When you've been around the block a few times you don't just learn a bunch of things, you learn a bunch of things about learning things. This post (and hopefully the thread) is about ways of learning.
I have two main ways of learning things, named for the way they happened in my life: the "Yorkshire" way and the "Choux" way. You can't contrive the "Choux" way, so most of the time it's "Yorkshire". But they both have their benefits.
Let me explain.
When I was in my teens I played in brass bands in Victoria. I was in a pretty mediocre outfit which marched on ANZAC days, played the odd agricultural show, and did neither very well. Then we got a new musical director, a genuine brass-playing Yorkshireman, with a very clear idea on how things could get done. Within a couple of years he'd lifted us from "untested" to B Grade State Champions and National Finalists. The main lesson I learned from him was "Practise does not make perfect: practise of perfection makes perfect". Broken down, this means that if you make mistakes in your rehearsal you'll make the same mistakes in performance, so you need to consistently practice without error if you ever hope to perform without error. Starting where we were, though, there was another lesson he had for us, and that was to ensure that we could perform competently before trying for something harder. This applied not just to playing, but also to marching. He had us out on the fire track, marching up and down, just getting our rank and file spacing right, before we ever tried to re-learn wheels, counter-marches or any of that other more complicated stuff. This is an excellent lesson for all sorts of things in life. How can you ever expect to acquire complex skills if you haven't learned the basic ones which underlie them? It's the old "gotta learn to crawl before you can walk" thing. I've applied this in my guitar-building by taking on what I presumed to be a simpler guitar type (the Tele) before attempting the more complex Red Special I'd really like to build, the theory being that I'll get a shallower learning curve if I spread the experience over several builds of escalating complexity.
Anyway, in my mind this is the "Yorkshire" way, because the first time it really crystallised for me was when it was applied by my Yorkshire-born brass bandmaster.
The other way is named in my mind simply because nobody ever told me it was hard to make profiteroles. I was living in a place in Carlton with a girlfriend, and her parents were coming over for dinner. We wanted to impress them (her mother was a home economics teacher), so I looked through a cookbook and found a recipe for profiteroles, thought they looked nice, and made them for dessert. They went down a treat, and I was asked whoever had taught me to make them, because choux pastry is a real bugger. I innocently admitted that this was the first time I'd ever made them, I just followed the recipe. Kudos for me! The same sort of thing has happened a couple of other times in my life, but that was the first memorable one. Sometimes, being aware that what you're about to attempt is something of a specialist skill, that knowledge can actually impair your ability to do it successfully. Equally, being ignorant of that fact can enable you to pull it off, sometimes to the annoyance of real experts! As I mentioned, this is the "nobody ever told me it was difficult" explanation, and it's impossible to contrive an approach this way, because it depends on genuine ignorance and stubborn adherence to instructions. But when it does come off, you've got an instant higher-level skill. And in my mind it's marked as the "Choux" way.
There are undoubtedly other approaches to learning, but these are two I've encountered in my life. It's not possible to say one is better than the other, because one is rational and the other isn't.
I'd love to hear about how others approach learning new skills - while many of us are first-time guitar builders, requiring the acquisition of new skills to get it done, I dare say the more experienced luthiers around here still face new challenges from time to time. More than anything, though, I'd just like to read a yarn or two.
Exercise the creative grey-matter, gents. Your topic is set. Now, entertain us!
