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Comment by ctrager | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of trauma, may I vent? So, my wife (my target audience for this app) is in the next room practicing even as I write this. It doesn't annoy me that she's out of tune. It annoys me that she doesn't stop, back up, correct when she plays a note badly out of tune. She can sing the pieces very accurately, but when she plays she is so lenient on herself. I don't get it, because in general she's kinda a detailed oriented perfectionist person who, not to stereotype, grew up in a a country known for detail-oriented perfectionism. I try to teach her (by shouting at her from the next room usually) to isolate the passages she gets wrong and then practice them super slowly. This is all really great for us as married pandemic housemates.

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My spouse is also learning violin. Granted, dynamics vary from one family to the next, but still... you can't be her teacher. Likewise for parents of kids who are learning.

Imagine a code editor that, if it detects a syntax error, automatically erases the entire line, flashes some random pattern on the entire screen, and makes you start over.

It's brutal, because you're flooded with multiple concepts and difficult physical skills all at once, including tone production, intonation, reading, just hitting the right note instead of a wrong one, and so forth. Working on one thing may require blocking the other things out of your mind.

Learning a stringed instrument as an adult is very hard. I'm awed by anybody who can do it.

There's a great electric bass teacher named Jeff Berlin, who has also written about teaching, and he mentioned that he doesn't stop his students when they make mistakes, because correcting mistakes is something they can figure out on their own.

depends what the goals are. ideally yes, you would stop and focus on a difficult part to get it right. stopping and replaying the measure every time you make a mistake can create bad habits though. if you ever find yourself performing (especially in a group!), you want to be able to keep going after a mistake. nine times out of ten the audience won't notice a wrong note as long as you don't break the rhythm.

Speaking for myself (I've played violin for a long time) - it's simply more fun to keep going even if you know it's not the best way to learn. Stopping and making corrections, even if it is "better", can take a good bit of the fun out of it.

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