"Okay! As we continue our guitar journey, we need to talk about how you're going to be attacking the strings. And I'm going to recommend that you use a pick." David's tone is upbeat and encouraging, as always, and he seems to be looking right at me -- his ability to make eye contact with the camera is uncanny. Propped on his right thigh, his acoustic guitar looks like a natural extension of his body.
I have my (borrowed) guitar on my lap as well, and have set out a few picks on my desk. Though I've watched hundreds of guitarists perform over the years -- and I have David's example right in front of me on the computer screen -- I'm having a hard time figuring out how to even hold the instrument. In the previous lesson, "How to hold the guitar," David emphasized that I should hold it close to my body so it doesn't "dance around", and also that I shouldn't hunch or lean over the guitar. But these instructions seem somehow incompatible with my (female) anatomy. Nevertheless, I've moved on to "How to hold the pick."
I began to explore online guitar lessons as an extension of my research on Guitar Hero and Rock Band. As anyone who's paid attention to media coverage of these games already knows, Guitar Hero players are constantly being exhorted to "lrn2reeltar", so I thought I'd take up the challenge. A YouTube search led me to David Taub; he posts some lessons there as teasers for the extensive guitar curriculum at nextlevelguitar.com. I can't embed David's NLG lessons here because the ones I'm discussing are only available by subscription; as with traditional private instrumental lessons, my virtual guitar lessons cost money (although they are much, much cheaper than private lessons; I'm paying $75 for three months of unlimited access to the video curriculum). "How to hold the pick" is Lesson 11, and it's almost 11 minutes long.
Why would it take someone 11 minutes to explain how to hold a guitar pick? Here are my initial fieldnotes from Lesson 11:
Early on he really focused on the tactile nature of the pick -- especially the fact that it might be slippery, and therefore picks with raised letters might be an advantage at first. He asked the cameraman to zoom in on the pick and demonstrated subtle differences in the angle of the tip. He showed that you should hold the pick tight enough that you can't pull it out with your other hand, but not super-tight because it's important to stay "natural". This reminded me of two things -- how jewelry sales clerks explain how a ring should fit (you shouldn't be able to pull it right off), and those exercises where you close your eyes and feel/describe all the sensory qualities of a raisin (except there's no eating the pick at the end). By zooming in on the pick and talking about texture, slipperiness, tension of the grip, etc. David really encouraged a lot of physical awareness and sensitivity to subtle differences in picks or pick-related technique. I wonder if a face-to-face teacher would just physically correct the student instead, or hold his/her hand up to the student's hand.
My previous guitar-playing knowledge was derived entirely from Guitar Hero. Laugh if you will, but as I've been exploring in my research blog and a recent article, there really are some technical basics that cross over. (For instance, the distinct roles played by fretting hand and strumming hand -- when I first started playing Guitar Hero, positioning the fretting hand in advance of hitting the strum bar felt quite counterintuitive to this pianist/clarinetist.) However, since a Guitar Hero controller has no strings and the strum bar isn't detachable, the game didn't give me any advance training on holding a pick. As I followed David's directions and (in subsequent lessons) tried some vigorous strumming, it was surprisingly difficult to hang onto the thing. Paying attention to texture really did make a difference: the raised letters on one pick gave me crucial tactile feedback, both for judging the right amount of tension between my fingertips and for feeling when the pick was sliding around in my hand.
I can't say how or whether David's Lesson 11 was different from the way an in-person lesson might unfold, but I suspect that a typical private instructor wouldn't spend 11 minutes encouraging me to just explore what the pick felt like in my hand -- and if I were paying by the hour, I might feel cheated if s/he did. I'd certainly feel more anxious about having my pick go flying across the room, too. Having taken more online lessons now, I know that the total absence of performance anxiety is one major difference between this learning experience and the private piano and voice lessons of my teenage years: after all, I'm alone in my living room. Except that I'm also not alone, because at any moment I can click over to the NextLevelGuitar forum and seek advice and encouragement from other students, or send David a question, or do a YouTube search to see how other guitarists hold the instrument or the pick. And if I want an audience, I can post a video of my playing to the NextLevelGuitar "Audio/Video Showcase" -- "If you just started to learn to strum 2 weeks ago or applied something you learned from David's Intermediate advanced or a video song lesson we would love to see it. Any haters will be banned immediately in this section..." 1,894 posts in that section so far, and a wealth of crowd-sourced feedback. I could get to like this "real guitar" thing.
I'm very curious about your research on "Guitar Hero," Kiri. I wonder, do you have any difficulty separating out the different roles you have to assume as an NLG student -- the role of the guitar-learner and the role of the researcher? I ask because David's lengthy commentary on holding a pick might register very differently to those who occupy either of these different roles, and of course might be registered differently by students at different levels of experience and understanding. What are the broader research questions that are driving your project? Are you interested mostly in player experiences? In the form of certain kinds of 'open' or pedagogical gaming experiences? Something else?
Thanks for your interest! You can learn lots more about the Guitar Hero study by browsing past posts at http://guitarheroresearch.blogspot.com. My current work on online music lessons is part of a broader project that investigates forms of play, performance, and participatory culture that bridge the virtual and the visceral. Since I'm an ethnomusicologist, I'm particularly interested in musical angles on all of this: for instance, lately I'm thinking a lot about how various forms of musicking (playing, singing, listening, dancing -- including qualitatively distinctive practices like sight-reading and improvising) might offer a model for understanding the virtual performance involved in playing videogames, and vice versa. You ask a good question about my position as researcher/student (aka participant-observer); this is something I'll explore in detail in the book, but meanwhile I'll just point you over to my article about player-as-ethnographer in the Grand Theft Auto games (http://gamestudies.org/0801/articles/miller).
Most interesting. I've spent a fair amount of time with Charlie Keil -- read a bunch of his stuff, & played in street bands with him. He, as you may know, he is rather skeptical about anything but live music-making.
You ought to check out my book on musicking (I did notice your spelling), Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic 2001), where I use Susanne Langer's notion of art as virtual experience. You can find some of my ideas online in my essay review of Steven Mithin's The Singing Neanderthals:
http://www.human-nature.com/nibbs/05/wlbenzon.html
This is such an interesting post, Kiri. The medium of the video promotes the translation of haptic knowledge into verbal and visual discourse (eleven minutes on holding a guitar pick). While the teacher can't mold your hand or shove your elbow up and down (ah, the memories of high school violin lessons with a Moscow Conservatory-trained chainsmoker!), there's no scarcity of time or of words, a point highlighted by the hours and pages of words (and hours of video) poured into the message boards. A superabundance of time, visuals, and words replaces the experience of a grumpy tobacco-scented man yanking your elbow for 45 minutes while saying, "no, the WHOLE bow."
Your post is particularly interesting to me as someone from the University of California system. Anyone who teaches at a public university, and many at private institutions, has heard online teaching proposed as a solution to budget limitations. The idea is that doing things online is "cheaper," or sometimes even "free."
I'm interested in online learning but skeptical of the idea that it is going to be cheap or easy to do well. Google, it ought to be pointed out, loses a lot of money on YouTube. One thing that digital media do well is occlude labor and overhead, and/or devolve it onto the end user. Someone is paying for that broadband connection; the server isn't free; moderating message boards takes hours; designing the site took labor and skill; someone has to manage technical glitches, but it's all invisible, paid for by advertising (or simply unpaid labor), but as far as you and I know, "free."
The governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, recently espoused this idea that anything on the internet is cheap or free in an interview on The Daily Show,
The model Pawlenty imagines is basically a model of undifferentiated information (or "content"), in which the point of going to college is to learn stuff, which gets poured into students' brains by a teacher or, equivalently, by a YouTube video. The bodily practice of congregating with other students, of visiting office hours, etc., as well as a number of other elements of what we call "college," are imagined to be irrelevant to learning.
Part of what's so interesting about your post is that the particular case you're examining, learning to play a musical instrument, is explicitly physical. The strategies David adopts to translate a physical action into words and video point up the complexity of that translation and the the altered relationships to time and words that it may entail, which are not, as far as I can tell, worse, but which certainly have pedagogical implications.
Natalia, could I just commission you to write this section of my book? Because you obviously know exactly where I'm going with this (and I look forward to quoting your description of the magic of a "real", visceral, hands-on music lesson). Online lessons do raise a host of questions about who's paying/who's getting paid for all this. David Taub has adopted a subscription model, supplemented by selling DVDs that teach people to play particular songs (this allows him to legally license the songs -- the copyright issues with online lessons are a whole other issue that I'll be exploring in the book). But he still uses YouTube to drive traffic to his site, and he and his tech-guy partner did a lot of work to attract views there (I think they initially were also getting paid for ad views on YouTube; maybe still the case). Other sites, like OnlineDrummer (created and maintained by a science teacher in Ohio in his "free" time), are committed to keeping all their content free but must rely on ad revenue and donations to stay afloat. The unpaid labor of volunteer message-board moderators is incredibly important on just about every site like these, and also goes a long way toward constituting a dispersed group of students as a self-identified "community" (vs. just "customers").
When I first started taking classical guitar lessons my teacher did indeed spend at least 11 minutes, perhaps more, on the care of the nails. Classical guitarists don’t use plectrums; they use their fingernails. He cut, shaped, filed, and sanded my nails (recommending a guitar shop in town where I could buy precut tabs of ultra-fine sandpaper for polishing off the nails). Guitar Hero guitar players don’t use picks either. The plectrum is built into the guitar, which is activated by the thumb, not held between the thumb and finger, as is a pick – although there may be some GH players who hold the guitar’s pick-tab like they might a real pick; the folk aspect of the guitar has led to a variety of picking and playing styles and to the development of different types of guitars. Many jazz guitarists use both a pick and their fingers, a kind of hybrid classical technique, which might suggest another question: what is a real guitar? Think of the cigar box guitars, handmade. In the folk-guitar sense, the GH guitar is a real guitar.
To Natalia’s point: “…a model of undifferentiated information (or "content"), in which the point of going to college is to learn stuff, which gets poured into students' brains by a teacher or, equivalently, by a YouTube video. The bodily practice of congregating with other students, of visiting office hours, etc., as well as a number of other elements of what we call ‘college,’ are imagined to be irrelevant to learning.” And one of those “other elements” she might have mentioned is the 300 student filled lecture hall, often presided over by an assistant – one might as well be listening to a podcast or watching a video.
The biggest problem I see in any kind of on-line teaching is that the teacher can’t listen to the student in the same physical way that a guitar teacher sitting in the same room as you will listen to you play and offer instruction based on what she hears and sees. But where students already may feel that they are not being listened to by the teacher, they may begin to drift toward other methods of getting their learning.
Have subscribed to your site and will continue reading. Looking forward to reading your GH/schiz article – sounds and looks interesting.