After completing Yousician’s Level 3, I am just beginning my 15-minute-steps on the road to completing Level 4. The very first activity is a group of songs that feature single-string–rather than chord-based–strumming, with different notes clustered more tightly together than they have been in previous melodies. The activity is designed to introduce and gain comfort with playing notes on the way up as well as down, for faster and more fluid playing of faster songs. The activity encourages–practically requires–the use of a guitar pick, and a growing concern of mine has now nicely coalesced in this activity: the lack of human oversight.

To this point, I have completed learning points and exercises in the order laid out by Yousician, and have only the app’s scoring system and my overall feelings of proficiency to determine whether I am learning and improving or not. At the very beginning, the virtual instructor told me that it was up to personal preference whether to use a guitar pick or your thumb, and as we were playing single strings, I found using my thumb easier. Then when we learned our first chords, I switched to a guitar pick, because that was easier to play many strings at once than using my thumb was. When we went back to more-complicated single-string melodies, I switched back to my thumb, where I had some measure of muscle-memory finding individual strings. For single strings I’ve used my thumb, and for chords I’ve used a guitar pick, and that’s been successful… until now.

If/when I get to the point of playing songs around a campfire with my friends, they’ll almost entirely rely on chords, so I will almost entirely have a guitar pick in my hands. Yet I wanted to use my thumb for these newest melodies, because my thumb has been easier to this point. The issue is that my thumb is not well-suited for strumming on the way up. So now I’m using a guitar pick, and while strumming on the way up is much easier, finding the strings with it is much harder, so I’m missing a lot of notes that I’ve built muscle memory for with my thumb, but not with the pick.

This turn of events has me reflecting on the value of human instructors and mentors. An experienced mentor could have told me that I’d probably spend most of my time with a pick in my hand, and encouraged me to build that muscle memory early, thought it was harder than just using my thumb. Because I didn’t have that context when I made an early decision in my learning, I now have a significant hurdle to overcome at a much later stage, one that I as an amateur did not have the capacity to anticipate. I very well may work my way through the melodies of levels 2 and 3 again, guitar pick in hand, before returning to level 4. A human instructor could have saved me the extra effort and backtracking, but they also could have run me hundreds or thousands of dollars. The ultimate question is, what is your time worth?

I feel as though I am a hiker climbing a mountain without a guide. Yousician is a switch-back trail, laying out a sure-fire path to the top, with lots of stops and detours and repetition along the way. Much of what I see on the trail will be new and interesting, but at the same time, much of it will be repetitive, and I may even go up the wrong trail and have to backtrack before proceeding. It is (theoretically) possible to go straight up the side of the mountain, skipping segments of the trail, but this is overall more difficult than following the switchback, and in the process I miss out on any experiences along the trail I skipped. Though not surprising, I can now very clearly and practically see the benefit of having an instructor. An instructor could advise me to take a shortcut here, because the trail doesn’t show me anything I haven’t seen before. Then, they could really make sure I take my time on a certain segment, maybe having me look at it from a couple different directions, to really emphasize and contextualize the experience from that part. A mentor can look at landmarks along the trail and say “Oh, you think that’s neat? Good, because there’s tons of it higher up” and that’s something that Yousician can’t (or largely hasn’t) done.

For next week, I will work on finding those strings with a guitar pick in hand, and may ask my friend Nicole to teach me a song or two she likes playing! See you next time 🙂

Photo by Sean Quillen on Unsplash