BANJO BREAKTHROUGH: Jay Whitehair

“Scary Progress”

On Breaking Out of the Rut

58 year old Jay Whitehair first picked up a banjo roughly 35 years ago, but it had lay dormant most of that time. As is so often the case, Jay would pick it up for a bit and then reach a plateau that he found it difficult to push through:

Having already had a fair amount of playing experience at the start of the course, Jay learned how important a rock solid foundation is to future progress:

Jay On Finally Playing With Others

At the start of the course, Jay set the goal of playing in front of others in one year. Just a few months later, he’d conquered that goal…and then some.

After 35 years of fits and starts with the banjo, it would have been all to easy for Jay to conclude that he just didn’t have what it took to break free from the rut he often found himself in. But, thanks to his persistence and the right learning path, he’s now doing things he still finds hard to believe.

When asked of his favorite thing about Breakthrough Banjo, Jay replies:

It’s never too late.

Kudos to Jay for making his Breakaway.

Episode 17: What Progress Really Looks Like

I’ll bet this has happened to you:

On an ordinary day, just like any other, you pick up your banjo and starting plucking around. After a few minutes, though, you note that something doesn’t feel quite right. You feel clumsy, you can’t pick the strings as as cleanly as you’d like, and tunes that typically come easily feel like a struggle. It’s as if you’ve stepped into a time machine and gone back several months, or more.

Raising the Dead

We’ve discussed in prior episodes that learning the mechanics of banjo playing requires that we build new pathways, networks of connections between brain cells, that control the various aspects of playing. As our banjo playing skills improve, so does the number and complexity of those networks.

Furthermore, these are specific types of neural networks that we want build, ones that do not require input from the conscious mind for their execution. In the last episode, I introduced the term (borrowed from neuroscientist David Eagleman) “Zombie Subroutine” to describe them.

To progress down the timeline of mastery, we want to build a complete set of effective and efficient Zombie Subroutine for banjo playing, so that our picking becomes automatic.

Research on neuroplasticity, or the science of brain change, has shown us that, inside the brain, your first attempts at performing a new skill look very different than your attempts after the skill has been fully learned.

At both the molecular and structural level, the parts of your brain controlling your first awkward attempts to form the D chord shape, for example, will look quite different than your attempts after that skill has become automatic. Which means that between those two points in time, a lot of changes must take place inside the brain.

Learning Fast and Learning Slow

One helpful way to view skill acquisition is to divide the process into two types of learning, fast and slow.

Fast learning is, naturally, learning that occurs relatively fast, on the order of minutes to hours. Learning the digits of a new phone number, or remembering how a new melody goes, for example. These sorts of things are accomplished by physiologic changes in the brain that occur quickly, like adjusting the strength of connections between synapses (the region where brain cells communicate with each other).

Slow learning tasks, on the other hand, take longer. They take longer precisely because they can ONLY be accomplished by changes in brain physiology that take longer. Changes like the formation of new synapses, the sprouting of new dendrites, or even the whole-scale transfer of parts of the network from one region of the brain to another.

These are all processes that require days, if not weeks, to occur. Each of these processes has their own time scale, but they all take more time, on the order of days to weeks to complete.

Just how long depends on multiple factors, including the complexity of the skill being learned, as well how well prepared the brain is to learn said skill. And whether the brain is well prepared depends largely on on how thoughtful we’ve been with our learning sequence up to that point (one reason why the sequence of learning is so vital to success).

Most of the building of banjo playing Zombie Subroutines involves slow learning processes, which is why the purpose of practice, as mentioned in Brainjo Law #2, is not to get better right there and then, but rather to “provide your brain the data it needs to build a neural network.”

And based on what we know of the biology of network building, specifically the varied processes that support slow learning, we shouldn’t expect our progress to be in a straight line day to day. Depending on the skill involved, our progress might be day to day, but it very well might take longer.

And during the process of neural reorganization that facilitates slow learning, we’re unlikely to see significant improvements. We may even see dips in our performance, periods where it feels like we’ve actually regressed.

But, just as you’ve likely experienced these moments of apparent setbacks, I’ll bet you’ve also experienced the opposite: times where you’ve struggled with something for a while, perhaps even concluding that it’s just too difficult, when suddenly – BAM! – you can do it. With ease, in fact. It’s in these moments that your Zombie Subroutine, now complete, has just been brought to life.

The three P’s of success: Passion, Persistence, and Patience.

– Doug Bronson

Setting Expectations

In the beginning, your initial gains feel huge because, well, they are huge. The chasm between zero banjo skill and being able to play through your first tune is enormous. And, just as the year between your 40th and 41st birthday seems a lot shorter than the one between your 4th and 5th, it may feel as if your progress slows a great deal over time.

Furthermore, the longer you play, the better you get, the more sophisticated your mechanics, the more complex the Zombie Subroutines that support them become. And so they take longer to build. Taking longer to build means that the plateaus, the time between the creation of one network and the next, will get longer. This may give the impression that you’re not progressing, even though under the hood er…skull…things are in constant flux.

It could be all too easy to give up in these moments where we feel like we have ten thumbs. But, understanding that these moments may be progress in disguise can provide us the all-important patience we need to give things just a little more time.

Brainjo Law #18: Expect your progress to look like a staircase, not a straight line

Back to the “Laws of Brainjo” Table of Contents

The Laws of Brainjo

Episode 16: How To Scare Away Stage Fright

You’ve been practicing diligently, and are pleased with your progress.

Tunes that once seemed almost insurmountable are falling under your fingers.

Yes, the time has come to share your music with others.

Yet, when it comes time to do so, things fall apart. Someone else has decided to inhabit your body, just to remind you what public humiliation feels like.

How is this possible, you wonder. You’d had dozens of perfect rehearsals. How on earth could you play so well by your lonesome, and so badly when others are within earshot?

If the above scenario is at all familiar to you, I’ve got news for you: you’re a human.

I don’t think there’s a musician on the planet, no matter how accomplished, who hasn’t encountered stage fright in one form or another at some point in their career. Conquering it, at least in part, is critical to any professional musician’s success.

If you’ve experienced it, whether playing for friends, family, an instructor, or a gig, it can be both frustrating and demoralizing. Sometimes the disparity between what you’re able to play in the privacy of your home and in public is so great you wonder if you’re delusional – are you just listening with rose colored hearing aids when nobody’s around?

So what to do? Do you just accept this is an inevitable part of your nature? Are you doomed for your best playing to fall on no ears but your own for all your days?

Or is there something you can do about it?

The answer, fortunately, is yes (otherwise this would make for quite a boring piece).

And it turns out the answer has to do with releasing your inner zombie.

Who’s Driving the Bus?

Imagine for a moment you’re driving down the highway in the left lane, and you need to move over to the right. Now, with your imaginary steering wheel in front of you, go ahead and make the required motions of your arms to change lanes.

If you drive a car with any regularity, then this is likely a maneuver you’ve performed successfully countless times.

Yet, if you’re like everyone else, you turned your imaginary wheel to the right a bit, then straightened it back out. If so, then you’re imaginary car just ran off the road.

It turns out that when you change lanes, what you ACTUALLY do is turn the wheel to the right a bit, move it back to the center, then turn it to the LEFT by an equal amount, and then you straighten it out (pay attention next time you’re in the car to verify this for yourself).

In his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman presents the above steering wheel vignette to illustrate the point that virtually all of the learned behaviors we’ve amassed over the years, and the neural networks that produce them, aren’t actually controlled by or integrated with our conscious mind.

Once fully learned, the conscious mind no longer even has access to those networks. They’re hermetically sealed off from the conscious mind circuits, and the two no longer “talk” to each other, which is why only your subconscious now knows how to change lanes.

It’s also how you can perform so many of your everyday behaviors “automatically,” while your conscious mind is engaged in something else entirely (your smartphone, perhaps?!).

Ring a bell?

(RELATED: Click here to read more about “automaticity,” and the perfect way for you to test for it)

Eagleman refers to these circuits as “Zombie Subroutines.” Meaning that once we’ve mastered a particular behavior, we can perform the routine even if our conscious mind is completely offline, like a zombie.  

Indeed, the very goal of our learning is to create these circuits (Brainjo law #2).

The vast majority of our everyday behaviors we owe to these Zombie Subroutines: walking, talking, driving, seat belt fastening, dressing, showering, and so on. It’s their very existence that allows us to coast through our days on “autopilot” if we wish, provided the demands of that day are similar to those of the previous ones.

But just what does this have to do with stage fright?

Free the Zombie!

The process of mastering a musical instrument, as discussed in this series, requires the creation of neural networks of increasing sophistication – networks who’s output results in the behaviors of musical performance.

And how do we know when we’ve created a well formed network and can move to the next phase of learning?

By testing for automaticity. That is, by testing whether the learned behavior can be performed while our conscious mind is directed elsewhere.

Pass this test, and we know we’ve created a solid Zombie Subroutine.

Put another way, then, the process of mastering a musical instrument is about the development of Zombie Subroutines of increasing sophistication. Yes, the conscious mind assists in the process of creating them, through practice, but, like a parent sending their child off to college, gets out of the way once those subroutines have reached maturity.

And once they’ve reached maturity, not only is the conscious mind no longer needed, it can actually get in their way.

Alone in your bedroom playing your well rehearsed material, material that relies on well formed Zombie Subroutines, your conscious mind is still.

The problem arises when, in the presence of other ears, your conscious mind REALLY wants you to do well. So it figures it’ll just add a helping hand just to MAKE SURE you get things right.

Yet, your conscious mind, as illustrated by the steering wheel example, not only interferes with the execution of your Zombie Subroutine circuits, it doesn’t even understand what to do (or worse, has the WRONG idea of what to do).

Many of the best works on overcoming musical performance anxiety focus squarely on how to remove interference from the conscious mind. Though strategies may vary, the fundamental goal is to learn how to turn the conscious mind off while playing (or get it to attend to anything BESIDES the mechanics of playing).

Now, shutting off the conscious mind, as you probably know, is no easy feat. And it’s one reason why many a professional musician has turned to ingesting conscious-mind-suppressing chemicals as a means to that end. That obnoxious inner voice that’s used to chattering away incessantly, narrating every second of your waking life, doesn’t leave without a fight.

But the good news is there are a number of proven, time-honored ways you can make it so that it no longer sabotages your performance efforts.

Here are some strategies for letting your Zombie out:

DESENSITIZE. Repetitions help. A lot. The less novel playing in front of others becomes, the less your conscious mind will care about it.

VISUALIZE. You can also reap the benefits of desensitization without the [real] threat of humiliation. Simply play while imagining a captive audience in front of you. Or record yourself on video – for many, the blinking red light of doom is more intimidating than a hundred faces staring at them. Press record, and play. There’s always the delete button.

MINDFULNESS. As mentioned, many of the books on overcoming performance anxiety focus on learning how to lessen the grip of the conscious mind over you. There are many techniques for doing so, some of which involve some sort of meditative practice (for those with smartphones, the HeadSpace app is a simple way to get started). Fundamentally, mindfulness meditation is about learning how to weaken the power of your thoughts over your physiology.

FOCUS ON THE MUSIC. Remember, we’re all selfish creatures. Meaning, the people out there listening aren’t paying nearly as much attention to you as you think they are. If you’re playing music for them, they want to be entertained, not impressed. They’re going to be focusing on the music itself. So your main purpose is to make good music.

Focus on the sounds you’re making, not the person making them (i.e. you). Or focus on the musicians you’re playing with, if that’s the case. Or the artwork on the wall. Just focus on anything but yourself. 

The ultimate irony here, which you’ve likely recognized, is that the very fact that we care about sounding our best in front of others is also the very reason we so often don’t sound at our best in front of others. And so learning not to care so much, so that the conscious mind is quiet and the Zombie Subroutines can do their thing, is the key to performing at our best.

Brainjo Law #17: Release your inner zombie to play at your best in front of others.

Go To Episode 17: “What Progress Really Looks Like”

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The Laws of Brainjo

Episode 15: The Secret to Memorization

Imagine this scene:

You’re gathered in a small circle with a handful of other musicians at an old-time jam. Only one of them is a fiddler, but he’s a seasoned one. As the one responsible for carrying the melodic line on each tune, he’s leading the show.

Which means if he doesn’t know the tune that’s called for, then it’s not gonna be played.

This will be a short jam, you think to yourself. Once you exhaust his repertoire of tunes, you’ll have to call it a day. Maybe you’ll make it an hour tops.

But an hour passes, and you’re still playing music. Two hours. Then three…

Amazingly, this fiddler seems to have an endless supply of tunes he can call forth at will.

“How about ‘Molly in the Foxhole’?” suggests the guitarist.

“Ooooh, haven’t played that one in years. How’s that go?”

“It starts out dada da da dad…”

“Got it!” he interrupts, and off he goes.

How is this possible, you think. I’ve been at this banjo thing off and on for a couple years now, and only know about 10 tunes by heart. This guy knows hundreds, maybe thousands of tunes. Have I just happened upon a musical savant?

The above scenario plays itself out in old-time jams around the world with regularity.

For the uninitiated, seeing a veteran musician call forth a seemingly endless supply of tunes can be a mind blowing experience. And the natural conclusion is to assume you’ve just born witness to a superhuman feat of human cognition.

Yet, this sort of thing is not that unusual at all. In fact, most master musicians possess a vast library of tunes they can call up at a moment’s notice.

But how on earth is this possible? Most early players struggle mightily to remember just a few tunes. How could this memorization ability gap be so large? Does achieving mastery of an instrument also magically impart an exponential expansion in one’s memory?

Before we delve further into the realm of musical memory, let’s first consider, for the sake of comparison, another domain of artistic expression: painting.

The Expert Advantage

Imagine two different individuals, Pierre and Brad. Pierre is an expert painter. Brad is a complete novice.

Both are given an assignment to re-create a work by a master artist. Only they’re not allowed to look at the original painting when doing so. Rather, they must paint it from memory.

Pierre studies the painting for a few minutes, then begins work on his piece. In short order, he produces an impressive re-creation of the original.

Brad, on the other hand, is a bit overwhelmed by the task. I have no idea how to paint all this, he thinks.

Then, to his delight, he discovers that there exists a video of the original artist painting the picture he must recreate.

I don’t need to know how to paint at all, Brad reasons, if I can just copy all of his movements, mine will turn out like his! 

So Brad begins studying the video, with the goal of committing to memory every stroke of the brush that was made to produce the work he must copy. But soon, with the full magnitude of his task finally sinking in, Brad abandons this approach. There’s no way he can commit all of this to memory, he realizes.

Brad takes a look at Pierre’s work and is astonished to find that, to his eye, it’s almost indistinguishable from the original. Mouth hanging wide open, Brad wonders how on earth Pierre achieved such a feat of memory.

Taking the Easy Road

Brad’s idea, in theory, wasn’t a bad one. The surest way to recreating the original work of art would be to make EXACTLY the same movements that the original artist made in painting it.

The problem, as I’m sure you recognize, is that pulling this off would require a feat of memorization beyond anyone’s capability. This just isn’t the type of memory the human brain excels at. It’s a logical, if entirely impractical, idea.

Yet, Pierre was able to recreate the painting from memory. His approach to doing so, however, was entirely different.

Through a lifetime spent mastering the art of painting, Pierre has acquired an expansive artistic vocabulary of concepts (house, tree, forest, etc.), along with the motor programs required to translate those concepts into images on the canvas.

If we diagram out Pierre’s pathway from recall to painting (the boxes representing function specific neural networks), it looks like this:

Remembering images, especially those that could exist in the real world, is something we’re all quite good at. Take the following painting, for example:

After only a short glance, you’ve already extracted (whether you tried to or not) the relevant details from it. You know there’s a cottage, a forest, a lighthouse, an ocean. You also know their relative locations, along with the time of day, the color of the sky, and so on.

You’re able to take the vast body of experiential knowledge you’ve acquired about the world you live in and use that as a powerful memory aid. You can remember the scene at the conceptual level, creating a scaffolding upon which to hang your memory of it.

Pierre can use this type of conceptual memory to his advantage when trying to recreate the original work. Brad cannot.

Our Musical Memories

Now let’s turn our attention to musical memory. To begin, here are two memory challenges for you. 

First, below is a video presenting a string of letters. Play through the video once, and then try to recite back the entire sequence of letters.

If you found that ridiculously difficult, you’re not alone.

Second, below is an audio clip of a melody. Play through the video once, and then see if you can hum the melody back to yourself after listening.

A bit easier, I imagine?

Both of these videos are actually representations of the same tune. The sequence of letters in the first video are the notes of the tune. The second is the audio of those notes played on the banjo. Below is a video of the notes along with the audio.

Remembering the string of letters was difficult, to put it mildly. Remembering the melody? Far simpler.

Once again, the first type of information – a [seemingly] random string of letters – is hard for anyone to remember.

The second type of information – a melody that conforms to the rules of Western music – is something every human brain is much better at remembering. Yet, both are representations of the same thing.

And therein lies the secret to our fiddler’s seemingly superhuman powers of recall.

A Happy Accident

In Episode 11, we came up with a definition of musical fluency, the mark of a master musician:

Brainjo Law #13 : Musical fluency and improvisation is predicated on the ability to map musical ideas (and the neural networks that represent them) onto motor programs.

Like the master painter who, through years of [the right kind of] practice, has built up a library of neural mappings between visual concepts and motor programs for controlling a paintbrush, the master musician has done something analogous, mapping musical concepts onto motor programs for operating a musical instrument.

In both cases, the creation of these networks allows the fluent artist and musician to tap into a type of memory that we’re all quite good at: remembering a real-world image in the former case, a melody in the latter.

Yet, these routes to memorization are biologically inaccessible to the novice painter or player.

The development of fluency transforms memorization from something arduous (remembering the movements of a brush or the notes on a page) to something natural and effortless (remembering a scene or a melody).

Before fluency has developed, the only possible avenue you have to memorize a tune is to commit the tab or the movements to memory. And this feels hard BECAUSE IT IS HARD! For everyone.

(RELATED: Click here for the system I recommend using to memorize tunes before you’ve reached fluency)

It doesn’t get easier one day because your memory gets better. It gets easier when you begin to develop fluency (as defined above).

Here, as with the ability to play faster, the ability to memorize new tunes easily occurs not through any sort of dedicated memory practice, but rather as a byproduct of the creation of brain circuits that support musical fluency.

Which is why building those circuits is the key to mastery.

Back to the “Laws of Brainjo” Table of Contents

Introducing “BANJO BREAKTHROUGHS”

Since launching the Breakthrough Banjo course in Nov. 2014, I’ve been delighted and humbled by the stories I’ve received from members.

Stories of folks doing things they didn’t previously think possible, like learning to play by ear, attending their first jam, or learning their first musical instrument later in life.

And giving people the tools to do things like this was the whole mission of Brainjo to begin with!

To give people the tools needed to do things with music they never would’ve believed they could do.

I also know how inspiring these stories can be for folks wanting to achieve similar things, so from time to time I’ll be bringing those stories to you.

EPISODE 1: Zachary Taylor

A Clear Path, Breaking Tab Dependency, and a Thumb that Drops

Up first in the Banjo Breakthroughs series is Zachary Taylor, a 21 year-old 5-string enthusiast who’d been trying his hand at clawhammer banjo for about 3 years before joining the Breakthrough Banjo course.

Zach On Breaking Out of the Tab Rut

Like so many folks, Zach had relied heavily on tab in the early going, and somewhere along the way realized that memorizing tabs would only take him so far. He’d reached a point where he felt stuck in a rut, but the way out of it wasn’t clear:

On Finally Conquering Drop Thumb!

Zach’s other main struggle, a common story in the world of clawhammer learning (my goal is to make it much less common!), was learning how to drop thumb: