Mastering Transitions When Learning Music
When learning a new piece of music it can be very easy to find ourselves getting frustrated with it. Frustration is not an enjoyable emotion, and if we find ourselves repeatedly marinating in frustration, it’s going to significantly impact our ability to enjoy playing guitar, possibly to extent where we find ourselves losing motivation to practice.
Frustrating is caused by having expectations. Now, I’m not saying that we should not have expectations, but we should make sure that our expectations are realistic.
A lot of the time we have completely unrealistic expectations of ourselves, which is caused by misunderstanding the learning process.
The more realistic we can make our expectations, the less frustration we will suffer. When we understand the learning process, we an idea for how certain areas need to be approached which means we can create realistic expectations.
Which brings me to todays main point - transitions.
Transitions can often be very difficult and must be treated as an individual practice item.
For example, let’s say we are learning a verse to a song, and the chorus.
Just because we can play the verse and the course independently, does not mean that we can transition between them.
The learning the two sections and learning to transition between them are three indepedent practice items.
An Example
I’ve recently been working on a particularly fiendish piece of music. There are multiple sections that are variations on each, that need to be at 110bpm. Let’s call the sections A and B.
Here’s how some people might approach practising them:
- Learn Section A. Slowly train it from 60bpm to 110bpm over the course of several days.
- Learn Section B. Slowly train it from 60bpm to 100bpm over the course of several days.
Now at this point some people may think, “I learned section A and B individually at 110bpm, I’ll play them together at 110bpm”, then find they cannot do so and get incredibly frustrated.
The key is that we have to start from zero when doing the transition, and add a third step to how we approach learning these two sections:
- Learn Section A. Slowly train it from 60bpm to 110bpm over the course of several days.
- Learn Section B. Slowly train it from 60bpm to 100bpm over the course of several days.
- Learn the transition from A to B, from 60bpm to 110bpm, over the course of several days.
Use this approach for learning music and you will find you can consistently improve your playing and work your way through anything.