The Fastest Way to Learn a Musical Instrument Guaranteed

With all of the amazing technology available today designed to help musicians learn to play their instruments faster than ever before, it’s easy to forget about one low-tech piece of equipment that is an essential tool for musicians: the Music Stand. Yes, the lowly music stand remains one of the most important accessories for musicians.  [...]

One of the things that plagues musicians when they practice is stopping playing, making a quick correction, and restarting.  I call this the SAD Syndrome (SAD stands for Stop And Do-it-again), and I’ve seen it happen in my own practicing as well as with my students and musicians who play at my master classes. There are many [...]

It’s important to keep your practice space free of clutter.  When you start your practice session, it’s a lot easier to get going if everything you need is easily accessible and you can find you sheet music, metronome, tuner, and any other accessories you need. Getting started with a practice session is difficult for many [...]

When many musicians practice, they go about it the same way they listen to music.  That is, they start working on a song at the beginning and run through the music until they get to the end. Then, the entire process starts over.  The musician goes back to the beginning and plays through to the [...]

In a recent post, I mentioned some difficult performance situations that had a devastating effect on musicians. Let’s discuss what you can do in the practice room to prepare yourself for these situations. In a nutshell, you want to create some discomfort in your practice space.  You need to know that you can deal with [...]

Although it’s important to have a specific practice space where you feel comfortable, it’s also important to be realistic about the demands of performance spaces. All kinds of issues can come up during a performance, including bad lighting (including having a spotlight in your eyes), extremes of temperature, terrible acoustics, audience noise, and not being [...]

Most musicians think that practicing music is a lot like performing music.  They start playing at the beginning of a song, make some corrections along the way, and finish when they’re done with the song. The only difference between this process and actually performing is that–when you’re performing–you can’t stop to correct yourself. The problem [...]

A typical practice session for most musicians goes something like this: You play through a song from start to finish.  You do it again. It doesn’t sound any better than it did yesterday–or the day before that.  You’re having problems with the same few areas that have always caused you problems.  You question if you’re [...]

Writing in sheet music to make practicing music easier was the topic of this week’s Practice Tip of the Week.  A comment I made about using pencil and erasing marks when they’re no longer needed has brought up a question: Can’t it be counter-productive to erase marks you’ve made in your music? Erasing certain marks [...]