Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning

and Jamie’s lessons (or her cult-classic book The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar) would be a fine place to start,

Instead of being asked to regurgitate some set of memorized facts for a final exam, the kids in Gill’s class build their own projects. And instead of competing, they were collaborating.

In the world of music education, one of the most inspiring figures is Marienne Uszler, co-author of the widely regarded The Well-Tempered Keyboard Teacher.

The Moog Guitar solves this problem, by using a system of electromagnetic mechanisms— entirely analog (no synthesizers involved)—to literally vibrate the guitar’s strings and keep them in motion

Instead of taking the one-size-fits-all approach that I (and virtually every other amateur) might take, Derryberry tunes his guitar differently for each individual song, taking into account what particular chords and melody notes might play a prominent role in that song.

But the ability to improvise and create new music as a writer is a separate skill. Some people possess both, and some, such as classic studio musicians, are people great at playing, not great at writing or creating something new. Those are two different talents. Sometimes they are embedded in the same person, like Hendrix had both talents.

As Paul McCartney said in a television interview, “As long as the two of us [John and Paul] know what we’re doing, we know what chords we are playing, and we remember the melody, we don’t actually have the need to write it down or to read it.” Who could argue with Sir Paul?

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.

Irving Berlin. Indeed, Berlin, who wrote standards such as “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “White Christmas,” “God Bless America,” and “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better),” was such a limited piano player that he could only play in the key of F-sharp, but that didn’t stop him from making music. Eventually, he got a special custom piano with a shift lever on the right that would allow him to transpose his work into other keys.

sometimes referred to as muscle memory (really a kind of memory in the brain)