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By NPR Staff

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But can you teach an old guitarist new licks? How about an old nonguitarist — not even a musician?

Gary Marcus isn’t that old. He’s actually in his early 40s, and he’s a professor of psychology at NYU and an expert on cognitive development. Marcus decided to pick up the guitar to study musical learning, using himself as a guinea pig. His new book, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning, documents that process. The title is an obvious homage to the video game Guitar Hero; Marcus says playing the game was what spurred him on to try playing music for real.

“Although it’s definitely easier to learn some things when you’re a kid, it’s not the case that you just absolutely lose the ability later in life.”

“I had a little bit of free time because I was actually on sabbatical,” he tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. “I was like, ‘This is the moment. I’m really going to try now. I’m really going to commit myself.’”

Marcus studied language acquisition in graduate school. He says that for a long time, there was a generally accepted theory of “critical periods”: the idea that if you don’t learn a language early in life, you’ll never be able to master it.

“We used to believe that that was the case — that if you didn’t learn by the time you were 16, you’d never become fluent,” Marcus says. “What we know now is that some adults actually do become fluent. And although it’s definitely easier to learn some things when you’re a kid, it’s not the case that you just absolutely lose the ability later in life. There’s more of a gradual decline, but it is still possible.”

Marcus says he wasn’t born with any sort of innate musicality, but that simply being an intelligent adult allows him to learn things about how music works that wouldn’t be as accessible to a child (reading about music theory, for example). He admits, though, that the mechanics of the guitar presented some challenges to his grown-up brain.

“If you look at a piano, the notes are laid out in a very systematic way. You can always very easily find the C in whichever octave you’re in. You can find the D the next note over, skipping a black note. It’s very systematic,” Marcus explains. “On a guitar, there’s nothing that kind of highlights first of all what the natural notes are — the Cs, the Ds, as opposed to the C sharps and the D sharps. And then every string sets things up differently. We have a kind of memory that makes similar things hard to remember. So like, if you park in the same lot every day, your memories of that blur together and at the end of the day you can’t remember exactly where you parked because you’re confused with where you parked on other days.”

The most profound lesson in how children and adults differ when learning music, Marcus says, came when he actually signed himself up for band camp. He traveled to his hometown of Baltimore and enrolled in a program called Day Jams, in which the participants — mostly children — have five days to put a song together and perform for a live audience. Marcus says his 11-year-old peers had an unlikely weapon on their side: patience.

“I think that kids have a lot more patience to do the same thing over and over again until they get it right. I think adults often push themselves to get the whole song on the first day,” Marcus says. “Adults, they’ve heard the recordings many times, and they don’t cut themselves the slack to take things incrementally. So I think there’s a difference in strategy.”

Some skills, like perfect pitch, do need to be learned early in life in order to sink in, Marcus says. But he maintains there is hope for nonmusical adults who would like to pick up an instrument — as long as they’re willing to swallow their pride and practice hard.

“A lot of people just do what they’re good at. They don’t focus on what they’re bad at,” Marcus says. “In my case, I really had to focus on the rhythm. If I had just done what I was good at, I would still sound terrible. Now I don’t quite sound terrible, and that’s because I focused so much on that. So don’t expect overnight success; try to enjoy each incremental bit of progress that you make.”

This story originally aired on NPR.

Flickr:NZGabriel

By Audrey Watters

In his remarks at TEDxNYED a couple of weeks ago, education activitist Will Richardson shared an anecdote about coming home one day to the sound of “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the piano. It was his daughter, a novice pianist, who’d placed Will’s laptop next to her and taught herself the song based on a video on YouTube.

It was a testament, Richardson said, to the fact that it’s a great time to be a learner, that anything you want to know about can be found online.

But watching a video on how to play a song is just one small part of learning to play an instrument. And it’s just one of many opportunities that music students have now. There are abundant YouTube videos (so your repertoire needn’t just be the classics of the eighties, as awesome as Journey is). There are apps that help you tune your instrument and apps that help you learn fingering. There are websites galore that offer step-by-step guides — online method books, if you will — and videos of how to play guitar, piano, and so on.

ArtistWorks, for example, lets you not just watch and learn online via video, but allows you to record and upload a recording of your music and get personalized feedback from music instructors.

The list of instructors at ArtistWorks is pretty impressive: jazz and gypsy guitarist Andreas Oberg, harmonicist and founding member of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones Howard Levy, guitarist Martin Taylor, banjo player Tony Trischka, pianist Christie Perry, and “scratcher” DJ Qbert.

ArtistWorks offers a basic series of video lessons, but the company also facilitates what it calls a “video exchange.” Students upload a three- to six-minute video of their practice lessons, along with any questions or problem areas they’re working through. Teachers then respond with their own three- to 12-minute video, helping address particular areas. Both students’ and teachers’ are made available online — to search through and to watch, so that students have a library of instructional material.

ArtistWorks’ Chris DeNatale says the company is eager for the release of the iPad 2 with its built-in video camera as the tablet device is much more mobile and will make the students’ video recording a lot easier. The company is working on building a custom uploader for the iPad 2 so students can easily transfer their video.

ArtistWorks isn’t real-time music instruction. But that’s not necessarily a drawback. This enables students to move at their own pace and it allows the teachers — many of whom are traveling, performing artists — to respond when and where they can.