a thing takes many hours of specific, focused, practice. And most deliberate practice time is spent in pursuit of this goal.

Yet, the other oftentimes underappreciated, or neglected, skill is the ability to remember how a tune goes.

This may sound obvious, even trivial, which perhaps is why it’s rarely, if ever, touched on in teaching materials.

For some, especially those who’ve spent a considerable amount of time singing, it’s a skill that may already be reasonably well developed by the time they pluck their first banjo string. In this case, it usually won’t present a significant barrier in their learning progression.

Others, however, may come to the banjo without a particularly well developed musical memory. And if that’s the case, you may well find yourself smack up against a wall you can’t figure out how to get through.

Either way, it’s something few spend time practicing, in spite of its critical importance. Those who already have a good musical memory don’t practice it because they have no pressing need to, and those who don’t already have a good musical memory don’t practice it because they don’t realize they need to!

How do you know, then, if this is something you should be spending some time developing? Here are some of the “symptoms” of an undeveloped musical memory:

• You find it hard to “memorize” tunes when learning them
• You struggle to remember how to play tunes you’ve learned previously
• You don’t find it easy to sing songs from memory
• You like to keep tabs or other written notation around so you can “remember” how a tune goes

In previous installments, we’ve covered the use of tab in the learning process. Used wisely, it can be a helpful tool. Used carelessly, it can become an obstruction, and this is certainly an instance where that can be the case.

Furthermore, we’ve covered strategies for the wise use of tab, including the importance of playing a tune without the tab as soon as possible.

(RELATED: For more on how to learn wisely from tab, click here to review the 7 Step Tune Learnin’ Process.)

But, equally important is to not rely on tab or written notation to remember a tune you haven’t played in a while. And one reason why you may find yourself having to do such a thing is an underdeveloped musical memory.

How To Develop Your Musical Memory

So, if you recognize any of the aforementioned symptoms, here is a suggested remedy.

This strategy has the added benefit of not only improving your musical memory, but simultaneously building those sound-to-motor mappings that support musical fluency.

Two birds, one stone.

In fact, even those of you who haven’t experienced the aforementioned symptoms will likely find the following exercise a valuable one:

STEP 1 – Create an audio playlist of tunes you know how to play.

STEP 2 – Every time you learn a new tune, make a recording of yourself playing through it, and add the track to your playlist.

STEP 3 – Periodically quiz yourself on your playlist – look at the tune title, and then try to recall how it goes from memory.

This is something you can do quickly, multiple times per day even if you wish. And, it will double as a handy record of your growing banjo repertoire.

You can also take this a step further:

STEP 4 – Play the tune from your playlist, and as you do, visualize yourself playing it.

As covered in a prior episode, this sort of visualizing is an incredibly useful way of building and solidifying those sound-to-motor mappings that are essential for being able to play by ear and conquer tab dependency.

Another less banjo-specific way of developing your musical memory is to simply maintain a playlist of your favorite songs, whatever genre they may be.

Then, periodically quiz yourself. Look at the track title, and before playing it out loud, see if you can hum or sing it to yourself (this is also a great thing to do with tunes you WANT to learn on the banjo but haven’t yet).

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— The Laws of Brainjo Table of Contents —

 

by Josh Turknett, MD

Here’s a fact of banjo that you should find reassuring: everybody sucks at first.

Nobody is born knowing how to play the banjo. Nor is the banjo-learning algorithm baked into our brain’s developmental program.

Nope. We must use our general purpose intelligence to build our banjo picking circuitry from scratch.

The wondrous thing about this is that it’s possible to do so at all. Such is the gift of a plastic, malleable, customizable brain.

This means, as any of you reading this series knows well by now, innate ability is not the thing that matters. Anyone is capable of building a musical brain.

But building it, and building it well, is where the challenge lies. It’s not those who are born with musical brains that become master musicians, it’s those who are good at building them.

And arguably the single greatest challenge, the primary obstacle that weeds out more aspiring banjoists than anything else, is the “Gap of Suck.”

Whether you make it across the Gap of Suck, or get lost in its vacuum forever, makes all the difference.

What is the “Gap of Suck?”

The “Gap of Suck,” described by Kathy Sierra in her book Badass, is that time in the development of any skill, from sports, to writing fiction, to acting, to woodworking, to drawing, to knitting, to playing a musical instrument of any kind, when you’re just no good. When you’re putting in effort in practicing, but have little to nothing to show for it (or, at least is seems that way).

The early stages in learning anything are mixed bag. On the one hand, it is the time of greatest growth – relatively speaking, there’s never another time in your journey where you’ll be learning more.

At the neuronal level, this early growth requires massive restructuring in the brain. And that restructuring takes time.

Meanwhile, while all that massive brain rewiring is happening, you still suck. In fact, you may have no awareness that any progress is happening at all.

From your perspective, you just aren’t any good, and you want real results faster than they’re coming.

And nobody enjoys this. It’s perhaps doubly hard in this information age of ours. In olden times, may have only come across one or two really great players in a lifetime.

Now we can watch scores of them at the touch of a screen.

Watching a masterful banjo player can (and should) serve as a source of inspiration, and fuel our desire to get better. But it can also remind us how far we’ve yet to go. Or, in other words, it can serve as a poignant, omnipresent reminder of just how much we suck.

For many, the Gap of Suck will pose the greatest existential threat to their life as a banjo player. So anything you can do to improve your odds of making it across it is crucial.

Fortunately, there’s a large body of knowledge on how you can do just that – knowledge acquired from both the study of experts and of the neurobiology of learning.

Here are 5 key strategies for making it across the Gap of Suck, all of which are common habits of the very top performers in multiple domains:

1. Break it down.

Break the learning process into the smallest possible bits you can practice. Time and again, this has been shown to be essential to learning anything successfully, the reasons for which we’ve covered in prior episodes of the Laws of Brainjo.

Beyond being the best way to build efficient and effective neural sub-circuits, there are also tremendous psychological advantages to breaking big goals into bite-sized bits:

In 1985, mountain climber Joe Simpson found himself found himself alone in the Peruvian Andes after having plummeted 150 feet into a deep crevasse. His climbing partner thought him dead. Between the injuries he’d sustained and the bitter cold, making the 5 mile trek back to base camp – a trek that included crossing a glacier – seemed implausible to any rational mind.

Yet, for the next three days, with frostbitten fingers and a broken leg, Simpson hobbled onwards. Realizing that focusing on how far he had left to go would only serve to reinforce the terrible odds he faced, he needed to break it down into goals that didn’t seem so insurmountable. So he took his one big goal – making it to base camp – and broke it down into a multitude of smaller goals that he tried to achieve in 20 minutes. Can I crawl to the next boulder in 20 minutes? Make it to that next bend? And so on.

“I started to look at things and think, ‘If I can get to that crevasse over there in 20 minutes, that’s what I’m going to do.’ … And it became obsessive. I don’t know why I did it. I think I knew the big picture of what was happening to me, and what I had to do was so big, I couldn’t deal with it.”

                                                                        – Joe Simpson, from “Touching the Void”

 

Struggling to remember how to play Foggy Mountain Breakdown in its entirety? Then just try to remember the first measure. Or two measures.

Not only is dividing and conquering the most effective approach to learning, but it’s also the one that comes with most rewards. The single greatest motivating factor is progress, and the more opportunities you create for demonstrating progress, the more likely you are to soldier on.

Who knows, it might even save your life one day.

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RELATED: Breaking things down into the smallest learnable bits, AND learning those bits in the right sequence, is one of the primary foundations of the Brainjo Method. Watch the video below to learn more about how this is applied to learning the banjo (click here to learn more about the Brainjo course for fingerstyle banjo):

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2. Embrace the struggle.

It’s natural to equate “struggle” with “pain,” and natural then to see your early struggles as painful. A bitter pill you must swallow. A necessary evil.

Another option is to reconfigure your thoughts about the struggle entirely.

Think for a moment all the things that you know how to do without giving them a second thought – walking, talking, using a fork, writing your name, and so on.

Do you revel in your ability to do these things, or do you think them ordinary? I imagine it’s the latter.

And why don’t you think anything of them? Because you didn’t have to work for them (or, more accurately, you no longer remember how you once did struggle to learn those things).

If you don’t have to expend much effort to get somewhere, then getting there isn’t nearly as gratifying. It’s the struggle to get there that gives our ultimate success its meaning.

The very best performers learn to look forward to the struggle. Struggle doesn’t equate to pain. Struggle equates to progress.

 

3. Set process-oriented goals.

Sure, you could set a goal like “I want to play Foggy Mountain Breakdown, the way Earl played it, at 120 bpm in 6 months.”

That seems reasonable enough. But there’s a problem with an outcome-oriented goal like that.

It depends on some factors that you can’t influence. There’s no way to predict whether certain goals are within the realm of feasibility.

Why would this be a problem? Because if you do everything right in your effort to achieve that goal but fall short, you’ll come away feeling discouraged.

On the other hand, the variable you can influence is your process. You can control whether or not you achieve a process-oriented goal, such as “I’m going to practice for 20 minutes every evening,” or “I’m going to make sure each sub-skill is automatic before moving on to the next one.” These factors do influence the final outcome, and whether you adhere to them is entirely within your control.

The top performers determine the process that’s most likely to lead to the outcome they desire, and then commit to following the process itself.

 

4. Don’t play the comparison game (unless it’s to yourself).

As mentioned, we live in unprecedented times, with the ability to watch scores of gifted banjoists at the click of a mouse. And it’s human nature to compare ourselves to others and see how we stack up.

Avoid that trap, because nothing good ever comes from it.

When you’re in the Gap of Suck, almost everyone is better than you. It’s just statistics. But, remember 2 things:

1. Everyone had to cross the Gap of Suck.
2. No matter how “good” you get, there will always be those you look up to.

If you get in the habit of playing the comparison game, then get used to a life of disappointment. Because no matter how good you become, you will never run short of players to compare yourself unfavorably to.

The flip side of these unprecedented times is it also means we have countless sources of inspiration. Those same players that you could use as a source of disappointment can instead be used as inspiration. They show you what’s possible if you stick with this banjo thing, if you make it across the Gap of Suck.

Remember, there is no good or bad, only where you are on the Timeline of Mastery. Those players who are further along give you a glimpse of your future.

 

5. Look backwards, not forwards.

We humans adapt quickly to the new status quo. All in all, it serves us well. But that means it can be easy to forget how far we’ve come.

As I mentioned earlier, there is not good or bad, only where you are on the Timeline. At any moment in time, there’s what’s ahead of you, and what’s behind you.

Combine our tendency to always look forwards towards where we’d like to be, rather than backwards at where we’ve come from, with how rapidly we adapt to any new normal, and it’s easy to convince ourselves that we’re not making progress.

Remember that every micro skill you’ve learned on the banjo, from picking the 1st string cleanly with your middle finger, to forming your first partial D chord, once felt really hard. And, regardless of where you are, there are almost certainly players who’d like to trade places with you. To them, you are their future.

When assessing progress, the proper metric is not how far you have left go (which is infinite), but how far you have come. 

Talk to almost any expert musician and they’ll tell you that there will always be more that you’d like to do, that this journey never ends, and that every position on the timeline of learning is relative. There is no finish line, only this moment in time, framed by where you’ve been, and where you’re going.

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— The Laws of Brainjo Table of Contents —

 

 

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

So in parts 1 and 2 of this series we laid out the case that:

1. The ability to play by ear is not an innate ability, and is something virtually anyone can learn how to do (click here to take the ear quiz), AND
2. Learning to do so will pay off big time. It is arguably the single best way to improve your playing, and is an essential piece in the development of musical fluency.

In the second installment, I provided some ways to get started developing your ear, if this is something that’s totally new to you. Inside of the Breakthrough Banjo course, I’ve also recently added the Ear Laboratory, an extension of the “Learning to Play by Ear” modules.

The laboratory will include video tutorials where we’ll take a song and go through the process, step by step, of transforming it, by ear, into a banjo arrangement. The ultimate goal being to break down what oftentimes seems like an overwhelming process into a series of manageable steps that anyone can learn, with a bit of practice.

So, to help crystallize the concepts we’ve covered in parts 1 and 2 of this “playing by ear” series in the Laws of Brainjo, here is the first episode, where we’ll create an arrangement of Pretty Polly, from scratch.

 

Click Here To Get The Tab

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TEST YOUR EARS

Want to find out if you have what it takes to learn to play by ear?

Click here to take the “Can you play by ear?” quiz

 

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— The Laws of Brainjo Table of Contents —

 

Click Here To Get The Lesson Tabs

 

Introducing the Ear Laboratory

Sending the music that’s in your head out into the world through your instrument is, in my view, the ultimate goal of any musician taking in part in an aural (i.e. passed along by ear) tradition, like the banjo.

It’s also a bottomless thrill, and something ANYONE can learn how to do.

 

For many, though, getting there may seem like an impossible task. And there is hardly any instruction that shows you how to get there.

Worse yet, much of the existing instruction ends up making it HARDER for you to get there (learn why this is in the 9 Ways To Practice Smarter book and video).

Teaching people this skill, as you may know, is a central focus of the Brainjo Method, and the Breakthrough Banjo course includes four dedicated “playing by ear” modules.

As an extension of those ear development modules, and in an effort to further ensure that nobody misses out on the fun, I’ve recently begun work on a new resource, the “Ear Laboratory.”

(RELATED: click here to learn about the “Playing By Ear” modules and take a tour inside of them)

 

The laboratory will include videos that take some of the the songs and tunes in The Vault and demonstrate how those clawhammer arrangements are built from the ground up (click here to see the current list of songs and tunes The Vault).

In other words, to break down the process of creating clawhammer banjo songs by ear in steps that, with a bit of practice, anyone can follow.

I’ll be sharing these tune building videos from time to time with subscribers to the Song and Tune of the Week, and I’m kicking it off here with the song “Pretty Polly,” a recent Song of the Week selection.

by Josh Turknett, MD (aboutbrainjo.com)

In the last installment of Your Brain on Banjo, we eradicated the myth that the ability to learn by ear is an inborn gift. Save those with true tone deafness, or congenital amusia, everyone possesses the requisite neurobiology to learn how to do it.

For some of you, the next question may be: why should I?

Before we go any further, let’s get this out of the way: This is not an anti-tablature article. Tab (or notation) is a wonderful tool, with many uses that are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Learning to play by ear doesn’t mean you must swear off all written forms of music for the rest of your life – in fact, they can function as a helpful aid in the learning process.

That said, depending on tab exclusively might hamper you in ways you may not fully appreciate. The obvious limitations of a tab-only approach are that you’ll remain dependent on written sources for learning new tunes, and on-the-fly improvisation is out.

But it can also obstruct your progress in ways that are a bit subtler. For those of you who’ve been tab dependent thus far, see if any of the following scenarios sound familiar:

• You play a tune flawlessly at home, but it falls apart when you attempt it in a jam.
• You’d like to add variations to the way you play a tune you’ve learned from tab, but find it nearly impossible to deviate from the arrangement you learned.
• You find it really hard to play through tunes without the tab in front of you. Likewise, committing a tune to memory is a difficult, painstaking process.

What’s to blame for these roadblocks? Let’s take a look inside your noggin to find out.

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TEST YOUR EARS

Want to find out if you have what it takes to learn to play by ear?

Click here to take the “Can you play by ear?” quiz

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Your Brain on Tab

Here’s a rough synopsis of what happens in the brain when you learn a tune entirely from tab. First, light reflecting off the page of tablature enters your eye and strikes the retina, stimulating photoreceptors there that transduce the electromagnetic energy into nerve impulses. Those impulses are then relayed on to visual cortex in the back of the brain where a rudimentary image is first decoded.

Once this happens, the image data is then relayed to sophisticated association networks that extract meaning from it. After the tab symbols are deciphered, the information is then sent forth to motor planning areas in the front of the brain where a movement plan is rendered.

To execute that plan, nerve impulses are delivered to primary motor cortex, down through the base of your brain and spinal cord, into peripheral motor nerves that trigger the coordinated firing of the muscles that control your fingers.

If all goes well, the end result is an accurate sonic reproduction of the printed music. Through this process, the symbols on the page have been transformed into banjo music using your brain and body as the conduit.

With practice, you might get quite good at this tab-reading procedure, eventually reaching a point where you can play through a tune as you read it. This occurs thanks to the creation of tight tab-specific mappings between visual and motor cortex (i.e “see this, do this” connections).

Notice, however, that something is conspicuously absent from the aforementioned neural procedure for playing from tab: The Sound.

Though the outcome of this process was music from the banjo, our brain got us there without needing any sonic representation of the music whatsoever. Our auditory cortex – the part of our brain that deals in sound – played no part in the making of the music. A bit odd, right?

With this in mind, those roadblocks mentioned earlier make more sense:

Why is it difficult to play a tab-learned tune in a jam? Well, it goes without saying that when playing music with others, listening is essential. Odds are we can’t just plow through the tune exactly the way we play it at home with no regard for what the other musicians are doing.

On the contrary, to fit in successfully with others our brain must adjust the motor output to our hands based on what we hear.

Yet, if we’ve excluded the hearing parts of our brain when we built our banjo playing neural networks, then we lack the needed neural machinery to make those adjustments. This isn’t some deficiency of musical ability; it’s simply a natural neurobiological consequence of learning methodology.

And why is it so hard to memorize a tab-learned tune? Memorization without the benefit of auditory input is also a very tall order. To memorize a tune from tab alone, you basically have two options:

1 – Memorize the entire tab visually. Save those with photographic memories, this is quite hard.

2 – Memorize the entire sequence of movements in the left and right hands. While easier than the first option, this is still a challenging task. Not to mention it’s no fun!

Worse yet, these types of memories are both harder to form and more liable to degrade over time.

So if the neural networks built from a tab-only approach are limiting, what kind of networks would serve our needs better?

 

It’s Child’s Play, Really

The ability to communicate with our voices is so important to our species that Mother Nature has fine-tuned the learning process for it over millions of years. As a result, virtually every baby human is born a master at language acquisition.

Given the many parallels between language and music, childhood language acquisition provides us with an ideal model to emulate.

Consider then how a little girl learns to reproduce the sounds of her native tongue.

To begin, she listens intently to every word uttered by the people around her, slowly building a repository of sounds that are specific to her language. Then she begins to try to reproduce those sounds using the muscles that control the mouth, tongue, chest, and larynx (the vocal apparatus).

These initial attempts at language are crude, but with practice become increasingly sophisticated. In just a few years, she’s mastered the sounds of her language. Through the aforementioned learning process, she has built an extensive library in her brain of correspondences between chunks of sound and movements of her vocal apparatus.

These “sound-to-motor” mappings are so efficient that they are able to almost instantly translate her thoughts into speech. Furthermore, with these elements in place, learning how to say a new word is usually as simple as hearing it once.

Not surprisingly, almost all players who have achieved banjo mastery have followed a nearly identical path. It’s a path that also begins with copious listening – this time to the sounds of the musical language he or she wishes to speak. Through this intent listening, a repository of genre-specific (e.g. bluegrass, old-time, punk, etc.) sounds is constructed.

Initial attempts to reproduce these sounds on the banjo are rudimentary and uncoordinated, but with practice become increasingly sophisticated and efficient. Eventually, through this learning process, an extensive library of correspondences between chunks of sound (a.k.a. “licks”) and movements of the hands are formed in the brain.

In the master banjoist, these sound-to-motor mappings are so efficient that he or she can almost instantly translate imagined banjo sounds into movements of the hands. With these maps firmly established, learning how to play a new tune (and memorizing it) is as simple as learning how the melody goes.

 

Building Your First Sound-to-Motor Maps

The gift of neuroplasticity provides us the remarkable opportunity to customize our brains to serve our needs. Whether we end up building a brain that does so, however, depends entirely on how we practice.

So if your goal is to maximize your brain’s banjo-picking potential, then building these sound-to-motor mappings in the brain is critical to doing so. To build them, though, You must use your ears.

If you’ve been an exclusive tab learner to this point, you may be unsure of how to start using your ears to build your own sound-to-motor maps. As with any skill you learn, the trick is to start simple and progress sequentially. Here are a few tips to get you going:

1. Always, always, always know how a tune is supposed to sound before you start learning it from tab. Not only should you know the melody cold, but also knowing how the particular banjo arrangement should sound is ideal.

2. When learning a tune by tab, get the tab out of view as soon as possible. Get in the habit of using your ears, not your eyes, to tell you if you’re playing a tune right.

3. Start trying to pick out simple, well-known melodies by ear (only the basic melody, don’t add rolls initially).

4. Look up the chord progressions to some familiar songs. Then, practice strumming along to a recording, using your ear to tell you when you should change chords.

Remember, virtually every one of you has a brain capable of playing music by ear, even if the prospect of it seems daunting. With a little patience and persistence, however, you may one day find yourself wondering how it ever seemed so.

— Click here for the 3rd and final part of this series —

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— The Laws of Brainjo Table of Contents —