If you’re just beginning your musical journey, or if you’ve been learning on your own for a while, learning an instrument can be daunting. If you’re here you want to know what habits you can start to implement into your practice routine to make it better. We really hope this will be helpful in pushing you in the right direction as you’re learning, whatever instrument you’re learning to master! At the end of this post we’ll even share a poster we can send right to your email for you to print and hang in your practice space to keep you motivated and reminded to make the most of your time. Click on the banner at the bottom of this post to get your free poster!
YouTube Is Good and Bad
YouTube, along with all the various free stuff you can find all over the internet, can lead you down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. It’s so easy to get lost searching for new techniques and ideas. Especially when you’re starting out, simply learning just how much you don’t know can be overwhelming.
We love YouTube here. It’s a fantastic resource for very specific information, and for entertainment. There’s a reason why YouTube is the number 2 search engine in the world, after Google. It can be an extremely powerful tool. Even when you’re just starting learning an instrument, there are a lot of great channels and videos that teach a lot of the basics.
But YouTube has a major design flaw as an education tool. The problem with trying to learn with YouTube is that YouTube is designed specifically to keep you on their site. The goal of YouTube is to keep you watching videos, not necessarily to teach you. If you’ve watched enough on there, you’ve probably even heard some of your favorite content creators talking about the “Algorithm,” the programming built into the website to keep recommending viewers new content to keep them watching.
There’s No Shortcut
So if YouTube’s main objective isn’t to help you achieve your goals, where should you go to learn the fastest? We believe here that while there is absolutely no real shortcut to mastering an instrument, there are ways to make the most of your time as you practice. We’re going to share with you five of our favorite practice habits that help us focus our practice to be most effective.
1. Practice 15-30 Minutes Every Day
You might hear it said that some virtuoso players practice as much as 4 or more hours a day. While that can seem intimidating or unattainable, it’s actually not at all what you need to be doing to see significant improvement over time as you learn, especially if you’re just starting out. Yes it’s true, research shows that once you’re at an advanced level, your outcomes improve once you begin to practice beyond an hour per day. However, making sure you practice 30 minutes daily can have a much more profound effect on your playing than trying to cram that same 3 and 1/2 hours into a single day once a week.
Memories can be reinforced while we sleep, meaning that if you’ve performed a task, such as a motor skill or heard a melody, repeatedly, that information can get revisited during sleep. These memories are strengthened each time, so repeating the process daily rather than weekly can help you learn more quickly.
2. Use a Metronome
If you’ve never played in a group or tried to create a recording of yourself, you might not have ever tried using a metronome. There are even some educators out there that might tell you not to use one at all. Practicing to a metronome, when paired with an audio recording device, can show you a lot about your playing. The human brain does not have in it a perfect clock. While we can make pretty close approximations in tempo, we do have inconsistencies as we play our instruments. Even though this is normal, practicing with a metronome can help make you more precise. In addition, the variable tempo options on metronomes allows you to practice difficult passages at slower speeds, eventually working up to the tempo as written.
The other added benefit to playing to a metronome is that it allows you to play better with others, and produce higher quality recordings if you choose to pursue that option with your instrument. Listening and adapting to the rhythm provided by the metronome is a great way to practice learning how to play with other musicians, especially percussionists who might be setting a tempo. Or, if you are a percussionist, it will help you better set a consistent tempo for other musicians playing with you!
3. Practice a Specific Skill
Nothing helps guide your practice like choosing a specific skill to work on. By choosing a specific technique or goal to work on with your practice, you hone in on a target and can develop a strategy to achieve it. For example, consider learning to play an A Major scale on guitar. Guitar is a complex instrument, and there are probably hundreds of different techniques involved in playing well. But by focusing on that one skill of “playing an A Major scale,” you can avoid the noise of everything else. As an added bonus, there are a multitude of other techniques that get refined as you practice that scale. You learn to sync up your picking hand with your fretting hand. You can improve your dexterity and finger strength. And, you can even work in other playing techniques like staccato and legato.
In addition, picking a single attainable goal can make learning more enjoyable. You can feel much more accomplished by being able to check things off your practice list. Accomplishing those smaller goals can be rewarding in and of itself, and provides measures of success for your playing!
4. Train Your Ears
It’s a great idea to train your ears as you listen to music, both during your practice time, and outside it. As you learn, you might start to listen for your instrument in other people’s music. After you have a little experience, might even start to pick out those melodies on your own. Playing an instrument can really change how you experience and listen to music. Training your ears to hear chords, intervals, and patterns can help you level up your skills even more.
You can dedicate a portion of your practice time to this skill, called “ear training.” But the real power comes when you learn how to apply this to the music you hear all around you. And if you look for it, music is everywhere. It’s in our TV shows, movies, YouTube videos, our cars, retail stores, and really just about everywhere else. When you get good enough at it, you can be practicing anywhere, whether you have an instrument in hand or not!
5. Chase Your Goal
We talked a little earlier about setting small achievable goals by choosing specific skills to practice. Let’s expand on that a bit more. You can have more success in practicing by working toward a long-term goal as well. Having good incremental steps along the way is helpful, but having a target to shoot for is just as important. Learning a song you like is a great longer-term goal to shoot for. Inside that song or piece, you could have a number of different playing skills that you need to work on to master the song.
You can break a song into chunks, learn specific skills in those chunks, and put them all together. At the end, you’ll have learned a handful of new skills that will help you learn the next piece. And, as an added bonus, you’ll have successfully added to your performance repertoire. The next time you learn something, you might learn more quickly because you’ve got some of the needed skills in your tool box already.
Is There Really a Fast Track?
There is no substitute for real, dedicated practice. But, taking private lessons can be a huge help for you to reach your goals. Because the lessons are one-on-one, you can personalize your plans with your teacher. In addition, meeting with a teacher weekly gives you accountability. This can help you stay consistent with your practice, reaching landmark goals as you learn, and get professional coaching and encouragement along the way.
The personal touch of having your own private teacher guide you on your journey is truly unparalleled. You can find good private lessons anywhere, but we offer convenient remote private lessons right from the comfort of home here at The Lesson Foundry. You can learn more about our extremely accomplished roster of teachers here, or get signed up here. In addition to the personal touch a teacher provides, our staff is here to support you in every step in your musical career. Get started with a teacher today, and in a matter of weeks, we know you’ll be able to tell the difference in getting to that next-level playing!
Click the Banner to Get a Free Poster!
Recent Comments