Practicing away from the screen is a good idea. My approach has been:
1. Reduce song to discrete riffs
2. Practice each riff slowly, breaking it down bar by bar
3. Begin connecting riffs together at a slow speed
Chunking it into riffs is nice because they tend to be more recognizable than just bars, and they're often repeated. It's also nice when someone asks, "can you play something?" and you can just play a few riffs without needing to set up backing tracks/Guitar Pro/etc.
From here, bringing in a computer starts to have benefits:
4. Start playing entirety of song at slow tempo in Guitar Pro. Raise tempo so long as everything holds together.
I also like printing out tabs and just using paper as much as possible. Being at my computer makes it much easier to tweak things which distracts from technique practice.
Agree this chunking is the only way I can learn. Apart from needing to be away from the computer - I prefer not having bits of paper floating around. Listening as important too. Maybe its because I start with learning the positions and then learn the timing after.
Agree completely. For 20 years I played through memorization and could learn a new song pretty quickly. In the last few years I've started using apps (like a Guitar Hero style) and it feels like I'm learning the songs, but I can't hardly play them without the screen. Even though it's funner using the screen, I'm going back to just memorizing.
It's like GPS, even if you know the roads you'll look at the GPS once you make that habit. I think for learning songs memorization is much better once you can do it.
1. Reduce song to discrete riffs
2. Practice each riff slowly, breaking it down bar by bar
3. Begin connecting riffs together at a slow speed
Chunking it into riffs is nice because they tend to be more recognizable than just bars, and they're often repeated. It's also nice when someone asks, "can you play something?" and you can just play a few riffs without needing to set up backing tracks/Guitar Pro/etc.
From here, bringing in a computer starts to have benefits:
4. Start playing entirety of song at slow tempo in Guitar Pro. Raise tempo so long as everything holds together.
I also like printing out tabs and just using paper as much as possible. Being at my computer makes it much easier to tweak things which distracts from technique practice.