Strum, strummy strum

Day 21

I taught a lesson this afternoon to a smart, talented student who can't seem to practice particularly well. She has good musical instincts, but week to week, things just aren't sticking. So I've started talking very deliberately about different ways to structure practice- using a timer, making a list, writing journal entries, recording things on her phone. But today I went back to basics: a good old step-by-step list. And here's what we came up with:

Step 1: Learn rhythms

Step 2: Learn fingerings

Step 3: Learn pitches

Step 4*: Trial and error

Step 5: Play through sections

Step 6: Play through piece

Obviously this list is intended for a beginner, but it's interesting how much it applies to me too. (Minus step 2. I feel pretty good about my fingerings these days.) The step that I put a star next to in my student's workbook, Step 4, is the one she really struggles with. And don't we all? That's the step where you have to actually hypothesize something, anything, that might help you play just a tiny bit better. And then try it out. “Does thinking about the shape of my tongue help me to play that measure softer?” Yes? No? Kinda? Argh.

When I discussed this step with her, she actually groaned out loud. “I never had to do that with piano,” she said. And she's right. You don't have to do that with piano, at least not at the beginner level. For an instrument like piano, you put your fingers on the right buttons, get the coordination down, and voila, a song appears! But horn is just harder. It's a difficult instrument and you can really only think about one thing at a time while your brain is trying to process how to accurately engage tiny random muscles around your mouth. And you have to think about something; you have to make a psychological choice to trick your brain into learning an unintuitive skill.

Problem solving is a fundamental part of any practice, but horn takes a kind of emotional self-awareness that isn't required in certain other instruments (again, at the beginner level). I feel for this poor 8^th grader, although it also made me feel for myself too. Why oh why didn't I/we just pick ukulele?

Alternate universe me