IMA Blog - Independent Music Academy

Music Reading, Yes or No?

2023-02-23T19:24:00+10:00

As music teachers, a question we’re often asked is, “Will I need to learn to read music?” "Is Music Reading important?" The answer, of course, is “It depends …”

It depends on what your goals are when learning music. Being able to read music is a great skill to have. It’s not one that’s necessary to have when you start learning an instrument. Neither is it necessary to be able to read well to be able to play well.

Here are some points to consider:

Western Classical Music

If you’re wanting to learn classical music, to be able to play in an ensemble / orchestra / big band or to play classical piano or guitar. Then learning to read sooner rather than later is definitely necessary. If you want to play blues, then it’s an optional extra.

You Learnt To Speak First

When you learnt your first language, your parents didn’t give you a textbook to learn it. You learnt first by getting a handle on the muscles in your mouth and throat, and then by imitating. It’s a good analogy for how we learn music. To become a truly fluent ‘speaker’ on an instrument, you need to be good at listening and reproducing sounds. That’s regardless of whether you can read music or not.

You Can Add It On Later

Once you can play your instrument you can add music reading easily. When you get to the point in your musical journey of not having to think about basic technique all the time. You’ll have the free brain space to add a new skill. Music reading is just like reading a graph. Time goes from left to right. Pitch (or how high or low the sound is) reads from top (height) to bottom. It’s just not that hard to add on later.

Trying to do it while learning the mechanics of your instrument though can be a big ask. It often puts people off learning music altogether, which is sad. The more people playing music the better!

Many Cultures Don’t

Many cultures don’t have a written form of music. Music is passed on orally within the community from elder to child or from master to apprentice. Some of these cultures have extremely complex musical traditions with a high degree of subtlety and nuance in their performance.

Blues, for example, is not something that you can learn to play well from reading it from the page. Immersing yourself in the recordings of great blues artists will improve your playing immensely.

Written Music Is A Low Res Copy

What you read is not what you play. Written music does not provide enough information to inform a performance. Unless you’re familiar with the musical tradition of the music you’re trying to perform, you won’t be able to play that music.

When studying at the Conservatorium of music, I asked one of the extremely skilled pianists to sight read out of a Jazz transcription book for me (the Charlie Parker Omni book). Being an excellent sight reader, the pianist in question played through it almost without error on the first pass. What she played, however, bore almost no relation to the music of Charlie Parker. Why? The pianist had never heard any jazz (She’d grown up in Asia and had listened almost exclusively to Western Classical music).

Because there’s not enough information on a written page of music to inform a performance, what she played was note perfect, but missed all of the other data needed to make it sound like that music.

If you were to add all of the details of a performance into written music. The music would be so dense and complex that it would be almost impossible to read. It would be more efficient simply to listen and imitate the sounds.

Many Great Players Can’t Read

Mark Knopfler, Jimi Hendrix and Sir Paul McCartney did not learn to read music. Tommy Emmanuel also can’t. I think we’d all agree that they play quite well. Regardless of whether you learn to read or not, the common skill between all of the great players is developing a great ‘ear’.

Music Reading Doesn’t Help You Learn To Play

Reading music won’t help you with the mechanics of playing your instrument. Being taught good technique at the start of your musical journey is the best thing that you can have happen to you. Music reading has nothing to do with the physicality of your instrument. It’s also not necessary to read music to have an understanding of music theory. Much of the theory of western music (particularly that in common practice in the 20th century onwards) can be explained using letters of the alphabet.

Conclusion

Unless you have some very specific goals. Like playing classical music, or playing in an ensemble / orchestra then music reading is a nice optional extra, not a necessity.

Don’t let the fear of having to read music put you off learning music. It’s a great thing to have, but it is definitely a skill that can be added later.

Andrew Farnham is the director of IMA Music Mentoring where he leads the Guitar Lessons team.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

Acoustic Jam Night

2022-10-04T07:03:00+10:00

Have a sing on stage in a relaxed environment, accompanied by our Jam Night Host (one of our fantastic IMA Mentors) who will play acoustic guitar and possibly sing backing vocals for you. Your audience and cheer squad will be other clients of IMA who wish to perform and any friends and family who wish to support.

Where

IMA Ashgrove - Shop 16, Ashgrove Central, 219-223 Waterworks Road, Ashgrove. There’s free off-street parking accessible from Harry Street.

When

At 6pm on the first Friday of every month. We will run until we’ve gotten through all the performers.

How

Ask your mentor! Let them know you are interested in participating and they will help you prepare one or two songs from our acoustic jam night song list.
Purchase a performers ticket.
Rock up!

You can find the song list and purchase tickets all from our IMA Acoustic Jam Night page on our website.

Things to Know

Acoustic Jam Night is only for current or past clients of Independent Music Academy.
You are welcome to accompany yourself if you are able.
You’ll need to be able to sing along with a recording of the song from start to finish. You can have a lyric sheet with you on stage.
Tickets for performers close on the Wednesday, two days before the Jam Night, as this gives our mentors a chance to rehearse your song.
You don’t have to perform to attend.

If you’re not quite sure if you’re ready yet, please come along as an audience member and get a feel for how the night works.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Music With Your Mind (Part II)

2016-06-01T12:16:00+10:00

In part one of this blog post I covered the mental aspects of music making and how it applies to practice. In this second part, I’ll be focussing on how having the right set of mental skills helps you in the actual performance of music.

Performance

Breathing

If you’re feeling tense on stage, one of the simplest and best ways to combat it is to use slow breathing. Concentrate on breathing slowly while you play whatever you’ve got to play. It will make everything a lot calmer. Try this even before you go on stage and continue throughout the performance as much as you can.

Relaxation

Notice the tightness in your jaw, your shoulders or wherever else you have tension. Biting lips is another common sign of tension. If you’re aware of the tension, continue to breathe and relax, you’ll be through the performance before you know it. Distracting the mind is a great way to perform well. Relaxation is a great thing to distract the mind with as it serves a useful purpose in itself.

Permission to fail

This biggest problem in performance is worry. Worrying about what people are going to think. Worrying about whether you’ve practised enough and so on.

When you stop worrying about making mistakes in performance you’ll stop making mistakes. See part I of this blog post under ‘Trying Fails’. How do you stop worrying? Focus on something else like relaxation or breathing (see above). As soon as you accept that if you do make a mistake, nothing really bad is going to happen . No one is going to die for example. Keep in mind that 99% of the audience aren’t going to notice as long as you don’t stop. Allow yourself to make mistakes in performance and you’re much less likely to make them.

Not Stopping

If you don’t stop, 99% of the audience aren’t going to know that you made a mistake. Other giveaways to the audience are pulling faces and swearing loudly. Don’t do any of those and the audience just won’t know, I promise.

No audience wants you to fail

Nobody comes to a gig to see you fail. So remember, the audience is there to support you, to have a good time and to see you play at your best. Also, remember that the most critical listener in the room will be you. The audience won’t perceive any of the faults that you see in your performance. As long as you remember to enjoy yourself they will too!

Enjoy Yourself

Everyone wants to see you have fun on stage. As long as you do that, the audience will enjoy the experience. It’s always great to see a group of musicians onstage enjoying playing the music that they love. Remember how much you’ve enjoyed seeing that onstage yourself and emulate it.

Listening 3rd person

We all play music because we like listening to it. The best way to enjoy a performance if you’re the performer is to listen to it like you’re in the audience. Listening like this also helps us ‘step away’ from the performance and listen more externally.

Remove Ego

If you get up on stage thinking that your social status or what people think of you is dependent on how you perform, then you’re not going to have a good time. You’re also probably not going to perform at your best. Find someone or something to perform for who’s not present or can’t judge you. For example, perform for the songwriter, the song itself. You’ll give a more generous, non-judgemental performance yourself when you’re not worrying about your ego. When you remove ego from the performance, everything will become much easier.

Mental Skills

Remember that these are all skills. They’re not inherent personality traits. They’re things that you’ll need to practice. Jam nights can be a great way to work on these skills in a supportive environment.

This wraps up the two-part blog ‘Music With Your Mind’. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to post them on our Facebook page, twitter feed or in the comments section of our blog.

Andrew Farnham is the director of IMA Music Mentoring where he leads the Guitar Lessons team.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

Music With Your Mind (Part I)

2016-05-25T11:34:00+10:00

In then end, improvements in your mental skills improve your playing above all else.

We know that the mental aspects are amazingly important. We’ve seen MRIs of musicians practising. MRIs of musicians mentally practising. And they look exactly the same.

I’ve also noticed that the small changes in my client’s mental skills have the largest effect on their playing.

Personally, I’ve caught myself making physical mistakes when mentally practising. For me, that was a sure sign that there wasn’t actually a physical problem with what I was doing. It was really all mental (and a fairly amusing form of self-sabotage). Once I’d corrected the problem mentally, the physical problem went away.

You can apply these mental skills in both practice and performance. Not that they’re really that different in the long run.

Here’s how I think about the two. (I’ll cover performance in another blog post, this one has gotten out of hand length-wise).

Practice

Practice is permission to succeed

Practice is a ritual that gives you permission to perform at your best. While practice is important for improving your physical skills. From a mental point of view, it’s a way of saying to yourself, “I’ve done the work, now it’s ok for me to perform well”.

Pattern Matching

The brain is an amazing pattern matching machine. When we practice we need to take advantage of this awesome tool.

In the end, there’s only one thing that counts in music, and that’s how it sounds. Music has only one KPI.

The ultimate goal of practice is to equate sound with muscle movement. So when you hear (either in your head or on a recording) a particular sound, your body knows what muscle movements to carry out to create that sound. We want to work towards removing all intermediate steps and eventually arriving at sound = muscle movement.

This is the whole purpose of ear training and practice in general. It’s also why we learn scales and scale patterns, to help bridge that gap between sound and action.

So, instead of concentrating on the physical when you practice, you should listen to the sounds you’re making. Use them as something that indicates that there may be a physical thing wrong. On guitar, for example, you may start to notice that a buzzy sound equates with your finger not being close enough to the fret. That a ‘dead’ sounding string may be a finger accidentally leaning over onto an adjacent string.

Don’t stop when you hear the mistake. Be aware of it, and fix it on the next repetition of the phrase that you’re practising. Slowly repeating small sections of what you’re learning is really effective..

When you practice small sections over and over, you give your pattern matching brain a chance to compare repetitions. This allows it to determine which options have faults in them and which are the more error free versions.

I think of this like target practice (think archery). You shoot at the target, you might have aimed a little high and you miss. You adjust your aim and try again, perhaps being a little low. Next shot you hit the target. Then miss, a little high, then hit it again. As you shoot more you become more consistent as you can reference the misses and make adjustments.

If we make the mistakes and stop, we don’t give our brain any reference points to improve against. Worse still, if we make a mistake, get annoyed and stop, we’re highlighting that mistake for our brain. The brain then thinks that the mistake is important and it grabs hold of that. Instead, show the brain that the mistake is a statistical anomaly. It will figure out that that’s not what you’re trying to achieve.

Practising in this way allows us to always improve by solving problems as they become audible to us. As we learn to hear more acutely, we’ll solve more and more subtle problems.

Long-Term Goals

When I’m working on a new skill, I like to set myself up for a three-month goal. Although “goal” is probably not the best term in this case. I decide that I’m going to do the same thing for three months and not really worry about the outcome. I’ll just concentrate on making gradual improvements over that period of time.

I find that goal orientated learning in music is rarely effective. If you’re inclined towards perfectionism, the long term ‘not goal’ is the best way to help yourself improve.

If you take a goal oriented approach and try to get it perfect on one day. Or, try to get it perfect by a specific date. You will either not achieve your goal, or slow your progress so much that it becomes a very painful process.

The trick, in this case, is to ‘just do it’, listen to the detail and make minor improvements when you hear faults. You’ll eventually do this without thinking about it. (see our blog post on the ‘Four Stages of Competence‘).

There is a great book ‘Zen in the art of Archery‘ that you’ll find in the instrument cases or bookshelves of many great players. It outlines the story of a Westerner who already had some archery experience learning the art of Kyūdō (Japanese Archery). There are many parallels between practising that art and learning music. In the book, the Kyūdō master sets up the targets in front of the student archer so that they can’t miss. This stops the student from worrying about the goal of hitting the target. This then allows them to focus on all of the other aspects of archery that in the end, are much more important.

Trying Fails

Another great book that we often recommend to clients is ‘The Inner Game of Music‘. There’s a section in the book where a student attempts to demonstrate to a teacher how she makes a mistake in her piece. Much to her chagrin, she plays the problem section perfectly several times. By giving herself permission to fail, she’s stopped worrying about it. As a result, she has performed the piece exceptionally well. This is another example of where the mental outweighs all other factors in playing music.

Speed

Another place where trying fails is trying to go faster. Even if you are playing a rapid passage, you should never be ‘thinking fast’. Think smooth, even, focus on the rhythm, but never the speed. Smooth and rhythmic playing is relaxed whereas fast is tense. It’s often counterintuitive that playing mechanically even notes sound smooth and organic. You never need to worry about speed, it comes with time.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll follow up this post with a second part next week. In the meantime, feel free to comment on our blog, Facebook page or Twitter feed, or ask questions via email ( help@independentmusic.com.au).

Andrew Farnham is the director of IMA Music Mentoring where he leads the Guitar Lessons team.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

Photo credit: A Health Blog via Visual Hunt / CC BY-SA
Photo credit: mikerastiello via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Music The Quick And Easy Way

2016-02-14T22:41:00+10:00

… or why fundamental technique is your friend

You know when you try to take some kind of shortcut, and it ends up taking you way longer to get to where you’re going? This might be in actually traveling to get somewhere, or in trying to achieve some specific goal.

We’ve all tried “the unthinking short path”. It’s when you’ve tried to brute-force your way through without knowing what you’re doing.

The other alternative is the “overcomplicated short path”. Like when you were still learning to read. The teacher would go around the classroom getting each student to read a sentence. You’d count ahead, figure out which bit to read, and then, blam! You miscounted, or the teacher changes the order and you’re left flat-footed.

With these methods, sometimes you get there, but the result just doesn’t hold together. Sometime’s you end up with a complete mess.

I’d like to contrast this with the times when you’ve had a really good hard think about something, or asked some advice and you’ve discovered “the simple short path”. It may have been in the way to travel to a destination. It may have been when somebody told you a better way to do a job. Either way, doing some research in advance ends up being a better method 99% of the time.

Learning music is much exactly the same. Humans have been doing the music thing for quite some time. During that time, some humans have worked out the simplest and best ways to play music. I’m not talking the style of music, or how it’s constructed, but the technique you use when it’s played.

A good teacher makes a point of ensuring that you have good technique first. Why? It’s the shortest path to where you want to go musically.

Avoiding the Learning Curve Plateau

If you don’t get your technique settled in at the start, you’ll end up with a plateaued learning curve. It looks something like this:

You move forward, and then get stuck. Sometimes you have to go back and retrace your steps to relearn something in a better way. Sometimes you get permanently stuck and the plateau persists for quite a while. Why do we get stuck with music? Frequently it’s because of an inability within our physical or mental techniques. Once this is fixed, we can move on.

It’s a case of going through the four levels of competence with whatever problem that you’ve encountered. The biggest trick, of course, is knowing what you don’t know (or what you’re doing wrong). The second trick is knowing what to practice to fix the problem. From that point on, it becomes a matter of doing the skill enough times to make it automatic (unconscious competence).

When you get some fundamental technique in place first, you’ll get to move forward in a more steady curve. It can even resemble an S-curve (see the Sigmoid Curve):

The same applies if you’re stuck on a long plateau and someone teaches you a better way to do what you’re doing.

This works out a lot better in the long run. Don’t worry about the steep bit at the end of the S-curve. When you get very good at what you’re learning. The refinements you’d like to make can take quite a while because they’re very subtle. If you’re not already close to mastery on your instrument, this flat bit is nothing for you to worry about.

Technique is a means to and end…

…. Not and end in itself. What does that mean?

Sometimes, players get so caught up with technique that they forget the reason for it in the first place. My favourite quotation about this is:

“Technique is the means to let the heart fly freely”

I think it’s a lovely poetic expression of what technique is all about. I thought that it was attributed to the french composer Olivier Messiaen. I can’t, however, find it on the all-knowing internet, so if anyone know’s what the actual quote is and who it’s attributed to, please let us know in the comments.

The technique allows you to remove impediment from expression. Have good technique means having the freedom to get our what you want to say. Once you’ve got the technique, the next important step, of course, is to have something to say.

Don’t Think About Technique

To have complete freedom to express yourself, you need to not be thinking about technique. Once again, subconscious competence comes to the rescue. Having good technique as a completely automatic habit, means that you have the free brain space to get on with expression.

Good technique means relaxed technique. Learn to relax while playing and learning. This will promote faster learning, increase your accuracy and decrease your risk of injury.

Avoid Injury

Avoid Downtime due to injury. If you can’t practice for weeks or months that will obviously slow your progress. Permanent injury can happen and then you’ve never achieved your musical goals. Good technique will be relaxed with no strain and will minimise the amount of fatigue that you feel from playing or singing. If music practice hurts its wrong (tweet this).

The Fastest Way Forward

In the end, the fastest way to learn any instrument is with a solid, relaxed technique on your side. Get a good teacher who’s interested in sound fundamental technique and move your playing along at the best pace.

Andrew Farnham is the director of Independent Music Academy where he leads the Guitar Lessons team.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

The Practice Triangle

2016-02-07T21:25:00+10:00

The practice triangle is a concept very similar to the project management triangle. The project management triangle outlines some constraints that you’ll have when working on a project. Simply stated it says:

Good, fast, cheap: pick two.

In other words, if you want something built well and quickly, then it’s not going to be cheap. Want something built well but for not a lot of money, then it’s going to take a long time. Fast and cheap, well it’s just not going to be good.

In the wonderful book effortless mastery by Kenny Werner, Kenny outlines ‘the practice triangle’. In this case, the three corners of the triangle are:

Perfectly
All The Way Through
Up To Tempo

or as I like to think of them:

How well you play the piece or excerpt.
Length of excerpt
Speed you play the excerpt.

Like the production triangle from earlier, you get to pick two. If you play a long excerpt quickly, then it’s not going to be good. Play a short excerpt slowly, then the quality of the performance is going to be very good. I’m sure that you work out the other variations for yourself.

What Kenny suggests is that you practice using all of these variations to really help you get to know a piece well.

I strongly suggest that everyone practices small excerpts slowly. Slow and short is the most underused practice technique, particularly for beginners.

However, It can be helpful to have a quick and rough run through the whole piece just to get to know the whole thing. In much the same way that it’s really important to have repeated listenings of whatever piece that you’re working on. This helps you begin to subconsciously store the ‘map’ of the piece in your head.

At the end of repeatedly practicing a small segment slowly, it can be fun and useful to see how far you can push the tempo up also. Again, I’d like to reiterate that this should be a small bit of your practice, not the majority.

Try all of the variations you can think of in your practice. Not only will it help you find weak spots in what you’re working on, it will also spice up your practice a bit and keep it interesting.

Happy Practicing!

Andrew Farnham is the director of IMA Music Mentoring where he leads the Guitar Lessons team.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

Four Stages Of Competence (and how it applies to music)

2016-01-24T16:16:00+10:00

Have you heard of ‘Four Stages Of Competence’? It’s a learning model that describes the steps you go through to become good at a skill. It’s something that we like to teach our clients as early as possible in their music learning journey. FSC is a great tool for understanding how to learn skills as quickly as possible. Learning music takes time, but we want to help our clients to use that time efficiently.

What’s important to remember is that these levels apply to very small skills. It won’t help you to rate skills like ‘playing the guitar’. What’s more helpful is understanding what skills are required to ‘play the guitar’ and to move those skills up through the stages.

The four stages are:

Unconscious Incompetence

Where you don’t know what you don’t know.

You may be unaware of a bad habit you have on your instrument or in your voice. There may be something that you’re not doing that could help your playing or singing a lot.

Conscious Incompetence

You become aware of a skill that you don’t have.

You might unable to play a piece of music smoothly, or not get the sound you want out of your instrument. You may stumble across the reason why by youself.

Most often you reach this stage by having a good mentor diagnose a problem. They’ll then prescribe an exercise or a physical habit for you to carry out to fix it.

Conscious Competence

You can perform a particular skill.

After working on the skill for a while, you can do it. Although you still have to think about it. That verbal part of your brain is still running the show when you’re using the skill.

Unconscious Competence

You’ve practised the skill enough that you no longer have to think about it. The skill has become completely automatic.

If you have a look at the Wikipedia definition for Automaticity. You’ll see the line “(Automaticity) … is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice.”

That means that there’s only one way to get something into this stage, and that’s via repetition.

We All Are On All Of The Levels

All of us have skills spread across all the stages. I’m very confident that there are things about guitar playing that I don’t know. When I find out about them and start to practice those skills they’re going to be very useful to me.

So don’t think that you’re on one level or another. There are things that you can do automatically already, and things that you don’t know about.

Applying the Four Levels to Music Learning

As we’ve all got limited amounts of time, we want to keep the number of repetitions we have to do as low as possible.

The best way to keep the number of repetitions down is to focus on one small skill at a time when you practice.

Here’s how I visualise the whole process:

I think of the levels as a series of shelves. The ‘Unconscious Incompetence’ level being the floor. This floor is littered with things I can’t really see clearly because of all of the mess.

Once I discover a skill on the floor that I didn’t know I needed. I’ll move it up to the next shelf (Conscious Incompetence). It’s a matter of “Hey, I can’t do that thing! Let’s put it up here so that I can start to work on it”.

I select that one small skill, devise a way to improve it and include it in my daily practice. I’ll do that one thing that I need to work on with a metronome. I’ll usually play at around 30—40 BPM for at least 5 minutes without stopping.

Once I start working on it, it’s going to eventually get moved up to the ‘Conscious Competence’ shelf. I’ll be able to do the skill, but I’ll still have to be concentrating to carry it out. At this point, I really focus on relaxing while repeating the skill. This takes my mind away from conciously carrying out the skill and helps push the skill towards being automatic.

Once it’s there, it’s not too many more repetitions until it makes its way up to the ‘Unconcious Competence’ shelf. I won’t need to think about it anymore. It may need occasional fine-tuning, but it’s probably going to stay with me for the rest of my life. Now that I’ve got the free headspace, I can start again with another skill.

The important part of this process is that the skills that you’re moving up the shelves should be very small. You should move only one skill at a time. Also, you should practice the skill very, very slowly. I can’t stress that enough.

On guitar, for example, I’ll focus on one very small thing. Making sure that I place my fingers exactly up against the fret wire (but never on top) is a good skill. I’ll practise this skill until I just start to place my fingers there automatically.

Trying to move a bunch of skills up through the levels is slow and ineffective. You’ll get there eventually, but it’s definitely the slowest route possible. It’s a bit like learning plate spinning and starting off with 8 plates at once.

Why slow practice?

The brain doesn’t care what speed you carry out a motion, it learns it just the same regardless of speed. So why slow? So that you can learn the skill perfectly.

There’s no point in making an imperfect skill automatic. That’s the very definition of a bad habit. The other reason for going slowly is that it gives you an opportunity to practice being completely relaxed.

There’s much research on how much more effective learning is when you’re relaxed. You’ll also find that if you practise your new skill slowly and perfectly that it will become automatic quite quickly.

The Tricky Part

The big trick, of course, is finding out what you don’t know. The slow way is to keep guessing by yourself. You’ll probably get there in the end. It certainly won’t be easy or the best use of your time. The faster method is to find someone who’s been where you’re headed and can help you avoid the pitfalls along the way.

A good mentor can spot the skills you’re missing quickly, help you work on them in the right order and get you playing the music you want to player sooner.

Andrew Farnham is the director of IMA Music Mentoring where he leads the Guitar Lessons team.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

Practicing Music In Micro Bursts

2016-01-17T22:15:00+10:00

We’re all strapped for time and we could all do with a bit of an energy boost. Practising music in ‘Micro Bursts’ could be the answer to our problems.

It has been discovered that short bursts of activity during your day can significantly increase the amount of energy that we have available.

Researchers Dr. Janet Nikolovski and Dr. Jack Groppel have named these short activities ‘Micro Bursts’. Details are in their whitepaper “The Power Of An Energy Microburst”.

Microbursts can be:

Physical (movement or eating a snack)
Emotional (changing an impatient attitude to one of positive and supportive)
Mental (going from a perception of a blur in time to one where you are in control of your time with some type of structure or habit you put in place)
Spiritual (where you connect momentarily with something or someone that really matters to you)

For many of us, music fulfils not one, but all of those categories. Considering that "Music Is Like A Full Body Workout For Your Brain. Setting aside a few, two to ten-minute sessions a day for some playing or singing is a good idea. These sessions are not just for good for your health, as the above TED-Talk describes. They’re also for your productivity and energy levels at home and work.

Can you keep an instrument in the office or do you work from home? Do you have a place that you can go to have a sing to yourself? If you can, great! Schedule in some break time and do some playing.

If not, try doing some practice in your head. You’ll be surprised at how effective it is. There’s much research confirming the effectiveness of mental practice. So don’t be afraid to take some time out and simply imagine yourself playing through a piece of music or exercise.

Alternatively, instead of scheduling in some time. When you start to feel tired or unfocused, just grab your instrument and have a quick play (or do the mental equivalent).

Playing music can be a great way to achieve a quick 'recharge' during the day.

Knowing now that you only have to set aside a few minutes a day to learn music. Not only do you no longer have the excuse that you don’t have time for playing music. You have the added bonus of knowing that playing a little music every day could be making you more effective at work and home.

If you’re not making music already, get started now! Not only is it fun, it’s really good for you.

Andrew Farnham is the director of IMA Music Mentoring where he leads the Guitar Lessons team.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

How To Structure A Practice Session

2015-09-06T21:51:00+10:00

We all know that practice is the only way to get better. Not all practice methods are created equal though. So how do you get the most our of your practice sessions? What’s the best way to structure them?

After years of devising complicated practice structures. I finally came up with a something simple and effective. It’s a practice plan that’s worked for both myself, and my clients over the last twenty or more years.

My Simple Practice Structure

Divide whatever practice time you have into three equal parts:

Technical
Vocabulary
Application (fun!)

Got 6 minutes? Do two minutes of each. Got an hour, do 20 minutes of each. It’s as simple as that.

If you’re not in the mood for practice, I’d recommend doing just sections 1 + 3. Do a little bit of technique to keep you progressing, and then just play and have some fun. That’s why we do this whole music thing after all, right?

Here’s what I do in each part:

Technical

Practice the skills that you’ll need to improve your ability to express. If you have difficulty saying a word, your less likely to use it in a sentence. That’s what technique is for, to give you freedom to express yourself. Work on making playing your instrument (or singing) effortless. As soon as it’s easy it will be good. As a guitarist, I work on string crossing, position changing and synchronisation. What you work on will depend on your instrument.

Vocabulary

Scales, chords, scale sequences, chord patterns. Any vocabulary that you use to express yourself. You may use this vocab as a performer, composer or improviser.

Why learn scales? They’re great ear training (as well as good for the fingers). You can use them to improvise or to compose. Scale patterns are even better. Chord patterns are great to know too if you play a chordal instrument. They’ll help you figure out songs by ear with ease.

Connecting your ‘internal ear’ to your muscles is critical. That way, when you hear a sound you can play it without having to think about it. Your brain will know the finger patterns that a particular sound makes on your instrument.

Application (fun!)

No one wants to listen to a good practicer, they want to listen to a good player. As such, it’s something that you’ve got to work on. Practice playing pieces, getting the emotional content of a piece across to the audience.

Try recording a chord progression (or using some software to create one) and then try improvising over the top.

Figure out a piece of music by ear. The more you do it, the faster you’ll get at it and you’ll also become a much better musician. Having a good ear is the most important skill you can have as a musician. Transcription, or figuring things out by ear is one of the best ways to develop that.

Any of these make great things to practice during that ‘Application’ part of your practice.

Practice Every Day

Don’t forget. You don’t need to practice for hours. You’re better off doing a little bit everyday. You’ll get much more benefit that way. Especially if you use the method above. It will help you develop into a well rounded musician.

If you’ve got questions or your own awesome practice methods, feel free to share them in the comments.

Independent Music Academy — Brisbane’s Premier Music School.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

Can I Really Learn To Play Music?

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Many people who want to learn to play music are put off by the fear that they “Don’t have it”…. that they’re not “musical” or “talented” or that they just can’t learn music. We know this isn’t the case.

We know that everyone can learn music because we see it everyday. Every day, complete beginners come to us for mentoring, and they all end up being able to learn music.

In Other Cultures, Everyone Plays Music

In traditional cultures, everyone sings, dances or creates music in one way or another. When travelling to an African country, one of our staff was asked what she did for a living. When they were told that she was a singing teacher they were confused. They had no singing teachers in their community, everybody just sang. This is because it’s a normal part of life and they had grown up surrounded by it. In much the same way that we learned our first language, children growing up with music just learn it. No one in that community had any doubts about their “talent”.

Excuses For Not Learning Music:

Everyone seems to have their own special reason why they can’t learn music. Here are some of the more common ones.

I’m Not Talented

I’ve never met a musically talented person. Never encountered someone who learned music per hour faster than anyone else. I’ve met people who are passionate and obsessive about music and practised 8+ hours per day and thus learned quickly. Never have I met anyone who did a limited amount of work who made great gains in their musical ability. Working as professional musicians, we’ve not met anyone who was amazing who hadn’t worked really hard.

I’m Tone Deaf

If you can hear when someone inflects upwards when asking a question, then you’re not tone deaf, as simple as that. We’ve had clients express a concern that they may be tone deaf. To this date we’ve not encountered anyone who was. It does exist, but it’s extremely rare.

I’m Not Musical

What does this even mean? Does it mean that you can’t play or sing instantly without having done any practice? If that’s the case, then no one is musical.

I Don’t Have Time

Can you find six minutes per day? We’re pretty sure that you can. If so, guess what! You have enough free time to learn music. Doing regular playing or practice is more effective than doing a long practice once a week.

In 20+ years of teaching we’ve not met anyone we couldn’t help. Depending on your prior experience and the amount of free time you’ve got. The time it takes to learn will vary (see How Long Will It Take to Learn Music ).

The sooner you start the sooner you’ve be up and playing.

IMA Music Mentoring — Brisbane’s Premier Music School.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

How Long Will It Take Me To Learn Music?

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“How Long Will It Take to Learn (insert your instrument of choice here)?”

That’s one of the most common questions we’re asked. Beginners want to know that they’ll be able to play something in a reasonable amount of time. They’d like to know how long before they’ll be able to share their playing or singing with a few friends. I have good news! It only takes a short period of time to be able to play a song.

10,000 Hours To Learn Music?

You’ve heard it before. It takes 10,000 hours to learn to do anything. Well, the actual research is about how long it takes to get to a professional level at something. We’d agree with the 10,000 hours idea for professionals. It takes a at least 10,000 hours to even think about becoming a professional player or singer. We’ve worked in the music industry, at a national level for the last 20+ years . All the outstanding players we worked with had worked that hard. None of them had clocked less than 10,000 hours. Most before they’d left high school.

300 Hours To Learn Music?

Very few of our clients are interested in working towards playing professionally. The large majority play for their own enjoyment. For most, it’s a hobby and they have careers outside of the music industry. They’d just like to be able to play the guitar with some friends around the BBQ. Some want to sing with a choir, others to play piano by themselves. At IMA, these are the people we’re extra excited about helping. We want to see more recreational music makers in Australia.

That being said, a lot of our clients like to do their hobby really well. We suggest something like 300 to 500 hours as a benchmark to work towards. Work towards this goal if you’d like to be able to play extremely well for your own enjoyment.

Just clocking 300 hours isn’t going to get you to where you want to go though. That’s where having a great music teacher comes in. You’ve got to use your time wisely and practice the right things with the right technique.

20 Hours To Learn Music!

If you’re starting from scratch, all it takes is about 20 hours. 20 hours to be able to play a simple song. Check out this great TED Talk about 20 hours of practice. We’ve seen people clock 20 hours or more without getting to where they want. They were usually self taught. They hadn’t had the guidance to give them the correct technique to make it easy for them to learn.

How Quickly Do You Want To Get There?

So how long is it actually going to take? It’s pretty straight forward math. If you want it to take:

20 days: Practice for one hour a day.
40 days: Practice for half an hour a day.

What we’d recommend though is something like this:

24 weeks: If you do 6 minutes a day with one half hour lesson a week, it’ll take about 18 weeks. (just over 4 months). We’re allowing for days off here. Also, all the other disruptive things that get in the way of your regular practice.

Everybody is busy. Finding an hour or half an hour per day is difficult in our busy adult lives. We suggest scheduling just 6 minutes a day. You’ll always be able to find 6 minutes somewhere in your schedule. The great thing is that your practice time may blow out into half an hour if you get lost in it. If it doesn’t, at least you’ve done your six minutes practice for the day. Why 6 miutes? We’ll cover that in an upcomming blog post.

Practising everyday is the trick. Music practice is like filling a slowly leaking bucket. If you top it up everyday, you’ll get ahead of the ‘leak’. Once you’re bucket is quite full, you hardly notice the leak at all. It’s all about getting the habits into place to do some regular practise.

Once you do that, learning music becomes a breeze.

The only thing left to do is to get started now!

IMA Music Mentoring — Brisbane’s Premier Music School.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.

Start With The Best Music Teacher You Can Find

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We often meet new clients who’ve come to us with some terrible habits. This is thanks to the inexperienced music teachers they’ve started with. To fix the problems, we have to take these clients back to basics. They then have to relearn skills that they thought they’d mastered. Save yourself the wasted time and physical pain. Find yourself an excellent music teacher, not just an OK one.

Why Waste Time

We hear it all the time:

“I wish someone had shown me this ten years ago.”

“Doing it this way is so much easier”

or even:

“It doesn’t hurt any more when I play this way.”

Learning an instrument takes time. Having someone teaching you great technique will help you learn a lot faster. You may shave years off becoming a great singer or player.

“I don’t need an amazing music teacher, I’m just starting out.” That’s the sentence that makes me cringe the most. You need the most experienced and awesome music teacher you can get when you’re starting out. Get some great technique in place right from the beginning. It makes everything easier and makes learning faster.

Takeaway Tip:

Learn it right once.
Good technique makes it easy from the beginning.

Don’t Risk Injury

If you’re playing or singing, and it hurts, then you’re doing something wrong. The closer you get to completely relaxed, the better your technique is. The more relaxed you are, the less likely you are to injure yourself.

Good technique comes down to having everything in the right place. A great music teacher will have spent countless hours on their own technique. They will have a good knowledge of physiology. Problems that you could encounter will be avoided by having an excellent music teacher.

Takeaway Tip:

You can damage yourself (particularly singers) if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Injury can slow your progress a lot.

Enjoy It!

The reason we learn music is because we love it. It can be discouraging to not sound like your favourite artists at first. A good music teacher will provide you with the support and encouragement that you need. They’ll also be able to shape a course of lessons to step you towards your musical goals.

Takeaway Tip:

Getting there quicker makes it much more fun.
Learning the music you love makes it even more fun!
Find a music teacher who has the experience and knowledge to structure a course just for you.

Good Music Teachers Will Have An Interest In Your Progress

There are many music teachers out there who are teaching as a way to make some quick cash between gigs. You can spot them because they’re more interested in their playing than yours. They’ll try to get you to learn the music they like rather than teaching you what you want. They’ll be more interested in showing you their playing than helping you improve yours.

Takeaway Tip:

Look out for music teachers that are more interested in you than your progress.

In Summary

It can be tricky to figure out who is a good or bad music teacher. Particularly if you’ve not ever had lessons before. Teachers offering a free trial are a good start. Have a few different trial lessons with different teachers and compare the difference. Are they discussing your goals? Are they finding out what music you’re interested in learning? Are they concerned with your posture and how you hold the instrument (or your body in the case of singing)? Try not to be influenced by price. Feeling price conscious? Be aware that you could save a lot of money by going with the more expensive teacher. You’ll save yourself a lot of time learning the best way the first time.

Learning to play music is one of the most fulfilling things you can do. Don’t be put off by bad teaching experiences. Find someone great who cares about your music and get started now!

IMA Music Mentoring - Brisbane's Premier Music School.

Book an introductory music lesson and start following your musical dreams.