Want the free color eBook edition of Practice Like This? Sign up for 6 Bullet Saturday. 6-Bullet Saturday is a newsletter that gives you six things I thought worth sharing every week. Mostly it’s about practice, and I always include specific tips or exercises or drills that I use to help me and my students get…
Jamming & Improvising: The Absolute Basics (a free mini-course)
About a year ago, I helped develop some teaching material that will be part of a Music Learning Playlist for Arizona State University’s CITME, directed by Dr. Evan Tobias. You can take the mini-class on jamming for free here. The module covers absolute basics of jamming. It’s directed at middle school kids and above who…
Questlove’s “Creative Quest”
Just learned of a new book from Questlove (Roots drummer and Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon bandleader): Creative Quest. I’m listening to the audiobook. Nice to hear the author speaking his own words. I’ll post a review when I’ve finished it. 🙂 Here’s an interview with Questlove on The Tonight Show in which he talks about…
The Art of the Cover: Learning from others: Pomplamoose
Imitation has always been the best way to go deep in the arts (or anything else, really). Always is, always will be. In any genre, any good musician learns from past masters through imitation. After you learn, the art of the cover lies in bringing something new to an interpretation, no matter the genre. Here’s a fantastic…
“How to Play the Piano,” by James Rhodes. A book review. But first, a talk.
James Rhodes stopped playing piano for 10 years. That’s not a detail you hear about from any other concert pianists I’ve ever heard about. It’s usually the opposite: long long hours of practice every day for years. Decades. The talk below is about trust, but it goes much deeper than that. And broader. How is…
The Work: Inside Classical Music Practice
There are more ways to practice than this video documents. It’s one of the blind spots in academia: all of the research on practice is focused on Western Classical Music. It’s like other styles and other approaches don’t even exist. Weird, right? It’s why I did the research I did on practice (and wrote a…
Evidence keeps rolling in: Early childhood music training can lead to better music and language skills.
Weird how one thing leads to another. Either that or Google is watching me closer than I thought. Could be. Anyway, after posting Victor Wooten’s talk about how learning language and learning music can be the same, here’s the first year of data from a longitudinal study from Sean Hutchins at the Royal Conservatory of…
Learning Music Like Learning Language: Victor Wooten
ABSOLUTELY! Victor Wooten speaks wisdom. Our approach to teaching music (often sight before sound) is backwards. Listen to Victor! Wooten’s book, The Music Lesson is pretty good, too. Like if Carlos Casteneda learned music from Don Juan instead of magic.
Polyphonic overtone singing explained visually.
Wonderful stuff from Anna-Maria Hefele. More tutorials here.
Brains of jazz and classical musicians work differently, study reveals. Which is Better?
The brain activity of jazz musicians is substantially different from that of classical musicians, even when they’re playing the same piece of music. Source: Brains of jazz and classical musicians work differently, study reveals – Classic FM Stoked to learn of this study and so glad we’re beginning to learn more about improvisation in music….
Born This Way? Nope. Do this instead.
This infographic below from The Practice of Practice is making the rounds. It’s one of the more powerful ideas from the book. The way we think about ability shapes how we approach learning anything. Check it out. Want to print it? No problem! Find the free, high-resolution, printable PDF (11×15) on the book’s extras page, under Chapter…
Music Practice for Babies and Littles? Yes! With These Precautions…
Learn more about the benefits of music for babies and kids at Mom Loves Best.com
