Are you looking for music lessons for your child?

Are you looking for a music teacher? Is your child taking violin, piano or guitar lessons? Another instrument? Do you need help with practice motivation or with getting your child to practice? We are here to help you with inspirations and ideas for empowering you or your children to make practicing their own. Starting the practice is the hardest part!

See Music School Quiz No. 1 below for children taking music lessons.

I am writing this during the forced stay at home coronavirus outbreak. The concert that I have been working towards for 6 months has been cancelled. I am not able to get myself to practice because I have so many other things to do. I talk to my musician brother on skype and find out he’s having the same problem. I am reminded how important having a specific goal to perform is to motivation. My brother says he has emailed and called his friends to say if they need anything recorded, he’ll do it for free just to force himself to keep up his practicing (and not let his trumpet playing lip muscles get week).

So here are a few suggestions. If your teacher doesn’t have recitals and even if she/he does, create your own concert goals. Plan to perform for your family or friends during the winter holiday season. (and also for a spring holiday). Make recordings or skype performances for your grandparents or other family who don’t live close to you. We sometimes did this for birthday presents. Play for school talent shows. Volunteer to play for fundraisers, or create your own fundraisers. I did both of these with my kids growing up, and they always enjoyed being an important part of fund raising events.

One year, I created a fundraiser for my kids’ school. We held it at Borders Bookstore (before they closed ;{). We invited everyone in the class to perform at this informal talent show. We invited kids to perform a little dance, a poem or reading, a song… We arranged for kids to play and sing some songs together. We invited the audience to join in on some of the songs. Parents came and we stood in a big circle around the performers. Everyone tossed money in a bucket. We invited school and city officials and even they tossed money in. The kids had a great time and great memories.

Often, for talent shows, my kids didn’t just perform songs they knew. Together we created a performance for them. One year we changed the words to my favorite things, with my son on keyboard and daughter on violin, they took turns singing the made up words and accompanying the melody. One year, we looked up the words to the “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” song, and they dressed the parts. They kind of acted to the words, and sang and played (accompanying the singer with harmony or playing a chorus).

Whenever I could, I made a dress that matched the music that my daughter was performing. with a scary song, I made her a black “drapey” outfit, and with a gypsy song… she wanted to perform Czardas barefoot, but in the end didn’t. I have to admit, I only once did this for my son.

So other things to get yourself practicing.

• Practice at the same time (and place) everyday to make it part of your schedule. although my children’s schedules varied everyday - so this can be hard.

• Perhaps keep a journal to set short term goals of what you want to practice during the week. Make it short, so that you know what you want to practice and have a goal before you start. Like to play two of the hard passages correctly to a slow metronome each 10 times correctly in a row. Or to concentrate on the phrasing and dynamics. Or to play the hard part in front of a tuner to be sure the notes are in tune.

• Find an audience - perhaps your pet or stuffed animals if not your parents.

• I love the challenge of playing with a you tube performance on my computer. (Note that you can slow you tube down with a button in the bottom left corner.) Unless, it’s pretty simple, you usually should not practice your piece starting from the beginning until closer to “finishing” it. You need to use your practice time for working on the problem parts. But for fun, and perhaps to identify the remaining problem sections, you can slow the computer speed down to play along, although sometimes it distorts the sound.

What makes me procrastinate my practice?

If my main “music piece” or even my warm up exercise is new and hard, I will procrastinate. So knowing that I will only work on a short section ahead of time makes it easier to get started. Then when I’ve been playing the piece for a while, it seems like a bore to play it yet another time. Having that concert goal gets me going. There are different goals to accomplish as you get closer to a performance. So setting new types of goals helps.

Again, email me any thoughts you have. I’d love to hear about your practicing.