The sixth bit. Ask your own questions and set your own goals.

Up until this point, I have been setting tasks, and you have been doing them pretty much however suits you. But the goal of this tutorial is the opposite of that - it’s for me to never tell you what to do ever again, and for you to have the ability to comfortably teach yourself to do things.

The thing about getting a little bit of knowledge about something is that more than making you feel enlightened, which hopefully it also does, it makes you aware of a whole new array of things you don’t know. A kind of frontier opens up on the periphery of your knowledge of a topic, consisting of all the things you know you don’t know, many of which you also don’t know how to learn. Not only is it hard to think about how to tackle all this knowledge you didn’t know you didn’t have, it’s also kind of daunting. You had to work really hard just to get the basics down, and the reward when you’re done is just an even bigger challenge? It’s easy to get caught up in thoughts like “I suck at this,” “I’m getting nowhere,” “I’m still so bad,” and so on. Comparing ourselves to others, it’s easy to think that we suck and will always suck.

So there’s two problems. The first is navigating the actual complexity of deciding how to approach a huge field of unknowns. The second is how becoming aware of how much we don’t know makes us feel. Fortunately, the same strategy is useful against both issues. That strategy is having a question, and turning your attention towards it, then using everything at your disposal to answer it.

If you focus on what interests you rather than comparing yourself to others, or how much progress you have made, it’s easier to learn. Rather than focusing your critical faculties on meaningless stuff like whether you’re “actually good,” or if you’re learning fast enough, or whether you’ll achieve something, you can spend your mental energy on working out little details in your practice and in your knowledge. This means, though, that the question has to be about something you’re actually interested in knowing. Instead of focusing on yourself, you can focus on finding out the answer. Accept any negative thoughts that may arise without judging them, and refocus on answering that interesting question.

Having a question also lets you break down the information you don’t know into manageable chunks. Rather than try to learn everything at once (which is impossible) you can start with one of the things you find most interesting, and then move to the next most interesting thing. You’ll often find sub-questions along the way (which will help you answer your main question) and additional questions, which you can come back to later. Even if you have already become the best ukulele player in the entire world (whatever that means) you can still continue learning this way — in answering questions that you don’t know, you can bring new knowledge into existence by answering questions nobody has answered before. Even if you’re not the greatest of all time (whatever that is) even if you suck, sometimes you’ll still end up asking and answering questions that nobody has ever approached before. Cool, huh.

But identifying which questions you’re interested in and then wording them well enough that you can answer them is a skill. And like all skills, it takes practice to develop. Approaching it in a structured way (as for most skills) can help you develop it faster. Here is the structure I use to find interesting questions:

Identify some big topics in the thing I’m learning. Think of some questions in each big topic. Try the one I’m most interested in until I solve it satisfactorily or it gets boring. Repeat.

For example, here are the topics I have identified in ukulele at the moment: music theory, musicianship, songwriting, technique, and instrument maintenance. And here is an example question or two for each topic:

Music theory. What scales are there aside from major and minor, and how do they feel? What kinds of unusual rhythms exist?

Musicianship. Will reading sheet music improve my playing? How can I learn songs more quickly? Can I recognize intervals and chords by ear?

Songwriting. Can I make a song where I change smoothly from one key to another? Do chord progressions evoke a topic, or is it the way I play them and sing?

Technique. How can I play bar chords more consistently? How can I transition G to E major more quickly?

Instrument maintenance. How should I clean the ukulele? How can I change my strings?

You can choose completely different topics and questions to my example, of course. These are just a few topics I’ve identified and questions I’ve investigated in the past. Don’t be afraid of getting ideas from other people. You can get a lot of ideas for questions by just watching YouTube videos about music. Not to mention the depth of information you can get from books.

If your questions are too big, you can break them down into more manageable pieces, and come back to the big questions when you’ve answered some of the little ones. Ideally, each question should last a week at most until you’ve either broken it down into other questions, solved it, or put it on hold.

Effectively, this is a new type of practice. The kind where you learn and practice songs was called rehearsal. Let’s call this new kind, where you investigate questions and topics that interest you “study”. There’s also a third kind of practice I want to identify. Let’s call it training. It’s named after what athletes do in the gym because it’s basically the same thing. Where in rehearsal, we practice for an activity in the outside world (say, performing a song) and in our study, we develop our knowledge of the ukulele, in training, we teach our bodies, especially our brains, to get stronger, faster, and more accurate at performing different actions.

In training, there are four important things:

Consistency. Measurement. Technique. Rest.

When training, you should fix everything but one meaningful parameter, and try to improve that parameter. For example, I might choose to train the number of beats per minute at which I can play a certain chord progression with a certain rhythm and strumming pattern. (Suppose I need to do it fast to play a song but it’s hard.) So the parameter I’m training is BPM. Each time I train, I will do exactly the same thing; try to play the progression five times at the BPM I’m currently trying to hit with the aid of my metronome. Then take a rest, then do it again. I’ll repeat the process five times and record the results in my notebook. If I did it correctly for the whole session, I’ll increase the BPM next time. I should start at a BPM that I find somewhat challenging but not impossible because I’ll be under-stimulated and bored if I start too low, and I’ll be too strained and forcing myself if I start too high.

Consistency is really important in this process because if you train at random intervals or change around how you practice, it’s hard to find out why you’re not improving — maybe it’s because you skipped practice, or because you slept less than normal. Measurement is really important because it helps ensure that you’re appropriately challenging yourself. Technique and rest are extremely important because they make sure you’re not wasting your time or hurting yourself. There is a point at which you gain very little from continuing to practice a motion without rest, and increase your risk of injury by a lot. Do your best not to exceed that point, and to ensure that the movements you’re learning are not ones that hurt your body.

You can also train mental abilities, such as being able to hear intervals and chords, and musical memory. In these cases, you need to take appropriately sized breaks with even more caution because training too frequently won’t help the information enter your long term memory. Check out spaced repetition systems for more information about that.

Training will also lead you to more questions to drive your study, often related to interesting details about how your body works. And it will support your rehearsal by providing you with new things you can do in songs. Not to mention how playing more and hearing more benefits your composition. But it’s also the most serious of the types of practice I’ve outlined, and if you don’t need it, don’t use it. It’s a tool that’s available for you when you want to be able to do something really hard.

With these practice tools in place, you can then set yourself a goal or two. The point of having a goal isn’t necessarily to achieve it, but rather to determine the direction you progress in. It’s most important to focus on your intrinsic enjoyment of the activity or music making than to think about the goal too much, but someone whose goal is recording an album is going to progress a bit differently to someone whose goal is to become a competent improviser.

So finally here is the task: