It’s that time of year again! Exam prep season. Prepping students for exams - whether you use ABRSM (Royal Schools of Music), CM (Certificate of Merit), RCM (Royal Conservatory of Music), or anything else - can be a tough balance between stress and learning. Tests and exams can be a great opportunit… 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

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

It’s December!… Which means you hear the same songs being broadcast and performed everywhere you go, all the time. You sing along, almost mechanically, to the same lyrics you’ve heard every year since you were a child. Have you ever stopped to wonder where the lyrics came from? How old are these son… 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

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

I’ve always been a paper-and-pen person. I took notes by hand all throughout college and printed all of my music - even though my backpack was a black hole of loose papers and I had a tablet that worked perfectly fine. I’d go into gigs with my trusty folder, barely holding together at the corners an… Read More

Maybe you’re a teacher that wants to make your students’ practice more fun and engaging by providing them with backing tracks. Or maybe you’re a student that wants to quickly make a track to play along with. This article will go show you quick ways to make backing tracks for any song you hear. You w… Read More

Think back to your very first musical encounter. What made you pick up your first instrument? Whatever the answer (whether it was inspiration from seeing a performance, a school requirement, or a demanding mother) - I think we all had that flash of hope in us that someday (soon), we’d be playing our… Read More

What does 200 consecutive days of practice look like? We wanted to take time this week to celebrate a Better Practice student, Meryl, who reached a 204-day practice streak! That is no small feat - anyone who practices an instrument should know. Meryl found a way to practice everyday, no matter wher… Read More

There’s one golden rule of practice I tell all of my students: fast is slow, and slow is fast. Meaning - fast practice is slow progress and slow practice is fast progress. But what do I mean by ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ practice? Students love rushing... There was a certain habit I saw a lot of my students h… Read More

In order to be successful at anything, one must be able to distinguish between good efforts, great efforts, and the not-so-great efforts. This means you have to be able to critique yourself - and as a musician, this critique should happen every time you practice. Good practice isn’t just about going… Read More

YouTube in Music Education As teachers, we all know the struggle of having a lot of ground to cover and only being given 30 minutes to an hour a week to do so. A lot of times, I’d feel my really motivated students were being held back only by this limit of how much information I could throw at them … Read More