It would be neat to write in this retirement blog about my increased use of Youtube video clips. This would fit with my previous blog about watching more television in lockdown. In the case of Youtube I would be able to write about how I have been watching loads more Youtube clips. Yes, neat, but strangely not really true, logical though it would be.
I have watched more clips but not as many as I might have predicted given the restrictions currently placed upon us. Also strange given that these clips, or at least the ones I’ve been watching, have a definite educational content, so why aren’t I doing more of this?
Retirement, my retirement anyway, ‘needs’ (in my opinion) to have a strong element of continued learning. Life-long learning as it is sometimes known. It’s one of my central retirement values. Keep mentally active, keep learning. So I’m surprised I haven’t taken the opportunity of watching more clips and, therefore, learning more.
Youtube offers this learning opportunity, even if the number of bloody adverts do their very best to disrupt the learning process and irritate the hell out of a person. But maybe there’s another reason that my Youtube learning experiences have been less than satisfactory. At its simplest, the reason is that my actual learning has been disappointing. So the motivational effect of acquiring new skills isn’t there.
I realised this, and perhaps some of the reasons why I wasn’t learning, when I came across a clip, by a woman name of Jamie Anderson, enticingly entitled, Ten tips for old farts who play guitar. Could have been made for me I thought and so couldn’t resist a peek. True, it was aimed at ‘old farts’ who wanted to start playing even though they were of great age and hadn’t played much / at all before. I could hardly claim membership of this group as I’ve been playing (badly) pretty much all my life but I might learn something, I reasoned.
So I took a look at Jamie’s ‘ten top tips’. As I ran through them I did learn something. I began to get a slight inkling of why I wasn’t learning in the manner I had hoped for. Straight away let’s get the obvious out of the way. Apparently age isn’t a problem as she was teaching people of 80 +. So no explanation for my lack of learning there.
But then she made a number of suggestions which didn’t sit so well and were not so easy to dismiss. For example, be clear about what you want to learn, the style, even the actual song. And, as an ex-psychologist, I would agree that clarity of ‘target’/ goal is vital to learning.
But here’s a problem for me. I have no interest in learning one specific aspect of music. I play (and therefore watch) just about every kind of music – jazz, blues, Celtic, country, even classical (yes, I know there are others). And then I play guitar, piano, bass, drums. All badly of course and all over the place. Sometimes from sheet music, sometimes from / along with apps like iReal Pro, playing along with Transatlantic Sessions and of course there’s Youtube and similar. So absolutely no consistency there. That definitely doesn’t help.
Another top tip is, don’t get quote, ‘this from here and this from there’ And, don’t change your tutor (with lockdown they’ve changed themselves without my influence, although they do post on-line tutorials for which we pay them). So too late. Well it must be obvious by now that this advice would indeed fall on stony ground in my case. And another nail in the coffin against my learning anything Jamie says – practice every day. Ha, next.
Next was about arthritis, she had it but her doctor had said it was OK to play but ‘not too much’. So, with my own arthritis that lets me off the ‘practice every day’ hook then. Finally Jamie said, choose your guitar carefully, find the right one and stick to it. Well, I’ve got twenty guitars so I’m spoilt for choice in one way, but then changing guitars – acoustic to electric and different ones within each of those categories – adds again to the complexity and the inhibition of my learning.
So all this I realised on watching Jamie’s video clip. No wonder I’m not progressing much and that might be why I’m not watching as much Youtube for learning purposes as I might have predicted when all this business began.
I clearly have a difficult decision to make about now. If I want to be able to look back on my lockdown and say, well yes, it was a pain but at least I learned how to … Or, yes, after all these years, I finally am able to play Moonlight Tomato (as we used to call it in my piano lessons days) by that Beethoven.
Or else, if I carry on like I am doing, then my lockdown summary will be something along the lines of, well, I just messed about really, a bit of this and a bit of that. No, I didn’t learn a thing but I had quite a nice time dabbling in (in this case) areas of music that I might not have got to under different circumstances. No, I can’t remember a bloody thing I learned. There was that thing about playing ‘in fourths’ from that bald-headed jazz guy. That was quite interesting and it might come back to me at some point but to be honest I’ve pretty much forgotten what he said. 2, 6, 1, 5 formation was it? Nah, I only looked at it once and so it’s gone.
So there we have it. If this lockdown business is going to continue I might have to decide exactly what I want it ‘to be about’. Is it a time for some serious learning or shall I just continue pissing about? Hang on I think I know the answer to this one.