Scheduling for Success With anything in life, mastery requires time and dedication. Research has shown that it takes around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in a particular domain. In times past, devoting thousands of hours to your craft was simply part of life. But in today’s… Read More

How Having Someone Can Make All the Difference: In our journey through life, we often find that having someone by our side can make a significant impact on our experiences and outcomes. Whether it's a workout partner refusing to let us skip a day, a study buddy helping us grasp complex concepts, or … Read More

Do you close your studio for the summer but want students to keep practicing over break? Let Better Practice’s smart engine help you and your students stay productive - whether it’s a month or three, students will stay up to date and not lose any skill that they worked on previously. How does it wor… Read More

Spotlight: Violet and Hazel both have practice streaks of over 1558 and 1685 days (as of April 23rd) - that’s over 4 years of practicing every day! Can you imagine practicing every single day for a year? (Yes, like that New Year’s resolution that you abandoned in the 2nd week of January.) Really pi… Read More

Is Better Practice for percussion students? We’ve gone over the ways band (and pep band, orchestra, etc.), guitar, and piano students use Better Practice, but what about drum students? Drum practice is different from practicing other instruments like guitar or piano. Instead of memorizing scales, fi… Read More

Here's a concise diagram to show you exactly what you should and shouldn't be doing when you practice: 1. Goals Practice smart! It doesn’t matter if you’re practicing 40 hours a week if you’re doing it aimlessly. Create measurable checkpoints that let you know if you’re moving in the right directio… Read More

Every student is different, thus every student is motivated by different things. Some are motivated by stickers and prizes - others, not so much. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make it easy for us teachers. Here, we will briefly explain the 6 types of motivation (brilliantly laid out by Royale Scuderi … Read More

Everyone says, “Go to school to learn.” But that doesn't really encompass the true purpose of school. The mindset should be, “Go to school to master.” For this article’s sake, we’re thinking of learning as just the absorbing of facts. Anyone can learn by going to lecture and sitting, or reading arti… Read More

This is a continuation from last week's article: How To Make A Habit Stick. Make sure you read that first to understand the steps we use below! This week, we'll explain and provide examples on how you can use these rules to create good practice habits. Use this worksheet to create your habit plan us… Read More

It’s the new year! Which means most of you have resolutions to create some sort of good habit this year (the most common of which are regularly going to the gym or eating right). However, most of you (80%, in fact!) are also going to drop these goals by February. Why are new habits so hard to stay c… Read More

You practice sections over and over, yet when you go to play your whole piece you still stop and stumble at those same sections. Why is that? It’s because you haven’t been chaining. Chaining is incorporating a small section that you worked on gradually back into the larger piece. Usually, this is do… Read More

Students, this is for you. Here are the top 7 biggest pitfalls of practice I’ve seen (and have been guilty of doing) and how to work around them. 1. Practicing too fast Trying to play at normal speed from the very start is one of the biggest practice pitfalls I see. Inevitably, you’ll make mistakes … Read More

For a typical music school, 80 percent of students are youths. This means families are involved. Families are invested (in their child's growth but also... financially). They are the ones who pick up, drop off, sit through lessons, figure out the assignments and make sure their kids practice during … Read More

The traditional model of music lesson isn’t working anymore. But why not? Music lessons, for the most part, have followed the same format for decades: meet with a teacher once a week, then go home to practice for the rest of the 6 days. But we’ve launched into the 21st century with more changes than… Read More

“When you assume that people know what’s expected of them, you are creating an ineffective form of bowling. You put the pins up but when the bowler goes to roll the ball, he notices there is a sheet across the pins. So when he rolls the ball, and it slips under the sheet, he hears a crack but doesn’… Read More