Dusting off the blog for BlendKIT

A couple of years between blog posts never hurt anyone, right?

It's now week two for the Blendkit MOOC and as usual we're being asked for a posting on our reflections of the reading this week.  Rather than thinking about it in the context of my job, while reading I was wondering how my learning guitar fits into the structure that was discussed.

In many ways, I'm sort of creating my own "Blended" course- most of the content in learning is already online in the form of detailed websites and videos that cover learning guitar from step one to playing Classical Gas fluently.  Periodically, I sign up for in-person lessons with a nearby instructor.  This method lacks a central "professor", instead relying on a variety of experts such as Justin Sandercoe who all cover slightly different areas and the local instructor to tell me if I'm doing something stupid.

This probably is closest to the Concierge model- the online teachers will point out the things I don't know and then guide me through some exercises to learn the technique, then give some songs to practice with.  Once you understand the idea, it's possible to go out and find good exemplar songs to learn- "This solo is basically a set of c-minor arpeggios", and so forth.  Periodically the in-person instructor can point out specific flaws in my technique and suggest additional areas to work on.  Typically I'll go through a set of designed lessons and then spend a while simply learning music that I feel like, then return to a set of lessons to work on another specific area.  The combination of online and in-person stuff fits the Concierge model reasonably closely.

The biggest problem in my current learning is that I lack a good structure for conversation with other students at my rough level.  Forum postings are possible as an asynchronous method, but for music instant feedback from others would be valuable.  But it's difficult to find folks who are where I am- one of my coworkers invited me to play with him, but he's a semi-professional with decades of experience playing out.  I'd merely hold him back.  It's a powerful reminder of how important the face-to-face, peer-to-peer interactions in learning are; something I need to remember when I'm the guy in front of the class.

Full circle

I had to chuckle upon seeing the video for the Struminator. In a previous blog post I commented about the fusion of a real instrument and a game as a teaching tool- playing music is fun, but learning a real instrument to play real music is hard so people created Guitar Hero to play a much easier fake instrument. With LittleBigStar we now (mostly) have the ability to use a real instrument to play a Guitar Hero-like game, which could be an amazing teaching tool. But of course there's one combination that didn't exist- fake instrument, real music.

Someone just had to do it...

Learning by game.

Most everyone even remotely interested in video games will recognize the picture on the right. It's Guitar Hero, the game where you get a controller that looks like a little plastic guitar and you can rock out to all sorts of tunes, getting higher and higher scores the more accuratly you press the buttons on the "guitar". It's wildly popular, spawning endless sequels and imitators, including those that include multiple guitars, a drum set and a microphone so you can create your own virtual band.

Except that anyone who's actually played Guitar Hero knows that it's not GH or any clone. (No preening virtual rock stars in the background.) Instead, it's a freeware program called LittleBigStar. The main difference? No plastic guitar. Use your real one. Play the real songs.

LBS and an unreleased commercial competitor called Guitar Rising are the first wave of games that have come full circle. Lots of people want to play music with friends, but learning an instrument is hard. So the game makers created Guitar Hero and its clones and proceeded to make money hand over fist. Millions of copies have been sold- in fact, they've sold so well they now bring in more money than the sales of actual digital music. Players have spent hundreds of hours learning Through the Fire and the Flames on expert.

But you're still playing with a cheap plastic imitation of the real thing. So why not skip it and just use a real instrument? You can still use the same idea- hit the right notes at the right time and you get a higher score. Even better, the computer can adjust the difficulty: if you can't play a passage, just slow it down until you can, then pick up the pace later. Think of it as a metronome, but a lot more fun. Unlike guitar Hero, LBS also includes a top bar that mimics guitar TAB, so you can learn the notation at the same time that you are trying to max out your score

I'm not sure what to call this: it's not a simulation, but it's still a game. The closest thing I can think of is comparing a shooter game like Quake to a game of paintball. It's not virtual anymore- you're playing (within the limits of not dying) as close as possible to real combat. As a rank beginner, it's also close to impossible for me since I still need to watch my fingers rather than a screen, but LBS will force me to break that (bad) habit that I need to dump anyway.

These real life games aren't there yet- they still have difficulty handling quick chord changes and LBS shows that it's a labor of love by a single person, but expect to see a lot more of these pseudo-simulations coming soon.