Deconstructing learning

Back in the sixties, when I wanted to learn songs to play on my guitar, it was somewhat complicated. Let's say I heard a song I liked, played on the top-lists on the radio, I could hear it again, maybe after a week when the top-lists was broadcasted again. You'd have to have a good memory to learn how to play it on your guitar. When I could afford it, I bought a tape-recorder, with a cheap microphone that I put in front of the radios speaker. That was the way I learned many of my early songs, listening again and again to a crap recording, sometimes disturbed by my mother hoovering in the background. Often I didn't know how the song ended, because the host of the program usually started talking before it reached the end. Later, I got a gramophone with a speaker in the lid. Then, if I could afford to buy the record, I could hear it in much better quality and wear the records out playing them over and over again. As with the tape recorder, I could listen to the music on low speed so I could have more time to work out what the artists were playing, an octave lower, of course. I still have binders full of lyrics and chords I painstakingly wrote down after copying them syllable for syllable from hearing them many times. Those were the days I learned how to listen and what to listen for. I got really good at hearing individual notes, lyrics and sounds and I bet I have an advantage when I listen for music to play today.

Years went by, I kept practicing, learned how to write music and went to the school of music at the university, where all the music was written down so I didn't have to listen and remember to learn it anymore, a very different learning experience. The whole process was different, somehow my brain took over some of the skills my ears used to handle but I'm glad I had the background of listening with me, it helped me a lot in those days.

Today, learning a song is so much different to what it once was. During the last ten years the internet is littered with excellent, and less excellent,  teachers showing you in detail how to play a song, a riff or a passage on whatever instrument. For free. All the lyrics of most songs ever written is only a click away. 

Today I spent some time copying music from Youtube, a tool I would not have been able to imagine in the sixties, it would have saved me years of struggle, but surely also changed the experience of learning. 
50 years after The Beatles broke up, I ca now find the "stems" to their music, free on Youtube. Stems is the individual parts from an original recording of hundreds of artists, now available to listen to. Imagine, I don't have to let my ears separate the guitar part from all the other instruments. 
I can hear it on its own! Without disturbing elements, like my mother hoovering. I can hear it in any key, at any speed, without it also changing octave, an indefinite number of times and, if I want I can get help from someone who can explain fingerings and tips on how to play it. 

No wonder the playing skills develop way more and faster than when I was learning, you still have to know the same things as I had to learn but it's  easier to get started and to get help at any level than ever before. 
Here, listen to Something, by The Beatles, as you may never have heard it before.