Make sure you know what all the notes and musical markings mean.Mathews has each small section end with incompleteness, enhancing savings. Learning research has found we recall almost-but-not-quite complete things more strongly than completed things. (Though there’s something similar in To hear ourselves as others hear us by James Boyk.) It enforces continuity between sections. I’d not seen this applied before so directly for music practice. One or two bars, but he advises always crossing a bar line bar lines, like line breaks in text, are there to make reading easier, but it’s often the case in music that they’re a little more like paragraph breaks-blocking out the sections of a piece often coincides with bar lines-so his recommendation in decomposition is to always practice starting the next thought, so to speak, even if only one note or chord. His seven steps: make small sections, then make them even smaller, i.e., by doing only the rhythm, only the LH, only the RH, joining them together only at extreme-slow: The gist of his approach is top-down understanding implemented with bottom-up practice: understand the song you want to play break things into small, manageable pieces, then break those down even further, continually returning to the whole. An important implication is that ‘memorize the music’ includes not only the notes but the rhythms, the tone colors, the interpretation. In a later section he says, ‘Begin with the intention to memorize the music.’ This is part of the fabric for eliminating confusion, i.e., intend to learn and be as certain as you can be that you’re intending the correct thing(s) at both the musical and performance levels. In different words, first what we’re trying to do and then how we’re trying to do it.

Technical challenges that we understand but can’t perform correctly and consistently.Confusion about what we’re trying to do.His typology of problems has two elements: Said differently, before physical performance we have a fully articulated musical intention. Mathews introduces his sequential model with, ‘One of our main goals is to eliminate confusion,’ meaning that prior to handling the instrument we know exactly what notes, in what order, in what rhythm, with what intonations we’re going for. ‘Guitar practice is the study of simplification.’įree book here, at his always-useful site.

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