Learning Curves

Yesterday Austin and I were talking about learning curves. This was after Austin tried playing my guitar for a few minutes and try one cord (D). He said, "that was hard!" This led to a comparison between learning to play the piano (easy/gentle learning curve) and the guitar (steeper/harder learning curve).

With a piano it's easy for anyone to just press the piano key and make the correct sound. Linking more than one note together is a simple matter of pressing one key then another. However, once you want to play more complicated pieces the learning curve starts to get steeper. For example, playing a melody with one hand and chords with the other.

We observed that with playing a guitar it's not simple to even get the correct sound when playing a note. You need to place your finger in the right spot (after the fret but not too far back), apply just enough pressure and strike the correct string. All this to just play one note! However, we speculated that once your body built up a "muscle memory" for the right way to play the notes (or chords) that it would become easier to learn more advanced songs.

I then described to Austin that most instruments tend to have a steep learning curve. It's usually more difficult than a piano to just make a correct note when beginning. Examples we discussed were trumpet and saxophone.

We also discussed what a "learning curve" is and why it's called a curve. I described how on the bottom of the graph we have songs that are increasing in complexity along the bottom and along the side we have the concept of "learning difficulty". We could then see that if we were graphing learning to play piano that the first few songs along the complexity axis are not that difficult to learn but as we move along to a song like _Fur Elise_ the difficulty starts to move up a lot more (FWIW this is a song that Austin has been trying to learn for about a year now but is a little "stuck" as it requires more effort on his part ... he's hitting the foothills of his learning curve!). We then did a graph of what it would take to just play a simple 3 chord song using the guitar and could see that right away, we had to place the first graph point high up on the "learning difficulty" axis. This creates a much steeper line when drawn on the graph. This is where the phrase "steep learning curve" comes from.

All the graphing was done using fingers drawing virtual graphs in the air so we don't have any paper to take pictures of.

This discussion lasted about 15 minutes. Austin played on the guitar for about 30 minutes and actually managed to make it sound fairly good w/out knowing a single chord! He just fooled around until he had it making sounds that he thought sounded good (and they did).