Saville, Kirt. Strategies for Using Repetition as a Powerful Teaching Tool. Music Educators Journal, 2011 98: 69
When a student brings a recorded song to me that they want to learn, the first thing I do is load it into Ableton and mark off the different sections with a simple color-coding scheme: blue for verses, green for choruses, orange for instrumental breaks and so on. This enables even non-readers to grasp the overall structure of the song. I then loop a short segment, usually significantly slowed, and have the student repeat it until they’ve attained some proficiency with it. As the student progresses, the loops get longer until they encompass entire sections. If a particular phrase is especially troublesome, I can send the student home with an mp3 of that phrase looped endlessly to practice over.
I can’t overstate the value of using loops of actual songs played by actual musicians, as opposed to metronomes or fake-sounding MIDI tracks. The metronome demoralizes students quickly, and convenient though MIDI is, it doesn’t convey feeling and nuance. Study of the genuine article, with its groove and feeling intact, is a vastly richer and more engaging experience. Also, listening to music loops creates a trance-like, meditative feeling, as fans of repetitive electronic dance music will attest. This meditative state is most conducive to flow, and turns repeated drilling into a pleasurable act.
Saville’s article discusses the value of repetition in music learning, and the challenges of putting it into practice. Repetition is fundamental to all forms of human learning, as the rehearsal of the material causes repeated firings of certain networks of neurons, strengthening their connections until a persistent pattern is firmly wired in place. Young children enjoy the endless repetition of any new word or idea, but for older children and adults, such literal repetition becomes tiresome quickly. Still, rehearsal remains a critical memorization method, especially in the intersection of music and memory. The trick for a successful music instructor is to lead the students through enough repetition to make the ideas stick, without descending into tedious drilling.
The key to effective music learning is “chunking,” breaking a long piece into short, tractable segments. Depending on the level of the students, those chunks might be quite short, a single measure or phrase. Once a series of chunks is mastered, they can be combined into a larger chunk, that can then be combined with still larger chunks until the full piece is mastered. Chunking helps get students to musical-sounding results quickly. Rather than struggling painfully through a long passage, the student can attain mastery over a shorter one, which builds confidence. Furthermore, Saville points out that chunking can help make feedback more immediate and thus more effective:
Experienced music teachers become adept at chunking and sequencing the reassembly of difficult musical passages as a means of solving complex performance problems. By chunking, we eliminate the delayed feedback inherent in a long list of items to be fixed after the performance of a long passage and instead focus on more useful and immediate feedback. Repeating the two most critical measures of a sixteen-measure phrase will solve more problems than the repetition of the entire phrase. Likewise, chunking the three troublesome interval leaps in a four-measure phrase will increase rehearsal efficiency and productivity.
Saville cites the music educator’s truism that “accurate feedback may be the single greatest variable for improving learning.” The longer the delay between the performance and the feedback, the less effective it is. It is best to give feedback in the moment, immediately after looping a passage, or even better, while the loop is in progress.
Repetitive drilling demoralizes students quickly. The challenge is to find a way to get students to repeat new ideas enough times to master them without boring them to the point of discouraging them. The strategies Saville lists are intended for classical ensemble teaching, but they are equally valid for jazz, rock, country and pop. Some of his recommended methods include:
- Call-and-Response Repetition — the teacher leads by example, without explaining the how or why, and students must use their own ingenuity to imitate.
- Performer-Switching Repetition — repeating a phrase with different students playing on each pass.
- Guided Discovery with Repetition — asking students to describe what they’re doing.
- Repetition with Addition or Subtraction of Degrees of Freedom — for example, having students perform the rhythm of a passage on a single pitch. I call this exercise the one-note groove and find it very valuable.
In my own music study and teaching practice, two programs have been invaluable in loop-based teaching: Transcribe by Seventh String, and more recently, Ableton Live. Both of these programs easily enable you to isolate sections of recordings, loop them, and alter their tempo. Transcribe is a fairly primitive piece of software, but it’s perfectly adequate for its stated purpose: helping the user transcribe jazz solos. It works equally well with any other style of music. In addition to its looping functionality, Transcribe can also identify the pitches present in short segments of audio.
Ableton is a full-featured audio production and editing tool. For education purposes, though, its robust looping features are the crucial ones. Ableton has the additional advantage of being able to arbitrarily alter pitch and tempo with minimal digital artifacting.
Coming next week: using drum loops to help students nail down their groove.
Hi Ethan,
I like your ideas about using loops, but two things stand out that I’d modify.
As a drummer I can’t help but comment on your view of the metronome. It should be set to cowbell or something and be seen as an opportunity to jam with a percussionist with perfect time :)
Also the danger of using a loop is that the student’s precision – hitting the note spot on – could get lost in the sheer amount of sound it produces, so while I can see the value of loops I can also see there are limits.
My second point is that I – and a lot of drummers; I assume it works for other instruments too – swear by practicing slowly at first as key to building muscle memory. Practicing at performance speed from the get-go is a sure fire way of learning, ie making permanent, the mistakes you’re sure to make at that tempo. Starting slowly — I usually start at 50% to 75% of the correct tempo — builds in muscle memory, minus mistakes, and you can always increase tempo. It’s harder to iron out mistakes already practice into muscle memory.
I can’t remember off the top of my head whether Ableton allows variable tempo playback with no loss of pitch (like Audacity does).
Hi Antony. Good point about the cowbell. It’s a big improvement on the regular old click. And for drummers, absolutely, it’s a good practice vibe. However, for guitarists and other instrumentalists, I stand by full drum loops. Even fairly advanced players can be lacking in the groove department. It’s one thing to keep steady time; it’s another to be expressive and in the pocket. There’s nothing like having people play over James Brown or the Roots to teach that. I tend to keep the volume low during lessons — the sound doesn’t have to be overpowering to make its presence felt.
Ableton does indeed do variable tempo independent of pitch, and you can adjust either during playback. I’ve never tried anything that manipulated loops better than Ableton. Of course, Audacity does have the significant advantage of being free.