Skills

I have played music since I was about ten years old; my uncle gave my brothers and me a guitar when I was 13. Learning music is mostly a very laborious process. One gets better at it incrementally. I have attempted to teach a few people how to play guitar, with limited success. The first lesson has been learning the chords G, C, and D – you can play thousands of pop songs with these three chords – in accordance with my belief that the first thing one needs to overcome is that phase of learning in which practicing is boring. The sooner the guitar student is able to play songs, the sooner he stops practicing and starts rocking out. At this point the process will move itself along despite attempts to slow it, if the student is genuinely interested in becoming a better player. The process will continue until the student hits a dreaded plateau.

In one of my favorite books, Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, students at a tennis school are commonly plagued by the developmental plateau. Hal Incandenza, on page 260, is revealed to have undergone a “quantumish competitive plateaux-hop” the previous year, vaulting him from a mediocre tennis player to one near the top of his class. Our spelling is different for complicated, Canadian reasons; the concept is the same. On a plateau, the student undergoes almost no skill development, practice though he may. I more or less continually learned new concepts in guitar until I was about 16, at which point I hit a plateau that lasted two years. I went to college and my roommate showed me the modal scales (ionian, aeolian, locrian, lydian, &c.) and I had a burst of conceptual expansion. I then reached another plateau on which I have sat, more or less, for the last ten years.

I believe the developmental plateau is a serious obstacle to continued skill progression for any number, if not all, areas of study. I hypothesize that it can be systematically beaten, but my spotty success rate will cast doubt on this claim.

In general, the new student, having no previous experience with the skill he is attempting to acquire, is limited only by the amount of time he spends working at it. It is undoubtable that children are better than adults at learning new languages (including written music), and I am sure plenty of psychologists have thoroughly documented, if not physically explained, this phenomenon. But I will eat my hat if a primary reason more children do (not can) learn new languages is that they are forced to spend the time learning them. A new student, who really knows nothing of the skill (say, me learning to speak Arabic) need only invest time memorizing anything at all about the subject. Since he has no foundation, anything he learns, no matter how miniscule, will become part of his foundation.

Note, however, that I have studied foreign languages and therefore I have some foundation, however tiny, for learning Arabic, which, for reasons I hope to explain here, may put me at a comparative disadvantage to a child in learning a new foreign language.

So, the new student simply needs to take in basic bits of information that take no previous knowledge to process. If the student continues to do this, his foundation in the skill will grow stronger, and he can achieve a more sophisticated level of understanding and ability by building on this foundation. Why doesn't the cycle then continue smoothly upwards, ad infinitum?

This, of course, is where the language analogy becomes less appropriate; it is a fairly simple process for the student, with sufficient continued exposure to the new language, to become adept at speaking it. But what about playing guitar, or tennis, or ballet dancing - subjects whose upper ceilings are harder to define, and possibly non-existent? What about juggling - when for 45 years one has been able to juggle 23 bowling pins, how does one reach 24?

I said at the beginning that one gets better at music incrementally; this is not entirely true. Pop/rock guitarists will gladly reminisce with me about the day I first learned what a power chord was: three (or two) simple notes, in an easy configuration on the fretboard, completely transferable across the frets on the first two strings, and delivering an elephant stampede of a sound. I went crazy. I played Smoke on the Water for a week.

In learning power chords, I scaled a developmental plateau. I am sitting on another guitar playing plateau, at which I arrived by scaling a series of lower plateaus, resulting in a staircase-like progression. Kind of technically invalidates the term plateau, I know, and I would go back and change it if Word had some magical device which sought out a word in a passage and automatically changed it to another word – but that’s just silly. I am walking around on a plateau, looking for a way to get to the next plateau. Importantly, though, I scaled my previous plateaus in the middle of learning things, tiny as they were. All these Metallica songs are rooted in these three-note combos – well shit, all these Ramones songs are nothing but these three-note . . . aha! Power chords.

So to get off my plateau, I am waiting until I rediscover the power chord. It’s not going to happen.

But I’m an okay guitar player: a little will, a little discipline, and a couple of discoveries (really, five, tops, at the level of the power chord discovery) and I’m certainly good enough to play in a band. So the method is not terrible. It’s the method I try to instill in students: learn G-C-D, then you’re playing Wild Thing, Blitzkrieg Bop, The First Cut is the Deepest; add E minor and you’re playing Redemption Song, even rhythm on D’yer Maker. Garage band bliss. Sure, you’re on your first plateau, but then you just need to learn the pentatonic scale. . . .

What has led me to believe I might have a way out of the endless plateau is my recent attempt to attain two more skills: one of which I have something of a foundation in already (I’m learning to play the pedal steel guitar), the other I know virtually nothing about (I’m learning kung fu). I started each in the spring of 2005. The pedal steel was going very slowly, which was frustrating because I had been spending hours at it, and after a couple of months I was thinking, after this much practice at regular guitar I had made more progress than this, and I was 13 years old. Not that I couldn’t play anything, but I was having a hard time getting comfortable enough to play along with the band, &c. So I went to kung fu class and took out my frustrations on the punching bag.

At kung fu, I progressed like a normal student, attaining a new belt every three months or so. It’s hard for me to judge progress in that I haven’t actually fought anyone, let alone anyone I had fought before starting classes, so who knows how much better I really am. But my endurance is up: I can do about twice as many pushups without stopping now, and probably three times as many in five minutes. I can touch my toes (without bending my knees). My classmates who hold my punching/kicking bag seem to recoil a bit farther after I strike.

A very unexpected result of my kung fu experience is the counter-intuitive (to me) necessity of moving on to something else in order to “master” what I already know. After a few months had gone by it would be time to test for my next belt. I would always hesitate, not feeling that I had a satisfactory grasp of the material. My teachers would insist that I did, and after my tests they always had a few pointers, but I never failed. The amazing thing is that when I came to class with my new belt and started learning new material (which, not feeling terribly confident with my previous belt’s material, I never looked forward to), I found I could do the old material much more adequately than I thought before my test, and that now that I was learning something new, the old material didn’t seem to me as something frustrating and complicated, but something I had in my arsenal – not “mastered” (when is anything, ever?) but something my muscles could perform without racking my brain. I had (and still have) no explanation for this, but I decided to try to apply the method that facilitated my kung fu improvement to my pedal steel playing.

The parallels between music training and martial arts training are numerous. A short kata is a chord: a small series of kicks, punches, sweeps, and blocks (notes) that form the building blocks of a long form (song). Blue belts learn a long form using the bow staff:

INTRO: bow, kick staff up, jab, block left, step, block forward . . .
VERSE 1: step right swing three, step left swing three, step right swing one, step left swing one
CHORUS: step, jab, pivot, jab
VERSE 2: step right swing three, step left swing three, step right swing two, step left swing two
CHORUS
BRIDGE: swing four (five times)
CHORUS
OUTRO: seven walking swings, bow.

The same things go through my mind while performing a kata and a song. I am careful to execute what I’m doing correctly while anticipating where to go next, not devoting too much brain power on one or the other. It can be exhausting mental and physical work, but I know the audience is watching and if I do it well, like I’ve done it before, it will be a thing to behold.

Then there’s sparring.

Sparring is jamming. They’re spontaneous, alive, liquid, exhilarating. The things I’ve spent hours mundanely practicing, repetitively and out of context, I throw together into a garden salad of sound or fury. When I have it working just right, it exactly fills up my brain – there is no room for balancing my checkbook or cleaning my closet; at the same time, my brain doesn’t search for the next move because it’s already there in front of me. I feel it. My opponent or bandmates act, and I go with it, and vice-versa. (I don’t mean to say either jamming or sparring is a thoughtless endeavor; on the contrary, neither can be done successfully without hours of contemplation, outside criticism, and deliberate molding and re-molding of strategy. But in the moment of action, in real time, the human body and brain must leave the realm of conscious planning and fly on the wings they have spent all this time constructing. Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, is an entertaining look into the self in these times.)

So I asked myself what I was doing differently in kung fu class from what I was doing sitting at my steel guitar. I realized that I was over-conceptualizing, trying to mold a mental inventory of steel guitar methods before playing anything. I wasn’t practicing tiny, stupidly-simple pieces and building a volume of things I could play from the ground up. I was insisting to myself that I was too good for that, and that I could learn steel guitar the way I learned geology – by reading a few books and thinking about it. It won’t work because it’s not learning that I’m doing; it’s developing a skill. I remember not knowing when to tell people I knew how to play guitar: you strum the strings and hold them down at the frets. I know kung fu: you kick the guy’s ass. But to develop a skill, to play guitar or do kung fu well, you must continually do small things and build them up, doing more things better, slowly, over a huge amount of time. Importantly, there’s an added bonus to doing new things – they seem to make the old things easier. Again, to me, this step is pure magic; if anybody believes this and has any insight into the phenomenon, I’m all ears.

For skilled people, I’m sure much of this is old hat. But I know enough people who have excelled early in an endeavor and hit a wall, never to advance beyond, to know that this is not old hat to everyone. Why do so many people, myself included, have so much trouble advancing to the next plateau? Part of the reason is probably that the student doesn’t know where to go. It is too easy to repeat the things he knows (now that he’s rocking out instead of practicing) rather than to seek out new material. This may require finding a teacher, and for many rock guitar players, lessons are strictly bush league (they also may be expensive). But I believe the most difficult piece of the plateau’s wall is that the student has now tasted the glory of scaling a plateau. The mundane things that are now necessary for further advancement seem too tedious and too numerous to undertake. He will spend his time standing there, looking up at the next ridge, figuring out how he is going to make his next big breakthrough, when the next step is, necessarily, just that: taking a step. Steps barely get you anywhere, so who needs them?

But standing there looking around gets you nowhere at all.