Lesson 7 - How To Practice

There is an old maxim among musicians that says you only need to do three things to become an accomplished musician: practice, practice, practice.

While there is an element of truth to this, what does the word "practice" actually mean? To begin with, it's an unavoidable fact when learning to play an instrument that nobody can do it for you. Furthermore, it is an intensely personal experience that requires you to spend time - as much as you can devote to the pursuit - sitting with your keyboard and on your own between lessons. Therefore, "practice" essentially is that time between lessons during which you learn to teach yourself.

There is a traditional stereotype of practice for piano students as hours of learning to play scales through mind-numbingly repetitious exercises and tunes one note at a time. It is an approach that relies heavily on teaching music as a reading skill instead of as an aural skill and many thousands of books have been written as methods to develop reading skills at the expense of developing aural skills. In short, "method books" ultimately don't transform piano students into piano playing musicians.

This isn't to dismiss the values inherent in being able to read music or the necessity to develop technical dexterity. However; learning to read music is analogous with learning to read any new language and without the aural skills - to actually hear in your mind what you're reading - you'll never achieve anything more than a superficial fluency in music.

The approach used in this course is to concentrate initially on developing your aural skills so you can hear the simple mechanics that lies at the heart of music. It is a three-step process of learning.

Firstly, each week you'll be introduced to a few basic concepts about melodies, chords and how each of these develop and progress in the realm of time.

Secondly, you'll be shown techniques you can use to "experiment" with these concepts. In other words, how to create large numbers of your own patterns using a minimum of raw, conceptual materials.

Thirdly, you'll learn how to translate the things you hear and enjoy into music notation that will form part of your own personal "repertoire" of music.

So, the key word in all of this is "experiment". That's what musicians do when they practice...