Music Therapy Musings

I just read a great post from Beginner-Guitar-Lessons.com entitled, How Anyone – Yes Even You – Can Become a World Class Guitarist The focal point of this post was that becoming an expert/virtuoso/world-class/etc. at anything isn’t necessarily about having natural ability. Now while I am a musician and certainly was born with some natural musical ability, there have been other musical abilities that I honed while in school. Relative pitch for example. I had to learn how to listen and develop my sense of pitch in order to use it in both my performances and in my music therapy practice.

What I enjoyed about this post was the message that becoming great at playing a musical instrument isn’t about practicing more than the next person, it’s about “the right kind of practice.” To quote this blog post,

So can just anyone become a master guitarist by simply practicing more than the next person?

Not necessarily – you have to do the right kind of practice. Don’t just repeat the same stuff over and over and wait for your cat to bark. In business a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result – this applies to everything.

More often than not what keeps people from achieving true greatness when it comes to mastering a musical instrument is the tendency to skim over the harder and mundane parts.

To progress to greatness you need to spend time on the not-fun-but-essential-to-get-better tasks. As with anything highly desirable and hard to achieve in life there are difficult, un-enjoyable aspects that need to be tackled. Look at it this way – if there is something you tend to skip over in your practice routine or in your learning package, chances are that’s what you need to be focusing on to get to the next level.

I found this post to be very supportive as a musician. I am, myself, taking guitar lessons to improve my skills and there are definitely days when I get discouraged and think I just can’t get to the level of playing that I want. But after reading this article I am re-energized to keep practicing and moving towards my goal.

I also teach kids to play the clarinet and think this is a great article to share with them, which I will be doing. Thanks to Dot-Dash Innovations and the author of this blog post. I hope it will inspire my own music students.

I have been teaching clarinet lessons for about a year now. It has been really fun to share what I have learned over the years as a musician with my students. Most of my students are in high school and have been playing for several years so, for the most part, they have a good musical foundation for playing their instrument.

This past Fall I started working with a student who was brand new to the clarinet. Instead of helping to perfect tone and technique I was to teach her everything from the beginning: how to put the instrument together, how to hold the clarinet, how to put on the reed, how to create the proper embouchure (mouth position), and how to create good tone. Then we had to tackle reading the music and how to properly finger the notes on the instrument.

It was at this point in my teaching that I realized my student was going to need to be taught in a different way than many of my other students. Reading the music proved more challenging and I found myself needing to adapt how I taught her. Before this I hadn’t really thought about learning styles of people or how I could adapt how I taught. But here I was in a situation that required I do just that!

The different styles of learning hit home even more a few week later when, in my own guitar lessons, I found myself needing to be taught differently than the way my teacher was currently teaching. I have come to realize that I am a visual learner. Seeing things written on a page helps me to process information. But in my guitar lessons, some of the material wasn’t written down and I was struggling to memorize triad and finger patterns from somewhere in my own head. Fortunately in my lesson last week I finally had a discussion with my teacher about my style of learning and what I need. The interesting thing was that it really got him to thinking about how he was taught and how he teaches.

We don’t always think about the different ways in which people learn or, if we are teachers, how we teach. But after these experiences in my own work, I won’t be making that mistake again.