Gaming the Learning Process with Tone Rangers

I spent a happy afternoon on Wednesday with a quartet called the Tone Rangers. They are experienced performers, having been together for quite a few years, and whilst they don’t participate in the national barbershop contest scene, they enjoy competing in local festivals to give themselves a challenge. They arrived with some specific musical-problem solving to do, and we interspersed this with exploring a number of other areas of vocal development and musical detail.

The specific problem-solving related to the rhythm in a particular passage in one of their songs. And in addressing it we thought quite a lot about not just what needed to happen with the rhythm, but what needed to happen in their brains to get the results of our problem-solving secure. Because the thing about tricky passages is that you spend a good deal of time on them, which can result in the unsuccessful way of doing them getting very well-practised in. The challenge is therefore not just in learning the new way of doing things, but in forgetting the old way.

One initial strategy we tried was to speak, rather than sing the rhythms, as this isolates the dimension you are working on, whilst also using a different motor action from the habitual incorrect one. At first this just resulted in complete brain melt-down, although it became as useful tactic for processing information conversationally as we went on.

We then went on to change the vocable used in the particular rhythm. This was in part to relate back to another place in the song where the same rhythmic pattern occurred in a different texture that they had been having no problem with. As they were accustomed to achieving the motif with one vocable, it made sense to transfer that vocable into the context they had been struggling with to make direct use of that practised motor action. It also served to inhibit the rubber-band effect that pulls you back from your new pattern onto the one you are trying to replace.

After a decent length stint on this, we gave it a rest. We knew the new neural pathways were not yet embedded, but we had had enough success to know we’d be able to find our way back there. At this point, what the brain needs is a change of activity. Hammering away at the same thing for too long just makes it tired and liable to zone out.

One of the things we did to change activity was to have some fun duetting and talking through the role it can play specifically for a quartet like this, which has built a solid ensemble and the stage confidence to reliably please audiences through plenty of performance experience with a range of repertoire rather than focusing on the detailed polishing of a few songs for competitive purposes. You will always feel safe in the hands of a quartet with this kind of profile, but the performances may not have the edge you get with a more competitive focus.

What duetting offers is a way to leverage the combined nous of the quartet into opportunities to grow artistically. Taking it in turns to listen and make observations gave them space to hear details that may usually slide by quickly, and you could see their brains engaging inquisitively with what they were hearing. In the process, their intuitive musicianship cleaned up all kinds of micro-details that would be too subtle to have a conversation about, as well as responding to the consciously articulated comments about balance and tone quality. Indeed, the challenge for this group will be having the discipline to make the observations and get straight back to singing; interesting as their analytical dialogues were, you need to keep the musical momentum up for the aural memory to work its magic on the sound.

We returned partway through to our rhythmic challenge, and as we expected it wasn’t immediately correct on first run through, but they had self-corrected effectively before the end of the passage. We stayed with it a bit longer to fire those new neural pathways a few more times, and then parked it again. It will need a night’s sleep to cement the gains, and it may need to go through the same process of interleaved work followed by sleep a couple more times to become the default motor action when they get to that bit of the song.

So the important thing for me as a coach who won’t be there to see the full arc of the learning process through to its conclusion was to be sure that they felt in control of the process. They knew how to get into the corrected version, and had also taken recordings so they could refer back to our work together if needed. They also had taken notes of the various stages and approaches to practising it so they could recreate the stepping stones to get there if needed.

In these kinds of situations, though, the primary thing that signals to me that a group has taken ownership of, and thus will retain, the progress we’ve made together is their sense of success. In particular, it was seeing the satisfaction they evinced on the discovery that getting this rhythm right makes a subsequent passage that had also been troubling them fix itself. There’s a relief at things becoming easier that tells you people have found the work to be its own reward.