[HELP] Should I memorize songs?

[Dondurma]

Hello,

I started Bootcamp 2 days ago, I'm going thru the lessons/songs like a video game and have a pretty good progress. My Question is am I doing it right? should I do one lesson and go straight to another or should I memorize it?

[sw1tch73ch]

Hello Dondurma, welcome to Playground Sessions!

So the boot camp or tour lessons do tend to build on the previous lessons to a large degree. I would go ahead and work those in the listed order. There is some thought into how the songs and lessons are broken down into exercises that you can study to think about how you should approach any new music, eventually music beyond what can be found in Playground Sessions - you're building skills not just to play music, but skills for how to learn how to play music, even though it isn't explicitly called out that way.

If you start a song and decide that it is beyond your current skills, don't think that is a failure, just put in on the back burner and come back later. Finally, "winning" a "level" doesn't mean you've completed it. Remember you are free to repeat lessons over and over as necessary. Especially the videos. These are serious tutorials, while made to be fun, still convey important information. If you feel you've missed something or aren't solid on a video lesson, watch it again. If you still have a question, bring that question here. Lots of us like showing off... I mean helping others with their progress. No question is too silly or noob if you really need to ask it.

Finally, if you are making great progress now but start to slow down, realize that is just like a video game too. You make a level 1 character in game and quickly get to level 10. Level 20, however, may take as much time to work through to get to Level 21 as it took to complete every level 1 to 19 combined. Sometimes new lessons in Playground Sessions can be that way and you'll think you hit a brick wall. At that point, recognize this is something that you need to work on, slow it down as needed, and repeat as needed. This isn't a race (which I suppose might make it unlike many video games) so take your time when you need to. And there will be other new lessons you breeze through - but feel free to repeat them anyway, if you want to be sure you "got this" for them.

[Dondurma]

Yes, I went all the way up to 38 lesson really good but I'm stick here for the whole day. Gottap push harder. I've been doing one excersice for hrs now.

[mjnornan]

What helped me was to go slow. Use the tempo settings in the top bar to slow down. Or if one particular passage is giving you trouble, use the loop feature and select that one part of the song, and play it over and over. Then speed up when you're ready.

[Dondurma]

Yes, that's exaclt what I tried and it works pretty good.


I also have one more question. DO YOU GUYS THINK IT'S BETTER TO PRACTICE WITH JUST METRONOME OR WITH ACCOPANIMENT? AND HOW CAN I FIX MY TIMING IF I'M MILLI SECONDS OFF? WILL IT COME IN TIME OR SHOULD I DO SOMETHING SPESIFIC?

[sw1tch73ch]

I also have one more question. DO YOU GUYS THINK IT'S BETTER TO PRACTICE WITH JUST METRONOME OR WITH ACCOPANIMENT?

That is an excellent question!

I like playing with the accompaniment. It makes it feel like you're working with others (and you sort of are - with whoever created the accompaniment). The Metronome is very good to work with too, because without accompaniment you are building specifically your own sense of the progress of the song, not leaning on cues from the other music.

Because I very often play between the default slow and fast tempos, I spend a lot of time where the accompaniment is not available (it only plays at the two default speeds). I like to think I'm getting the best of both paradigms. With Metronome, with Accompaniment.

AND HOW CAN I FIX MY TIMING IF I'M MILLI SECONDS OFF? WILL IT COME IN TIME OR SHOULD I DO SOMETHING SPESIFIC?

So the being a tiny bit off and getting wrong notes can have a few causes. One is a potentially weak USB cable. One might be your latency setting in Playground Sessions. It can also be something that you need to just practice more to get more "in time" with the metronome clock. On a MAC or a PC there can be stuff going on "behind the scenes" in the operating system; especially with Windows. Finally, you might just need to reboot or restart or just log out and back in to your computing device. Sometimes processes get slow from memory clutter and can be cleaned up by closing and opening the app and the entire operating system.