Video feedback and the choice of strategies of college-level guitarists during individual practice

Developing musicians are expected to accumulate many hours of self-regulated practice to attain expertise on a musical instrument. The ability to choose appropriate strategies based on the internal and external feedback obtained while performing in the absence of the teacher’s support constitutes an important aspect of self-regulated practice. Nevertheless, performing and simultaneously monitoring the performance for feedback represents a challenge for any learner, therefore possibly affecting the resulting choice of strategies. A possible solution to this problem might be to videotape the performance and watching it afterwards to fully concentrate on each task. Studies that have used video feedback in the domain of sports suggest that there may be many similar potential benefits of self-recording for musicians’ self-regulation practices. In our study, we examined how video feedback might affect the choice of strategies of intermediate–advanced musicians (n = 16) while practising a new piece of music. To attain this objective, we compared the number of qualitative text entries coded against an observation framework derived from observations of a group of musicians who used video feedback four times over a period of ten practice sessions with the number of coding entries of a group of musicians who did not use video feedback. Our results indicated that musicians who used video feedback practised at a slow tempo more often and that they played longer segments of the piece earlier in the learning process than the musicians who did not use video feedback.