Teaching Students to Practice
One thing you figure out pretty quickly is that some students don’t practice and others don’t practice effectively.
Part of the problem is they don’t know how to practice. Especially for beginners, the music they study is all very short selections of only a line or two of music. The selections are short enough they think that practice is playing them over and over. What they need taught is that they need to turn the harder parts of the selection into “boxes” that they loop and work out. This is much more effective towards the goal of learning the music.
In addition to warming up, the other part of the equation is use of a metronome. Things have to be timed correctly. It is really easy to slow down on the hard parts and speed up on the easy parts, but this is not how music is supposed to flow. I find often the problem is related as well to the timing of the first notes of phrases. It is essential to learn to breathe-set-play in one motion without any hitch. This can be addressed in warm-up materials.
I have been teaching several young students recently, and they needed this talk. In their lesson we sat down and worked out some “boxes” in their assignments and warm-up materials that relate to timing of first notes. I believe for a lot of you out there teaching young students this is about the time that you too will need to have a talk about how to practice.
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