For years I tried to learn in a linear way, with everything in my life. The way I was taught in school. We’re going to start at the start, open your textbooks to page one and we’ll begin. It sometimes worked, but other times it stopped me learning anything at all.
I had a revelation when I started to properly learn the guitar. I learned in a different way, then everything started to slot into place - and it wasn’t just guitar, it was lots and lots of other things as well.
Let’s rewind a bit. I remember being reasonably young, maybe 10 and trying to help my dad around the house, but I was terrible at it, he’d get angry, I’d get angry at him and I’d resigned myself to the fact that DIY wasn’t for me. Nothing really changed, after I got married I remember my father-in-law remarking that I was ‘not handy’ and again I just accepted that. Then when we moved into our first house I just started doing stuff, really small at first, putting up a shelf (wonky), trying to fix a leaky tap (still leaks, but not as much) then I started building a wood store, functional, but a mess (think Homer’s spice rack, but for wood).
Then I built another one, slightly better, then we moved again so I built a new one. This one looked half decent, I put a sloped roof on it, covered it in roofing felt, made some sections to split out seasoned from non-seasoned wood. I was still slow, measuring twice, cutting once (sometimes measuring and cutting again). Then we moved again and all of a sudden I’ve developed some serious ability, I don’t need to measure as much, I can eyeball an angle and I can calculate lengths in my head, I’ve made a little jig for my saw. All of a sudden I’m Handy Andy, but I did not notice.
In 2021 I decided I wanted to learn the guitar properly. I’d stopped and started for many years and never got anywhere, so I got in touch with Vic Hyland and started lessons. I wanted to learn to play the blues, I knew a few chords already, but pretty basic stuff. I started printing out the tablature for everything and sitting down going note by note, getting very bored very quickly. So with Vic I’d start learning something, then a few weeks later we’d start learning something else, this was strange. Surely we have to learn the whole thing from start to finish, but no that did not seem to be the case. We’d learn a bit of the intro to Johnny B. Goode then a bit of Clapton or Peter Green. And quite a lot of the time we wouldn’t do a lot of guitar playing at all, we’d talk about music theory of course, but also philosophy, meditation or just about music in general; the genesis of how artists got their sound or the mistakes they made along the way. I’d go home and practice, frustratingly slowly, fingers all over the place, hitting the wrong strings, but over the course of the next year or so I’d developed the ability to solo over blues tracks or over Vic’s playing.
I didn’t learn this in any traditional or linear sense, my brain just started making links in the background. All of a sudden I had a new skill, and it didn’t stop there, I could tell which notes were right and which weren’t. That one sounds a little sour, that one works over that chord, but not that chord. I didn’t mean to learn this, I don’t actually know how I learnt it. I went back to a Peter Green song I’d been trying to learn, put the song on and tried to play along. Damn! I can do this, this sounds alright, I can hear what he’s doing there, that’s a little curl there or a slide there - this is witchcraft!
I resisted for so long, I was sure that learning was a linear process. When I learned that it’s not I stopped trying so hard and ended up learning a lot more and a lot more quickly.
I had been taught the method, first the 1 x table, then the 2 x table etc. or learning every box of the pentatonic scale before being able to play a song, but I had it backwards. Just do the damn thing, you’ll figure it out. Parents watch children do this, we all did it ourselves, we didn’t learn to talk by going through the alphabet over and over.
You don’t need to know everything before you start. I probably caused myself so many problems by trying to learn in a methodical way.
When I stopped thinking about it and started just doing it, all of a sudden a new world opened up. You have to practice, but that’s not the end of it, your brain doesn’t need a rigid system, you don’t need to memorise every fact, movement or chord shape. I could try a new solo or chord progression, get frustrated in the moment, then come back a day later and I was better at it. My brain was seemingly sorting this all out for me while I was sleeping or cooking dinner.
There’s another cool thing that happens, your brain will start making connections between things you didn’t think were related and this is where this all came together for me. It was sitting with Vic one day, telling him how I’d become competent at building things by accident, then I realised the DIY and guitar were connected, they were two different expressions of the same thing. I hadn’t registered it to begin with because I’d never considered DIY as creative exactly, but it is, and mastering it is the same process. Do it, fail, do it some more.
So what do I mean when I say ‘stop trying’?
I stopped putting arbitrary timescales on things. Sure, you can say you need to complete a piece of artwork by x date or learn a new scale or perfect Mary Berry’s Victoria sponge before Aunt Beryl comes over, but don’t give mastery a deadline. There will always be something new to learn, there is not going to be a time when you can say ‘completed it’ so let that go.
I did the things I wanted to do, not because I should. Learning something you hate is a terrible way to spend your time. I tried to get my son to learn guitar, he wasn’t interested, he loves football and mountain biking, he may come back to the guitar at some point, maybe he won’t.
I let myself be bad at it, for ages I was slightly embarrassed that I wasn’t already good at the thing I’d just started. Allow yourself to be bad at it. No one in the world who cares about you cares about how good you are except you, I used to beat myself up all the time because I couldn’t play like Clapton or sing like Stapleton, but I let that go and just enjoyed the process.
That’s it. I will never stop learning, but I did manage to stop getting in my own way by trying too hard.
A few weeks ago my wife got home from seeing some of her friends where they were discussing house renovations and my name came up, ‘Matt’s handy isn’t he’ - I’m still not quite sure how I got here.