Most musicians will change teachers several times throughout their lives. Each level of player requires a different skill set, and some teachers are naturally better at teaching some skills than at others. Beginners need someone who can nurture their love of music, teach the fundamentals, and help establish productive and positive practice routines. Intermediate players need help with specific practice strategies, new concepts and literature, technical skills, and building the consistency and...
When I was in grad school, I played second trumpet in the faculty brass quintet. It was a nerve-racking situation, since all of the other musicians all had their doctorates in music performance and had been teaching for many years, while I was a conducting major fresh out of undergrad. I took most of what they said and how they practiced as gospel truth. But one source of frustration for me was how often they wanted to play with a metronome. It was at least 95% of the time. They all seemed to...
Henry Ford had a problem with a boilerplate. None of his engineers could figure out where the problem was. When Ford asked Nikola Tesla for help, Tesla looked, listened, and then walked over and marked an X on the plate with a piece of chalk. The other engineers went to work and the problem was quickly fixed. When Tesla sent his bill, Ford was surprised that it was $10,000. “That’s a lot of money for a couple minutes work,” he said, “can you break it down for me?” “Sure,” said...
There’s a common mistake that ruins otherwise great practice. If you make it, you can practice every day with perfect execution—and still get nowhere. You can work with the best teachers in the world—and you’ll barely make progress. You can isolate small chunks, slow them down, use your metronome slavishly, and put in hundreds or even thousands of accurate reps. Make this common mistake, and you might as well have spent the time watching TV. So what is it? Failing to take care of...
Ah, late January. All that New Year’s motivation is starting to wear off, and your resolution is becoming more difficult to sustain. Obstacles are rearing their ugly heads like monsters ready to attack—you overslept, you have a project due, the news hijacked your brain. You’ve plateaued. You lost your drive. This is all normal. They are part of what Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art, calls The Resistance. We resist doing our best work so that we can protect ourselves from the judgment...
We’ve all had that passage that seems to defy taming. The one that fuels never-ending frustration and even, at times, rage. You break it down, slow it down, and repeat it until you can play it twenty times in a row. You work it back up to tempo and nail it another twenty times. You even put it back into context, and practice it to death that way, and everything seems to be in working order. But the next day, it seems to go back to where it was before you started: you crack the note, fumble...
Bronnie Ware, an Australian Nurse, asked her dying patients about their biggest regrets. Coming in at Number One was “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” It’s a big problem in the creative arts. I sense that most burnout starts with a disconnection, a feeling that what we used to love has been overwhelmed by tasks and expectations. It starts early, when we want to learn a song and we’re given scales and rhythm exercises instead....
Detritus. Waste. Debris. Flotsam and Jetsam. If you don’t clean your house, it fills up with junk. It doesn’t appear by magic, though. You brought that stuff into your home because at some point you either wanted it, needed it, or it served you in some way. The same is true of our routines, our style of working, even our musical repertoire. Our parents rejoiced when we finally took Hot Cross Buns out of the rotation. Last week we talked about how to create a rock solid habit in the new...
New Years Resolutions have been around for four thousand years, all the way back to the ancient Babylonians. With all that history behind us, you would think we’d be better at them. Luckily for us, the field of psychology has made major progress into understanding habits over the past two decades, and keeping your new year’s resolution has never been easier. Authors like James Clear, Gretchen Rubin, and Charles Duhigg have all brought useful models of positive habit-formation to the public....