Mike's Oud Forums

Motor memory lapse

El Atrache - 9-22-2024 at 03:39 AM

Good evening everyone

After many years of being passionate about listening to oud planning to start playing oud, I finally had the courage to do so this month. Im 32 y/o. Im practicing almost 3-4 hours a day however after one month of dedicated practice Im still suffering from skill decay or motor memory lapse in which I have been trying to learn the same skill over and over and when I master it my brain forgets how to do it next day.

Im frustrated with my progress. I just want to know if this is ok to happen and how to overcome it. What is a realistic timeline to learn oud and reach intermediary or advanced level? Is there an average number of hours to practice daily? Is practicing that much a bad or a good thing? Is learning oud online less effective than learning it in-person? I would appreciate any advises.

Thank you everyone

kampanas - 9-27-2024 at 08:27 AM

From experience, take a break from the exercise for a few days. There are numerous articles out there talking about over-repeating something has adverse affects on memory.

Give your muscles a chance to build new neuro connections, you can't progress without recovery (physical and psychological)

maraoud108 - 9-28-2024 at 08:00 AM

Your enthusiasm is so great and congrats for having the courage to start playing! So many people never get to this stage.

You should think of learning to play as a slow process. Like a tree growing and bearing fruit. Or like dying a cloth.

Regarding the amount of time you're playing, it might be good to play less in the beginning. 30 minutes to an hour.

I say this because as you slowly develop proper technique, if there's things that you're doing wrong, you can cause pains and even permanent injuries.

Quote: Originally posted by El Atrache  
Good evening everyone

After many years of being passionate about listening to oud planning to start playing oud, I finally had the courage to do so this month. Im 32 y/o. Im practicing almost 3-4 hours a day however after one month of dedicated practice Im still suffering from skill decay or motor memory lapse in which I have been trying to learn the same skill over and over and when I master it my brain forgets how to do it next day.

Im frustrated with my progress. I just want to know if this is ok to happen and how to overcome it. What is a realistic timeline to learn oud and reach intermediary or advanced level? Is there an average number of hours to practice daily? Is practicing that much a bad or a good thing? Is learning oud online less effective than learning it in-person? I would appreciate any advises.

Thank you everyone

Brian Prunka - 9-28-2024 at 10:48 AM

Do you have a teacher? The main point of a teacher is not so much to tell you what to play but to guide you through the process of how to learn.

To add to the good points of kampanas and maroud108:

3-4 hours a day is too much as a beginner. There's a lot of information about how learning happenns, but in a nutshell:

What you are calling "skill decay" or "memory lapse" is actually a necessary and important part of the process of moving material from short-term memory to long-term memory. So yes, it's totally normal. Our brains aim for efficiency and optimization. When they encounter new things, there is an automatic process of attempting to determine whether it's a one-time event or something we need for the future; the somewhat clumsy mechanism for this is to forget it a little bit and see if it comes up again. The 'forgetting' occurs on a curve, we forget the newest material most quickly and more thoroughly; there more we revisit it, the curve is slowed and eventually is nearly flat (i.e., it is essentially a 'permanent' memory).

Look up "spaced repetition" to learn more about how to optimize practice time and learn more quickly. You can't "brute force" your memory or skill acquisition, it's just not how our brains work. There is an ebb and flow to the process.

Regarding your other questions, everyone has a different timeline. What "intermediate" or "advanced" even means is different from one person to the the next or even to the same person over time.

The thing that you didn't ask but is very important to know is that while the "motor" skills of playing are very important in the early stages of learning (the instrument is physically unfamiliar and requires new physical skills and awareness), the main work of being a musician occurs in your imagination.

That is, the ability to hear, understand, and imagine sounds is the main mechanism of playing music and the physical part is just a tool that is integrated into one's ability to imagine music as clearly as possible. So as long as you think about the mechanics of playing as mainly physical motions, your ability to master them will be limited. The key is to imagine the sound you want and try to "aim" your playing at the sound, while constantly refining both your aim and the clarity of your imagination.

Another way of thinking about this:

yes, you do need to spend time with the mechanics and physical aspects of playing the instrument in order to master the techniques and build good habits. We can't really focus on more than one thing at a time, but music requires us to do many things at once. So we need to make a lot of those things automatic.

At the same time, most of music is not mechanical. You cannot use mechanical practice to fix non-mechanical problems. Learning to tell when a problem is mechanical and when it is musical is a big part of developing and learning how to practice effectively. So called "muscle memory" only goes so far.