Starting A New Instrument

Starting any new instrument can be challenging. Most likely, the body will have to use muscles and extremities in a way it has not done before. If the student and/or their parents have big expectations and are looking for fast results, the process can quickly start to feel like a chore and the student can feel like a failure. Of course experiencing all these feelings is valid, but if we give the natural process of learning some time and some room, everything will fall into place with more joy. Which means that applying pressure will have the opposite effect – it will most likely take more time to learn the new craft, the student might drop the instrument, music might leave a bad aftertaste and possibly cause stress. Who needs that in today’s world?

Think about it – regardless if you are 7 or 37 – to hold a guitar string down on the neck of a guitar in the right place with the right amount of pressure and the right finger and, at the same time, try to make sure the right string is plucked is a skill the body has to familiarize itself with. Now think about putting three fingers in the right spot and strumming the right strings. All these processes need brain power first until they become part of muscle memory.

How To Learn Best

It has been shown that the brain learns at the greatest speed when the person who is doing the learning is mildly frustrated – I would disagree with the choice of word in expressing “frustration”, because frustration does not have to be part of the process, and depends on the private music lesson student and his or her choice. The student can approach each new challenge with resistance or with a positive expectation. To learn any new skill is challenging. Learning how to “learn with ease” can be one of the valuable side-effects of private music lessons.

Part of the learning process for the private music teacher is to find out what excites and makes a student “tick” – if the teacher can find out what that specific thing is – great! It will make the student more interested in practicing, and practice makes better, not perfect – we are all already perfect as we are ;-)   And seriously, 10 minutes practice every day will beat 2 hours on the weekend. Making the music practice part of the daily routine is a good strategy – for example after or before homework, or right when the student gets home from school or work (depending on the age of the student, of course).

Special Needs

Making goals and working towards them is a good thing, and a more fixed structure in the lessons also can work, though not always. It depends on the student – that is one big reason why private one-on-one music lessons can work so well. A private music teacher can gear the lesson plan toward the needs of an individual student and in that regard everyone is a special needs student in my view. We all need special attention in one form or another.

 

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