TakeLessons Asks Students: Practice Makes Perfect, But Are You Doing It Right?
After defusing some common excuses to avoid practicing, TakeLessons poses the question to music students everywhere: How do you ensure effective practicing?
Online, November 21, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Rihanna's much-anticipated Talk That Talk album was released today, right on the heels of her winning the Favorite Soul/R&B album award at Sunday night's American Music Awards. Like the other top dogs at the awards show, Rihanna has secured her place in the industry with her strong vocal talent. She, too, had to practice her art to earn that place.
TakeLessons (http://takelessons.com), the nation's fastest growing private music lessons provider, recently took the opportunity to pose a few essential questions to music students everywhere, including: How do you ensure effective practicing, if you're low on time? Their corresponding blog post discussed the difference between mindless practicing and deliberate practicing, and offered some helpful tips.
The following is an excerpt from the blog post, courtesy of the Bulletproof Musician website:
"Deliberate Practice
So what is deliberate, or mindful practice? Deliberate practice is a systematic and highly structured activity, which is, for lack of a better word, scientific. Instead of mindless trial and error, it is an active and thoughtful process of experimentation with clear goals and hypotheses.
Deliberate practice is often slow, and involves repetition of small and very specific sections of your repertoire instead of just playing through (e.g. working on just the opening note of your solo to make sure that it "speaks" exactly the way you want, instead of playing the entire opening phrase).
Deliberate practice also involves monitoring one's performance (in real-time, but also via recordings), continually looking for new ways to improve. This means really listening to what happens, so that you can tell yourself exactly what went wrong. For instance, was the first note note sharp? Flat? Too loud? Too soft? Too harsh? Too short? Too long?
Few musicians take the time to stop, analyze what went wrong, why it happened, and how they can correct the error permanently. Make that a habit during your practice sessions."
By sharing the practice tips with blog readers, TakeLessons aims to continue engaging current students and help them reach their musical goals. Readers are invited to share their own tips and advice by commenting on the TakeLessons blog, where fans can check out the common excuses for not practicing, and comments are also welcomed on Facebook (http://facebook.com/takelessons).
In addition to providing music students with daily blog articles, TakeLessons offers an Extended Black Friday sale this week, in which new students receive 30% off all lesson packages. The sale runs through this Sunday, November 27th, and is available by calling 877-231-8505. Since its launch in 2006, TakeLessons has helped students pursue their passion for music by offering over 35 types of private music lessons that are taught by some of the nation's most talented local music instructors.
