brainjo method

The Metronome Playlist

Those who’ve made or who have made their way through the “8 Steps to Clawhammer Banjo” course and students of Breakthrough Banjo know that I’m a big advocate of playing along with a rhythm keeping device. The most time tested of these is the metronome.

In the earliest days of learning, playing alongside a metronome is a great way to ensure you’re focusing on good timing and rhythm from the get-go. It’s all to easy to overlook these aspects when playing in a vacuum, which can easily to the development of the dreaded “closet picker’s syndrome”.

But another benefit, which I think is of equal or even greater utility, is that the metronome is a perfect litmus test for automaticity – an exacting assessment for whether a new technique or tune has become “automatic.” You can read more about this concept in Episode 2 of the “Laws of Brainjo” series.

For those without access to a physical metronomic device, I’ve compiled a metronome playlist, which you’ll find above. You can choose the speed you wish by clicking the playlist icon in the upper left of the video and selecting from the menu (listed in ascending order from 40-140 BPM).

The Immutable Laws of Brainjo: The Art and Science of Effective Practice (Episode 7)

The Laws of Brainjo, Episode 7

Mind Over Matter

Not long ago, I wrote a piece for my “Brain on Banjo” article series for the Banjo Newsletter about the benefits of visualization in the banjo learning process.

Multiple studies have demonstrated that many of the benefits of practice, and the attendant changes in neurobiology that accompany them, can be attained simply by imagining yourself practicing.

Even though I’ve studied the human brain for over two decades now, and understand the physiology that supports this process, I still find the whole thing a bit magical – the idea that we can restructure our brains through thought alone seems like the stuff of science fiction. In the article I likened it to using the Force, that gift that allows a Jedi to manipulate the physical world with his or her mind.

In sum, visualization is a super cool and incredibly effective way to augment the learning process.

That said, I also know that if it’s not something you’re used to doing, you may feel a bit lost when it comes to getting started with it. If so, fear not! In this article, I’m going to share a simple procedure to help you get started, one I’d say that pound-for-pound is the most effective way to reap the full benefits of visualization.

More than a learning substitute

The fundamental idea of visualization in the context of skill learning is to simply imagine yourself performing the skill in question. Some folks may misinterpret this to mean that you should imagine watching yourself playing (the name itself is part of the problem, as it implies watching something). This is not the idea. You actually want to imagine yourself doing the activity. You want the first person perspective, not the third.

As I alluded to earlier, multiple studies have shown that this type of first person visualization activates many of the same areas as physical practice. In other words, when done right, many of the same parts of the brain that are active during actual banjo playing are active during imagined banjo playing.

In this sense, visualization can be viewed as a substitute for practice when, for whatever reason, you can’t pick a physical banjo.

But this view sells the technique a bit short, as there are additional benefits – ones that are somewhat unique to those of us learning the music of an aural tradition – that are actually easier to attain through visualization than physical practice.

By definition, when you’re visualizing, in the brain you’re connecting an imagined sound with an imagined feeling – in this case the bodily perceptions that accompany playing.

And, if we consider what types of neural networks that support the skill set of a master musician, this is precisely the thing these networks do. Through years of [the right kind of] practice, the masters have created direct neural mappings between imagined sounds (what they want to play) and movements of their limbs (so that those sounds are emitted through their instrument).

So, when you visualize, you too are building exactly the kind of neural networks that support the highest levels of musical expertise. In fact, you have no other choice. With no tab to look at, no hands to stare at, you’ve removed the visual system from the equation. All that’s left is sound and movement.

Visualization is also a fabulous technique for memorization, and provides an exacting assessment of how well you know a tune. If you can visualize yourself playing a tune from start to finish, then you know with certainty that you’ve got it. If you can’t, then more work is likely needed.

So, now that I’ve hopefully convinced you that visualization belongs in your suite of practice methods, here’s what I think is the perfect way to get started putting it into action.

Step 1: Record yourself playing a tune

Ideally, record yourself playing through a tune you’re still working through, one that you have yet to satisfactorily get “under your fingers” (you can even just record a section you’re finding especially tricky).

Alternatively, and particularly if you’re first starting out, you could begin by recording a tune you already know well. Even in this case, you’ll be reaping some of the benefits (specifically, building those “sound-to-motor” mappings I discussed earlier).

When recording, make sure to play through the piece as slowly as you need to in order to maintain accuracy. Speed is of little importance here. And it’s fine to look at tab or some other written source if needed.

Step 2: Play back your recording at a later time, and visualize while you do

Now, to practice the visualization part, simply play the tune back at a later time (whilst away from your instrument), and visualize yourself playing as you listen.

What you’ll find is that having an auditory cue, and having it be something you’ve already played, will make the visualization part nearly effortless. In fact, most likely the visualization will occur naturally; you almost can’t help but imagine yourself playing when listening to a recording of yourself.

And that’s it. Record yourself, then listen back later and visualize when you do. Over time, you’ll likely reach a point where you can visualize without the recording.

The Time to Visualize

It goes without saying that one of the great benefits of visualization is that it allows you to practice when it’d be otherwise impossible to do so (in the car, walking the neighborhood, while exercising, while engaged in un-stimulating conversation (so I’ve heard)).

But I think the absolute best time, when possible, is right before going to bed – something I do often (it can even double as a cure for insomnia!).

Last month, I covered the topic of how to choose when to practice. As you know, sleep is the time when we grow, the time when the brain does most of its rewiring in support of transforming the experiences of our day into physical memories.

And there I mentioned that the brain, when deciding what of those daily experiences to commit to long term storage, does seem to give priority to activities performed closer to sleep (all those college kids cramming right before bed understand this phenomenon on some level).

Yet, getting in a practice session before hitting the hay isn’t always the most practical thing. So what better way to still reap the benefits of the sleep proximity effect without having to disturb your family or neighbors than to conduct that practice session entirely in your mind? It’s the perfect win-win.

With that, we’ll conclude with…

Brainjo Law #10:Visualize while listening to your recorded playing to build sound to motor mappings.

Episode 8: The Secret To Staying Motivated

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About the AuthorDr. Josh Turknett is the creator of the Brainjo Method, the first music teaching system to incorporate the science of learning and neuroplasticity and specifically target the adult learner

Clawhammer Core Repertoire Series: “Shady Grove”

We all know that nothing showcases the unique sounds of the banjo quite like a modal tune. We also know that modal tunes might be best described as a “banjo player’s banjo tune” – beloved by devout fans of the instrument, but perhaps not as well appreciated by the uninitiated, for whom its archaic scale tones may be a bit too inaccessible to the unfamiliar ear.

Not Shady Grove.

For whatever reason, this old nugget of a lovesong has become a crossover classic, with its popularity extending well outside the bounds of traditional old-time banjo. In that way, it’s a great way to initiate the uninitiated, to introduce them to the idea that there are great sounds yet to be discovered outside of the monochromatic world of top-40 radio.

Or at least we can pretend this is so.

Anyhow, perhaps the best reason to learn Shady Grove is that it’s simple melody that, in modal tuning, is darn easy to play! And play it we shall.

Step 1: Know thy Melody

This step should be an easy one, as the melody for this song is dead simple.

In the video above, I’m tuned down to the key of D to better suit the gourd’s temperament and my post-pubescent vocal chords, but we’ll be playing it out of “G modal” tuning in this lesson, which means we’ll be playing it in the key of G.

To help hear the melody in this new key, I’m going to attempt to sing a verse in G for you:

Take a listen to these examples enough time to etch this melody into the banks of your memory.

Step 2: Find the Melody Notes

Speaking of G modal tuning, make sure your banjo is properly tuned to gDGCD before going note hunting. Once you’re there, see if you can find the basic melody notes of this tune on your banjo.

Here’s my version of the basic melody in audiophonic format:

And here it is represented in tabulational style:

Step 3 – Add Some Clawhammery Stuff

With that out of the way, let’s make it sound like a banjo tune. Go ahead and first follow each of the notes that occur on the downbeat (placed in bold in the tab above) and follow them with a “ditty” strum.

Add in a few choice drop thumbs and hammer-ons to syncopate the melody (by shifting it to the offbeat) to add some interest, and here’s what you get:

And here’s how it sounds:

Step 4: Embellish to Taste

The simplicity of and space within this melody affords you ample opportunity to play around with it, so don’t be afraid to stamp it with your personal style.

That’s what I did in my final arrangement you heard in the first video. Here’s what that looks like in tab:

A Word (and a video) About Syncopated Skips

Notes in the shaded box in the tab above are “skip notes.” In these instances, the picking hand continues as if it’s going to strike the string, but doesn’t actually come into contact with it (you “skip” the note). It’s a great technique for adding syncopation, and one I receive a lot of questions about, so here’s an in depth video lesson on the subject (part of the “Breakthrough Banjo” course):

And just to help you get a sense of what that sounds like in our current key of G modal, here is is played in that tuning:

Go to the Core Repertoire Series Table of Contents

The Immutable Laws of Brainjo: The Art and Science of Effective Practice (Episode 6)

The Laws of Brainjo, Episode 6

When Should You Practice?

In the last episode in the Laws of Brainjo series, we tackled the question of practice time: just how much we actually need to get better, and whether it’s possible to practice too much.

This time, we’re shifting our attention to a different but related question:

When during the course of the day should that practice take place?

What’s Your Chronotype?

In this modern, newfangled world of ours, with all manner of artificial light sources at our disposal, we’re free to set our days and nights according to whatever schedule we please. And if we wish, we can divorce our “daily” routines entirely from the rise and fall of the sun.

Yet, the time that’s passed since the invention of the incandescent bulb represents only a tiny blip in the total swath of our history on this planet.

So even though technology affords us the opportunity to escape our ecological niche, our biology remains inextricably linked to the rhythms of nature. Which means that every cell in our body, including those in our brains, still cycles through changes on a 24 hour schedule. These are our “circadian rhythms.”

Translation: we operate differently in the morning than we do in the evening, and we’re better suited towards doing certain things at certain times of day.

Last episode, we discussed the essential role that attention plays when it comes to learning new things. Attention is the means by which we signal our brain that whatever activity we’re engaged in, like banjo playing, is worth learning.

And research shows that most humans are able to maintain their sharpest focus in the late morning to early afternoon. This is the time when those attentional circuits so critical for facilitating neuroplasticity are typically at their best. Not surprisingly, given our discussion in the last episode, this is the time of day when we tend to perform best at learning new things.

But this window won’t be the same for everyone. Your ideal time for practice, the time of day when you’re at your sharpest, will in part be determined by your own personal “chronotype,” which is just a fancy way of describing whether you’re a morning person or an evening person.

As you might imagine, the larks among us are best suited for practice sessions during the early part of the day, while the owls are capable of keen attention far later into the evening.

You likely already have a pretty good idea of which chronotypic camp you fall into. But if you want to get more specific, there’s even a quiz you can take to precisely quantify your degree of morning or eveningness.

Also, if you start paying attention to the way you feel during the course of the day, the times when you feel your most alert and productive, and the times when your energy starts to wane, you’ll realize pretty quickly that this pattern remains pretty consistent from day to day.

Which brings us to Brainjo Law number 9:

Brainjo Law #9: The meat of your practice sessions should occur during the time of day when you’re at your sharpest (for most, this will be late morning to early afternoon, though this can vary further according to your chronotype).

On a related note, it turns out that our creativity peaks when we’re a little bit tired, during periods when our attention tends to wander a bit. This is your best time for free-form noodling, when your random and uninhibited meanderings around the fretboard might lead you to a serendipitous discovery or two that you can add into your bag of tricks.

A Word About Sleep

As you may know from previous articles in the Laws of Brainjo series, the whole point of our practice sessions is to provide our brain with the inputs it needs to wire up new circuits and forge new pathways. And the bulk of that rewiring and path forging occurs during sleep.

Sleep is the time for growth and restoration, both physically and mentally.

And there is some evidence that the brain, when it triages the events of the day, gives priority to the activities performed closer to sleep. So, all other things being equal, you may be able to get a little more bang for your practicing buck closer to bedtime.

So you night owls are in luck. While the logistics of society in general may not be set up in your favor, this is one instance where your contrarian chronotype works to your benefit.

For you larks, who can’t imagine mustering the requisite focus for an extended nightly practice session, even just a brief, 5 minute session to reinforce anything you’d practiced earlier in the day should allow you to still reap the benefits from this phenomenon. Here, all you’re trying to do is convey to your brain that you consider that banjo practice from earlier to be a worthwhile thing for it to work on while you snooze.

And you don’t really even need your banjo in hand for this condensed, pre-slumber practice. Simply visualizing a brief practice session before you hit the hay should be enough for our purposes here.

If you’re not too familiar with the idea of visualization, fear not! It will be the subject of the next installment in the Laws of Brainjo series. It’s a cheap, efficient, and suprisingly effective tool that definitely belongs in your practice arsenal. See you then!

Episode 7: Mind Over Matter

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The Immutable Laws of Brainjo: The Art and Science of Effective Practice (Episode 5)

The Laws of Brainjo, Episode 5

How Much Should You Practice?

If you hang out around banjo forums for long, you’ll notice certain commonly recurring topics:

“What’s the best banjo under X amount of dollars?”

“Can I play Scruggs style without fingerpicks?”

“How much do you practice each day?”

Years ago when I first took up the banjo, I’d find those conversations about practice time a bit demoralizing.

Tales of daily marathon sessions of 8-10 hours were commonplace. Anything less than 4 and you best not speak up for fear of public shaming.

I was in my first year of medical residency when I got my first banjo, when 90 hour work weeks were the norm. In those days, I was thrilled if I could squeeze in 15-30 mins of picking time in a day. Was I deluding myself by thinking I could become a banjo player with such comparatively little time to devote to it?

Needless to say, not only did I become very interested in methods that would maximize practice efficiency at that point, but I also became intensely concerned with the question of how much practice was truly enough.

We seem to have a natural tendency to believe that if a little of something is a good thing, a lot is even greater, even if our experience tells us that more is often not better.

So what then of practice? How much is enough? And is there such a thing as too much?

The Minimum Effective Dose

First, let’s clarify precisely the question we’re asking, which is how much practice time is necessary to get results? In other words, what amount of time is required to make sure that the next time we pick up our banjo, we’re a better player?

Remember, the goal of each practice session is not to get better right then and there, as getting better requires structural and physiological changes in the brain that take time – changes that are set in motion during practice, but that continue long after we’ve set our banjos down (much of it while we sleep).

With this in mind, our question then becomes, what’s the minimum amount of time needed to signal our brain to change?

Necessary Conditions

As stated above, to learn anything, the brain must literally remodel itself to build novel neural circuitry that supports the new skill or technique we’re learning.

Yet, we don’t have unlimited space or energy to work with. Our brain is relatively fixed in size, and building new brain stuff requires precious energy stores. To operate successfully within these constraints, our brain must be selective about when it changes, and when it doesn’t.

To illustrate, think back to February 9th of this year. Do you remember what you had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Do you remember who all you spoke with that day, and the contents of those conversations? The emails you sent? The websites you visited?

Me neither!

You don’t remember those things because your brain didn’t deem them worthy of long term storage. They weren’t worth spending valuable space and energy on. I think you’ll probably agree that your brain made a good decision. Whether it was eggs, toast, or a pop tart on February 9th, who really cares?

And how exactly did your brain decide not to encode those things into long term storage?

Because you didn’t pay much attention to them.

Every minute of every day, our brain is busy sifting through an incomprehensible amount of sensory data. Most of it is discarded as irrelevant, not worthy of the resources required to store them for a later day.

But what of the stuff that is worthy and relevant? How does the brain know to keep that for later?

By only storing the things you were paying close attention to.

Attention is the means by which we tag the events of the day to signal our brain that we might need them again later, cueing the brain to then rewire itself towards that end. There’s a large body of research on this issue, and the results are solid: without attention, memories aren’t formed and skills aren’t learned.

But the type of sustained and focused attention we’re talking about here isn’t easy, and it isn’t something most folks can carry on for too long in one stretch. At least not before the mind tires and begins to wander. And once the mind wanders, further efforts are wasted.

So what’s the typical amount of time a person can maintain this level of focus? About 20 to 25 minutes.

Brainjo Law #7: When practicing something new, practice until your attention starts to fade. For most, this will be 20 to 25 minutes.

So, if our practice sessions are best divided into 20 minutes bursts, the next question, then, is whether this is enough time to trigger the brain to remodel itself in the service of our desired skill. Stated another way, how much is enough time to induce neuroplasticity?

Until recently, we were left to only make an educated guess about this question. But thanks to recent technological advances, we now have the tools to assess when the brain has remodeled itself through practice, enabling researchers to target questions of this nature more precisely.

Using those tools, it’s been shown that 25 to 30 minutes of focused practice time is enough to produce the structural changes in the brain that support skill acquisition.

Putting all this together, we can reasonably conclude that, when learning something new, about 20 to 25 minutes of focused practice is sufficient for achieving our goal, which is to ensure that the next time we sit down to play the banjo, we’re a better player.

Furthermore, given what we know of the limits of human attention, and given that there’s a limit to how much the brain can change in a day, the practice curve is likely U shaped, like this:

After a certain amount of time, we face diminishing returns, as our attention wanes and we run the risk of spinning our wheels. This goes on too long and we start to compromise the quality of our inputs. We can take a break and return later, of course, but at some point we come up against the limits of neuroplasticity.

So, should your predicament be as mine was many years ago, when the demands of work and family left little time for banjo plucking, don’t despair. Take heart, and keep mind this next law of Brainjo:

Brainjo Law #8: When practicing new skills on the banjo, quality beats quantity. Twenty to thirty minutes of focused, distraction-free practice is sufficient to ensure consistent progress.