My Week Teaching: Keep at it students!

By Bradford Werner on January 30, 2011 in Classical Guitar Canada Blog, Lessons, Tips and My Week Teaching

My Week Teaching Guitar is a section that recaps some of the lessons and tips I gave while teaching my studio of 30 students and ensembles. See more articles like this one.

My Week Teaching: Keep at it students! January 24th-29th,2011

I often tell my students, particularly the older ones, that you need to approach lessons in the way that kids do. Kids just show up every week, practise a prescribed about of time, and don’t over-theorize their practise sessions. Then, six months later they’re suddenly better! For centuries musicians, teachers, and philosophers have debated the language of music, sought different ways to practise, and tried to describe music pedagogy in words. However, music is an art that can only speak for itself. If you want to become a good musician here’s what I recommend:

Listen to music (live or recorded) and follow along with a score or just listen to the types of rhythm, harmonies, phrasing, articulation and other elements. You need to absorb the styles and subtleties.

Play more and talk less. It’s sometimes good to talk and philosophize about music but playing, experimenting, and finding your full potential on the instrument is far more important. Many of the world’s greatest people are not the smartest ones but the ones who actually just get down to doing the work that others were too lazy to do.

Play in ensembles and collaborate because it’s fun, social, and will teach you more about music then sitting alone in a room. There’s nothing wrong with solo playing but ensembles will fill your head full of ideas on a regular basis. It’s like having a group of teachers rather than just one.

Other notes from this week:

Sometimes you need to take risks. There are times to train your hands carefully and times to just go for it. Last week I discussed choosing the perfect musical aesthetic and reproducing it on just one or two bars of music (better yet a phrase) but at other times you have to take a manageable risk and trust in your own abilities. Without the risk factor you may never realize your full potential. For example, if you have a hard left-hand shift you sometimes just have to visualize the shift in your head and ‘will’ your hand to the right spot, as if by sheer will you will succeed. When you do succeed, memorize the sensation and the accuracy you accomplished and try to reproduce it. That will ensure that you are maximizing your full potential.

Relaxation and phrasing. Build relaxation into your pieces, but not randomly. In much of the music we play, tonal music in particular, there are points of destination where you can relax your mind and body. In much of tonal music these areas are at cadences. You can usually find the right spot by singing the melody and seeing where the breathe marks naturally occur. Train yourself to push the ‘reset button’ after each phrase.
- Relaxation is muscle memory too: Learning to relax your muscles requires muscle memory just as much as learning and executing the music itself. Mark in relaxation points with a comma in your music so that every time your play the piece you’ll practise relaxation.