Let’s say that you’re about to practice a new piece of music: What’s your typical plan of attack? Researchers have observed that expert and student musicians display profound differences in their approaches to learning new material, and those differences lead to huge...
It’s 10:00 a.m., and I’ve already practiced for a couple of hours. I practiced yesterday, too, and I’ll practice tomorrow. Like musicians everywhere, practice is central to the rhythm of my life. What keeps us musicians practicing? Self-motivation is a big part of it....
Do you ever dodge your creative work? Say, your practice or writing time arrives, and you race off to do some chore. It might be a chore that you detest, but now it calls to you. Then, instead of refining your music, you start cleaning the house or doing whatever. If...
Have you ever been confounded by a thorny passage that wouldn’t come together? You know, the sort of material where even after days of working on the music, you notice no real improvement. Probably every musician encounters such problem spots from time to time....
Suppose that you’re preparing to play or sing in public. How do you bridge the gulf between personal practice and public performance? I’ve observed that many rising musicians underperform because they omit a crucial element from their preparatory routines: practice...
This is the first of periodic posts in which I summarize how I use The Musician’s Way in my studio teaching. Here, I focus on Chapter 1. My class of guitar students at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts includes graduate and undergraduate students as...
