Beat Holiday Regression – How to Maintain Guitar Progress Over Christmas

Christmas holidays – a chance for you to relax and enjoy some much-needed time off. It’s also a chance for you to forget some things you’ve learned, and undo some of the good work you’ve done throughout the year!  How can your guitar progress possibly survive this miasma of inactivity? Check out these easy ways to help you maintain guitar progress over Christmas, and beat “Holiday Regression.”

1. Continue Your Lessons If Possible

The Guitar Gym only closes for 1-2 weeks over Christmas.  If you’re still in town, there’s no reason why you can’t come to a guitar lesson and maintain guitar progress over Christmas. If the usual after-school time doesn’t work during the holidays, just use the “Reschedule a Lesson” form on the website and find a time that works while you or your family is off school. Even if you have your lesson in the middle of the day on a different day each holiday week, you’ll still be reaping the benefits of weekly lessons without it getting in the way of you enjoying your much-needed rest and relaxation.

2. Stick to Your Usual Realistic Practice Schedule

If you’re still attending your weekly lesson, then you don’t need to practice any more than you did when you weren’t on holidays to maintain guitar progress over Christmas. One of the benefits of attending a weekly lesson is that you’ll continue to improve without additional practice, albeit much more slowly than with regular playing at home. Check out our article “Are You Really Too Busy To learn The Guitar?” for more on that subject.

With that said, if you usually go to school and now find yourself without schoolwork, you have way more opportunities to grab your guitar and have a play. A good way to maximise this is to leave your guitar out where you can see it and easily pick it up and play. Cutting out the set-up time will make you more efficient, and makes playing the guitar more appealing. Check out our article “8 Tips To Better Guitar Practice.”  If you go on a trip, see if you can take a guitar with you. Whether you can or not, check online for any guitar shops in your holiday destination – it can be very interesting seeing what guitars can be found in shops outside of your usual haunts.

3. Hang out with Your Musical Friends

Chances are that people you know play an instrument, too. Now that you have some free time, organise to hang out and play some songs. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy – just play some chords together and have some fun. You’re on holidays, after all! The holidays are also an excellent opportunity to go and see some live music, with more festive events being held and you having more time to go and see them.

Go see some concerts with your musical friends and have an in-depth discussion of what you’ve seen – it’s amazing some of the things that you can pick up just by talking about music with others. Discuss some of what you see with your coach – all of the coaches at The Guitar Gym are extensively experienced in live performance, and will be able to shed some light on any questions you might have about how things are done.

4. Listen to Music

It sounds a bit obvious, doesn’t it – who doesn’t listen to music? Just make sure that some of your daily music interaction is active listening. Active listening means that the music is your primary focus while you’re listening to it, instead of having music as background noise while you do other things. You may be very surprised how much of your music you’ve been missing out on. Check out our article on active listening for more information on getting the most out of your music.

If your usual listening doesn’t include a lot of guitar music, maybe try to include some more guitar-centric music in your playlist. Regardless of the type of music you like, you’ll be able to find something that sounds good to you and includes a guitar. Try asking your coach for recommendations.

5. Don’t Feel Bad for Having a Day Off

The worst thing you can do is turn your guitar playing into a chore. If you miss some days over the holiday season, that’s totally fine. A little bit of practice during our holiday closure period will be enough to keep you improving. If you beat yourself up over every day that you don’t practice, all you’ll do is make yourself unhappy, and eventually despondent and resentful of the instrument. The old adage of “half an hour” of daily practice is a myth. Your weekly lessons are enough to keep you improving by themselves,and any extra playing you do at home is a huge bonus. Check out our article “Psychology for Success” to learn more about how your practice expectations can influence how you feel about your guitar playing.

Everyone celebrates the end of the year in their own way. Some take lots of time off work, some work all the way through. There are lots of ways that you can maintain guitar progress over Christmas. Ultimately, the most effective step you can take to preserve your progress during the holiday season is simply to continue to stay engaged with your guitar as much of the holiday period as possible, and to make music a part of your life for all the space in between.

Aural Health and Tinnitus

One of the most important assets any musician has is their ears. Not only do they allow us to play with other musicians, keep check on our own playing, and (with some training) work out how to play songs using our ear, they are fundamental to actually experiencing music. It makes good sense then that we should be aware of our aural health, and how to avoid damaging our hearing. This article will cover some anatomy to explain how our ears work, what can cause damage to our ears, and what we can do to protect them.

How Does Sound Get From the Guitar to Our Ears?

When you pluck a string on the guitar, it vibrates a particular number of times per second depending on the tension (tuning) and length (fret) of that string. This displaces the air particles around the string at a particular frequency, causing waves of pressure to radiate out from the string. These pressure waves are what our ears interpret as sound. When the sound waves hit our outer ear, they are funnelled down into the ear canal until they hit the tympanic membrane (or eardrum). The eardrum is connected to three tiny bones called ossicles (these are actually the smallest bones in the human body). The sound waves cause the eardrum to move back and forth very quickly – at the same speed the string was vibrating. This causes the ossicles (tiny bones) to vibrate as well, and they stimulate the cochlear – a tiny organ deep inside our ear which translates these sounds into an electrical signal that our brain can understand. The cochlear is also what is normally damaged in progressive hearing loss.

There are two functions of this system: one, to funnel as much sound in from all directions, and two, to either amplify very quiet noises, or attenuate very loud noises. This second point is very important – if given the chance, your ears can adjust to constant loud noise by adjusting the position of your ossicles (tiny bones), reducing the force of the vibrations being sent through to your cochlear, partially protecting it from damage. This is why it is particularly harmful to hear a very sudden, very loud noise – your ears have no time to adjust.

What is the Cochlear?

The cochlear itself is basically a fluid filled tube coiled up like a tiny snail, and lined with special, tiny hairs called cilia. When sound vibrations are transmitted into the cochlear, depending on the frequency of the vibrations, certain cilia will be stimulated. These cilia are connected to neurons, and when stimulated, will transmit an electrical signal to your auditory cortex where your brain makes sense of the sound. The pitch of a sound is determined by where in your cochlear the cilia are stimulated – higher pitches will stimulate the cilia at the beginning of the cochlear, and lower pitches will stimulate the cilia towards the end of the cochlear. Loudness is determined by the number of cilia stimulated. If the vibrations travelling through the cochlear are very strong, then the cilia can actually break off. Unfortunately, unlike birds or amphibians, in humans they don’t grow back, so if you lose enough cilia at a particular location in your cochlear, you won’t be able to hear sounds at that pitch anymore. As the cilia for higher pitches are at the beginning of the cochlear, they are the most vulnerable to damage.

How Loud is Too Loud?

So as you can imagine, if you want to keep your hearing healthy, you’ll want to avoid loud noises, and particularly loud sudden noises. But how loud is too loud? According to the American National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), sounds of 75 decibels or less are unlikely to cause hearing loss. However noises at 85 decibels or louder can cause hearing loss. To give you an idea, here is a chart from the Australian Government National Acoustics Laboratories of common noise levels and how long you can safely be exposed to them:

What About in Lessons?

In lessons, we normally wouldn’t go any louder than the noise a vacuum cleaner would make, so you have nothing to worry about in terms of hearing damage during lessons. If you’re cranking the amp at home though, this may be something to think about. Exposure to sounds too loud for too long can result in acoustic trauma – that is, damage to your ears caused by sound. Acoustic trauma can result in both temporary and permanent noise-induced hearing loss – something none of us want.

What’s this Thing Called Tinnitus?

In addition to hearing loss, acoustic trauma can also result in Tinnitus – noise or ringing in your ears when there is no physical cause. Tinnitus is a symptom experienced due to damage to our hearing system, and can be made worse by anything that affects our hearing, such as an ear infection or excess ear wax. It can be diagnosed by your doctor. Treatment is dependent on the cause – for example, resolving an ear infection may clear up the Tinnitus. Unfortunately though, if the Tinnitus is hearing loss induced, there is currently no treatment or cure.

How Do I Protect My Ears?

What should be clear by now is that we need to look after our ears! Obviously, the best way to do that is to avoid situations where we are exposed to loud noises for a long period of time. That means keeping your amp at a reasonable level! Unfortunately though, there are situations we find ourselves in where we can’t help being exposed to loud noises – for example at work, or at a concert. In these situations we should really consider using hearing protection. Talk to your local music shop or ask your coach for a recommendation on hearing protection equipment. While over-the-head earmuffs will do the job, there are some much more subtle ear protection devices available which will attenuate the level of sound you’re hearing without compromising quality. While hearing protection can sometimes be cumbersome or inconvenient, it’s a small price to pay for protecting your ears.

Hopefully now you have a better understanding of how our hearing works, and how we can protect it. Our ears really are our greatest asset, and unfortunately if we don’t take care of them, they can become damaged beyond repair. To avoid this, be aware of noise levels and how long we can safely be exposed to them, and in situations where you can’t avoid loud noises, use hearing protection.

Useful Links:

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/noise-induced-hearing-loss

Australian National Acoustic Laboratories

https://www.nal.gov.au/