A little article I wrote for beginner students on The Practicing Musician: Many students are unsure about how often they should practice with a metronome because there is little consensus in music education as to the benefits or negative consequences. Before outlining some pros and cons I’d like to tell you what I often tell [...]
Tag Archives: Lessons
Practicing with a metronome – some pros, cons, and tips | The Practicing Musician
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A Basic Guide to Better Practicing
This post is from The Practicing Musician Blog. The Practicing Musician is a blog about inspiration and personal development in daily music practice. There is one juicy post per week by yours truely. The post was written for beginner students or intermediate students that could use some motivation. Hopefully some of the professionals who read this [...]
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Adjudicating Guitar
A common question my students ask is what adjudicators consider when evaluating a performance? This is a complex question because of the nature of performing arts and ambiguity of something we can call “correct” or “incorrect”. Music is vague because it is highly interpretive. One performance may have high technical standards whereas another has high [...]
What We Can Learn From Other Musicians « Nick Cutroneo’s Blog
Some of my students played today in the Collegium Concert at the Victoria Conservatory and having guitarists play next to string quartets and piano trios is just so good for them…See what Nick Cutroneo has to say about this…. I was actually very excited to work with the woodwind student, as everything that we would [...]
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Developing Scales – A few leading questions
Some of these questions come from my experience teaching but I filled it out with a few from The Well-Tempered Keyboard Teacher (overpriced but great book). Presenting and developing scales: questions to consider for teachers and students: What type of legato: When working on legato scales what type of legato are you aiming for? Will it aim [...]
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Sight Reading — Classical Guitar Review
I agree with Simon about over-fingering of the repertoire is very detrimental to students. My guitar method actually leaves out all fingerings. However, that makes it hard to sell unless teachers are really into it. The first fews week with the book is tricky but then the student’s reading takes off! READ SIMON’S ARTICLE via Sight Reading [...]
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Three Things to Stop Doing During Your Practice Time
Christopher Davis reports on three good reminders about getting to work…I’d like to clarify something he’s saying: there is a difference between working and playing. Working implies actively seeking improvement whereas playing is simply the fruits of your labour. 1. Stop Looking for Pencils, Your Metronome, and Everything Else 2. Stop Playing Through Entire Pieces 3. Stop [...]
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The importance of mental preparation in music performance
Jean-François Desrosby has a new blog section on his website, check out this post about mental preparation. As I drew a lot of information for my research in the field of sport kinesiology, it was quite normal for me to look to the athletes and their mental preparation to performance to see if there were [...]
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Left Hand Fingering Considerations « Nick Cutroneo
Deciding on left hand fingerings on the guitar can be difficult. One of the nuances of the instrument is that we have multiple options for the left hand. For example, the E on the 4th space of the staff on 5 out of the 6 strings on the guitar. Also, using harmonics we can play [...]
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My Week Teaching: Musical Layers
When I teach I like to think of layers of musical information and how those layers can be simplified to the student. Think of layers as slides that you stack on top of one another. One slide could be the sky, another the trees, another a person etc etc until you have an entire picture. [...]
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