Profile view of a business man with a megaphone, isolated on white background[/caption]Over many years of learning and teaching students to play the guitar, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to see how much of an impact different approaches can make. One particular method which stands out above the rest are vocal affirmations.
A vocal affirmation is just saying what you are doing or playing as you do it; ie. saying the name of the notes you are playing or counting out loud. I have literally seen students transform their ability to play a piece in minutes using vocal affirmations – one particular student did it in less than 7 seconds! Now, not every change will happen nearly that quickly, but the changes that occur when you use your voice to state what you are doing are quite dramatic. Ironically, vocal affirmations are easier said than done.
If you’ve ever tried to say what you are playing as you play it before, you’ll know that it can be incredible difficult to do. It actually requires a fairly large amount of mental and physical coordination to do properly and if you lose focus, even for a moment, you’ll probably screw it up. If it is so difficult to do, why bother doing it in the first place? Here are few reasons why you should use vocal affirmations when practicing and the benefits you will gain:
Active Thinking
If you’ve been playing guitar for any length of time, then you’ve probably experienced the following practice situation: your mind starts off focused on your practice exercises, but by the fourth or fifth time through, you brain has checked out. You’re no longer thinking about guitar or music, but are instead thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner. When your mind stays focused you are doing Active Thinking; your mind is working on the problem at hand is trying to figure out the solution. By saying things out loud, you will be able to stay focused on the problem for a much longer period of time and get more out of your practice time.
Memorization
You’ve just seen that saying things out loud requires active thinking which is useful for keeping your attention on practice, but it also helps with memorization. Saying things out loud forces you to run the information through your mind over and over again – you are increasing your exposure to that new information. When you continually run the same information through your mind like this, it signals to your mind that this new information is important and that it should be remembered for later use. You are essentially getting an improved memory as a free bonus for saying the ideas out loud.
Confirmation
Saying something out loud is a kind of “double-check” to make sure that you really know something well. We often assume we know things better than we actually do and doing these kinds of checks can save you a lot of stress and embarrassment. For many things that you learn it isn’t until you are put under the stress of actually having to use the idea in a real-life playing situation that you get tested on whether you know it or not. This means that you might be in the middle of playing on stage when you realize you don’t know the notes of that one particular key as well as you thought you did…crap!
When you say things out loud you are actively testing your knowledge and making sure that you know it well.
Improves Recall
How quickly can you remember important concepts in music? If you needed to remember what the notes are in a C Major chord, how long would it take you? How about finding an Eb Major chord in the 10th position? What about reciting the Cycle of 5ths or the Chromatic Scale from memory without your guitar? If it takes you longer than 10 seconds to remember any of the previous concepts, then your recall needs some work. Great guitar players do not struggle to recall important musical ideas as they are essential to writing, improvising, and working with other musicians in a band.
To help improve your recall abilities, apply the principle of progressive overload by increasing the challenge level on a regular basis. The tried and true test of skill with the guitar is time, more specifically how quickly you can do something. By using a time limit or metronome to force you to do things in a shorter period of time, you are forcing your mind to work harder and faster; it will have to adapt by thinking faster to get the job done. When you say things out loud and increase the speed, you are testing the limits of your ability to recall the musical ideas that you have learned, forcing your mind to improve.
Multi-Faceted Memorization
Memorization and your ability to recall information can be improved by connecting different senses or approaches to one particular idea. When it comes to the guitar, a few examples might include the fret and string numbers, the note names, the sound of the idea, what it feels like to play, and how it works in terms of theory; the name is just another layer of memorization. Not only this but working on several of these approaches simultaneously will cause your mind to connect the different methods together, creating an even more powerful memory. By saying things out loud as you practice, you will be adding an additional type of memorization to the others you may already be using and you will connect the name.
Where can you use vocal affirmations when practicing the guitar?
Below is a short list of some of the things that would benefit from vocal affirmations when practicing. There are certainly many more possibilities than this, in fact, you could use it with just about anything.
- Learning chord qualities (Major, Minor, Diminished, Major 7th, etc.)
- Learning chord voicings (open chords, barre chords, shell voicings, etc.)
- Learning chord progressions
- Learning scales
- Learning keys
- Learning the notes on the guitar
- Learning arpeggio patterns
- Thinking about chord function as you play
- Thinking about scale degrees as you play
- Thinking about chord degrees as you play
- Thinking about note names as you play
- Reading guitar tablature
- Reading chord charts
- Reading standard notation
- Counting out rhythm and timing
I will caution you that using your voice to help you learn the aforementioned areas is going to be harder to work on than what you are used to. However, if you can stick it out, you will be rewarded for your efforts with an incredible command of your guitar. And, when all the other players who took the short road to playing the guitar are starring in amazement, wide-eyed and mouths gaping at your unbelievable playing skills, you’ll know that all that extra effort was worth it.
