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/

There are lots of different ways to go about learning guitar. At The Guitar Gym, we believe in differentiating based on the needs and wants of each client.  That said, we will more often than not advocate a “skills-based” approach.  It is very important for us to have a clear understanding of your reasons for playing and what you are seeking to accomplish with your guitar if we are to develop an effective program for you.  Our general approach would be to have you acquire the knowledge and develop the skills and techniques for playing the guitar that are relevant to YOUR goals, supplemented by learning songs that YOU want to play. This approach brings with it a number of benefits, regardless of what stage you are at with your guitar playing.  

Starting out with a skills-based approach is excellent for forming a strong foundation. An early focus on skills such as playing chords, reading chord charts and rhythm sets you up to be able to quickly and easily learn lots of songs early on, and cements these skills as a part of your repertoire for you to call on later. Essentially, learning the skills is less about learning songs than it is about learning how to learn to play songs. This is very important for making your home practice more enjoyable, as it allows you to choose any song that you want, whether it’s one you heard on the radio or one you grew up listening to, and have a good go at learning to play it. You already have the skills, it’s just a matter of putting the notes or chords in the right order. This way you can start to tackle your favourite songs at home, and you can use your lesson time for getting into the really hard parts.

Everyone has different tastes in music, and that is totally okay. Your preferences for listening and playing are part of what make you unique, both as a person and as an artist. The kinds of music that you like to listen to and play will come with their own genre-specific quirks, and these quirks most like require specific guitar techniques. Folk and acoustic lovers will need lots of open chords and fingerpicking; blues cats will want 7-chords and improvisation; metalheads will need speed and techniques like economy picking and pinch harmonics. There is no rule that says that you need to learn all of the techniques in existence to play the guitar. Talk to your coach about the kind of music that you like, and that way they can help choose which skills need to be worked on, and which can probably be skipped over – if you want to sound like John Mayer, then you probably don’t need reverse-gallops and dive bombs, but if you’re working on some classic Iron Maiden, then you could probably pass on the fingerpicking for now. By prioritising only the techniques that you need, your development towards your personal guitar goals will be much more efficient. There are no hard-and-fast rules for what you need to be able to do, and if your needs or interests change, your lesson program can change right alongside them. Your lessons are about helping you to become the player that you want to be, so anything that we can do to make them more focussed on your goals is worth considering.

When you learn the guitar just by learning songs, it makes it difficult to quantify your development. As you learn more songs, learning songs becomes easier, but how do you gauge whether the next song is easier or harder than the first one? How can you be sure that it’s the best song for the stage you are at? How can you define what you are gaining from learning that song? These questions do not arise when learning guitar via a skills-based approach, especially when you’re with The Guitar Gym. When working on skills in isolation, we can use a variety of time-trial-like activities that equates your proficiency to a number, whether it’s the time it takes to play a certain progression, or how many times you can play it in a minute. Numbers don’t lie. These activities allow you to quantify your improvement by showing you in black and white how much you have improved between sessions and since beginning that technique. It also allows you to compare scores with others at your studio in the spirit of friendly competition and mutual inspiration.
 
Ultimately, there is no right or wrong way to learn the guitar. However, a skills-based approach is the most likely to provide you with the best returns for your time investment, and sets you up with the capability to learn and develop more on your own. Learning how to play the guitar instead of just learning songs empowers you to be able to reach your goals faster and with a more complete and focussed grounding in the aspects of the guitar that are relevant to you. Talk to your coach about what skills you feel you are good at, what could do with a bit of work, and ask if your coach can recommend any new skills for your skill level or area of interest. One of the best things about the guitar is that there’s always more to learn!