Why Do Kids Pick Sports Over Music? Why is it that the majority of students tend to gravitate towards sports rather than music as they progress through their school years? Despite music being just as fun, if not more fun, than sports, we continue to see this trend around the world. It appears that t… 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

It’s no secret - students today lead far more hectic lives than they did twenty or even ten years ago. More and more teenage students find themselves struggling to balance their schedules. There have always been academic pressures and extracurricular activities, but in recent years, the amount that … Read More

Tricky rhythms and syncopation got you down? Can you play each hand separately just fine, but have trouble putting the two together? Piano players, here’s a trick to help you learn those parts quickly and efficiently - the quarter note technique! What is the quarter note technique? With this techniq… Read More

What is Visualization? Visualization is the process of mentally experiencing or simulating an experience in order to prepare for it. It’s a technique that top performers have been using for decades and have been proven by countless studies to be effective. The goal is to have rehearsed a performance… 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

Chunking is, in my opinion, one of the best strategies to learn pieces. Not all parts of a new piece are the same difficulty and so those parts need more work than others for you to play it all at the same fluency. Chunking consists of identifying the more difficult parts of a piece (the chunks) and… Read More

The advance of technology has gotten a bit of a bad rap lately with the killer robot movies and technology-is-going-to-take-your-jobs mentality. I’m not saying those aren’t legitimate fears (it’s already becoming all too real) - but there are ways to leverage what’s available and appealing to the yo… Read More

The best students know how to teach themselves. They're motivated, love what they're doing, and take the initiative to explore what interests them and to really understand what they’ve already learned. This concept of learning and exploring on one’s own has never been easier with the rise of technol… Read More

Sometimes when I was younger, I would get a piece to learn that was so long or so difficult that I just didn’t know where to start. I would get overwhelmed just looking at it. So day after day, I’d put it off - until, before I knew it, a week passed and I hadn’t touched the piece. I’d sulk into my d… Read More

Have you been wanting to start group lessons but need some pointers on where to start? Or are you making a big move and want to reinvent your studio format? Megan from Pianissimo: A Very Piano Blog has graciously shared her insights into how she made the move (literally) from private lessons to grou… Read More

In Part 1 of our multipart series on Motivation, we discussed how to identify motivation types in each of your students. In this post, we'll dive deeper into the use of incentives and rewards or extrinsic motivation. In the world of music education, extrinsic motivation has always been a touchy subj… Read More