As your repertoire grows, keeping all your songs alive takes more work. In addition to the practice habits that can help your playing stay in great shape, there are some things you can do with the actual Playlist itself to make it simpler to manage.

Color the Lines

How many times have you checked off the song in the row above or below the one you just practiced? Or maybe sometimes you’ve put your check under the day before or after the current day? As each month goes on and you’re marking your Playlist farther to the right side of the page, it can be difficult for your eyes to keep their focus on a particular song’s row. And especially with songs that aren’t practiced as frequently as others, it can be all too easy to hit the wrong day when you’ve moved across a big gap of white space since the last time you practiced a song. Students of any age can find these things difficult.

One solution is to color the rows. This could be as simple as using a highlighter to put a colorful stripe across every other row. If you prefer, use colored pencils. Whatever your medium of choice, if you feel like making a more elaborate pattern of colors, enjoy. Having different rows in different colors will make it much easier for your eye to scan from a song title across to a day even very late in the month, far over to the right on the page.

If you’re also having trouble getting the date right, you could use a pen or fine-point marker to make bolder the vertical lines that already separate the columns. With the backgrounds colored but only the vertical lines made bold, you should be able to easily find your spot in both directions.

Use the Computer

Tired of rewriting all the titles in your Playlist every single month, especially as it’s getting longer and longer? Consider using a spreadsheet program to type up your Playlist.

Make the first column wide enough for your song titles, and give it the column heading “Title” in the top row. Keep going across that top row, adding the S-M-T-W-T-F-S headings in the next 37 columns.

If you’re really slick, you might be able to use headers and footers to recreate the Month/Year spot at the top of the Playlist page and the Date / Lesson No. / No. of Songs spot at the bottom. You may even figure out how to have your spreadsheet program include the correct month and year automatically. If you like the ideas above about coloring the lines, you should be able to use highlighting and borders to do even that.

Now go ahead down the Title column and type up your current Playlist, one row at a time, just as if you were rewriting it. You’ll never have to write or type those titles again, or color those rows or columns ever again. Print your Playlist. Over the course of the month, handwrite all your checks as well as any new songs. At the end of each month, all you’ll have to do is type in the few new songs at the bottom of the list and maybe add some color for their rows and voila, the now up-to-date list is ready to print again.

Added bonus of managing your Playlist like this: you’ll save money by never having to buy another blank Playlist book ever again.

Combine Songs

Another way to simplify your Playlist is to combine pieces you’ve learned into longer ones. This is sometimes done formally, as when Honey Dew and its Dm variation are combined, or when Ode to Joy and its C Section are combined into the fuller “ABCB” version. There are also other opportunities to combine pieces. Fewer rows make the Playlist easier to handle while giving you the satisfaction of more substantial pieces to perform.

Because more and more possible combinations will become apparent farther along in the curriculum, combination suggestions will be kept on a special page called Playlist Combinations, where they can’t get lost in the chronologically ordered depths of the Lesson Line. Take a look at that page now for a preliminary set of combination ideas, and check back regularly for new ones.

If you have any other ideas on how to keep Playlist management simple, share them below with a comment!

After going through his initial training and becoming a Licensed Simply Music Teacher in October 2008, today Mark’s status has been adjusted to Accredited Simply Music Teacher.

Simply Music is a revolutionary, Australian-developed piano learning method that offers a breakthrough in music education. This remarkable approach has students of all ages playing great-sounding contemporary, classical, gospel, blues and accompaniment pieces — immediately — from their very first lessons.

Learn more about Simply Music piano lessons and workshops with Mark.

This song was written from scratch June 14, 2009, during a Potluck Creative Arts Songwriting Workshop commissioned by the Red Hook Public Library for their Summer Reading Program kickoff event. It took 60 minutes, starting only with the topic of the Red Hook Public Library. The group chose to base the song’s melody and structure on “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” Learn more about the Songwriting Workshop which uses Appreciative Inquiry to foster collaborative creativity.

Music and lyrics by the Red Hook Public Library with Mark S. Meritt (facilitator)

The original workshop performance was by the Red Hook Public Library and Mark on June 14, 2009.

Listen to the Podcast MP3.

Watch the video right here by just pressing Play immediately below. Or, visit YouTube to see the video or post a comment.

Lyrics

In the eight-sided building on Route 9
Children are there at storytime
Use the computer to go online
Come on in and expand your mind

Everything’s fun and friendly and free
At the Red Hook Public Library

Books and movies and CDs galore
Interlibrary loan will get you more
Friendly staff will help you explore
When you walk through the library door

Everything’s fun and friendly and free
At the Red Hook Public Library

Everything’s fun and friendly and free
At the Red Hook Public Library

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

As mentioned last week, this Lesson Line piece completes a set of nine pieces which form a sort of primer for success with Simply Music piano lessons. It is the last piece being published weekly — look for monthly updates from here forward. To close this primer and set you on your way toward continued progress as well as possible, let’s return once again to a big picture view and ask just what it means to be on target with sufficient progress.

Think, then, of a target, like in archery. Circles within circles. Hitting the bullseye at the center of the target scores you the most points. The next bigger circle scores less, and so on to the biggest, outermost circle gaining you the fewest points, with no points awarded if you miss the target. Every time you pull your bow, you’re aiming for the bullseye. The more often and more carefully you play, the better you get, and the more points you score. The less often and less carefully you play, the lower your score tends to be.

This is, of course, similar to learning piano, simply because it’s another skill to learn, and you learn it better if you practice carefully and consistently. But there is a more fundamental lesson here. Think about what was discussed in your very first lesson, the Foundation Session, about what is ideal in helping you achieve success with your piano lessons. Things like:

• The playing-based Simply Music curriculum, as opposed to a less effective program
• Practicing at the same time each day
• Practicing 15-20 minutes each day, or a bit longer depending on how far you are in the program
• Using all of the Student Home Materials and all of the learning strategies you’re provided
• Keeping your repertoire alive
• Attending and actively participating in all your lessons
• Seeing your practice routine through the peaks and valleys of your long-term relationship with music

Then think about the questions asked in last week’s Lesson Line piece, covering the issues just mentioned as well as many others. Think about what answers to those questions would best support your learning to play the piano.

Put it all together, and you start to develop a picture of what the ideal situation is for maximizing the likelihood that you’ll maintain music as a lifelong companion. You start to develop a picture of just what you’re really shooting for. A picture of the bullseye on the target that you’re aiming at in striving for progress as you learn the piano.

Will you hit the bullseye every time? Probably not, just as even an experienced archer might not hit it every time. But the archer always aims for the bullseye, and so must you. However, it’s not enough to merely aim for it each time you play. Yet if that’s not enough, and if it’s understood that you won’t hit the bullseye every time, then what is enough?

It’s a question of how often and how carefully you take aim. You’ve got to play the game frequently and attentively enough to, literally, stay on target. The more you do this, the closer you get your practice routine to the ideal, the more effectively you’ll progress as a musician. You’ll hit the target regularly, and you’ll always be maximizing your score. It doesn’t matter how often you hit the bullseye or just what your score is. What matters is that, by playing diligently and aiming for the bullseye every time, you’re doing as much as you can to improve at your own best pace.

What happens if you can’t get to that ideal situation? Luckily, you get points for hitting not just the bullseye. There’s wiggle room for you to still succeed. Can’t get out for as much target practice as someone else? You can still get out often enough and be careful enough to do pretty well. Will you score as much as someone else? Will you improve as quickly or efficiently as someone else? Perhaps not, just as you won’t be doing as well as you yourself could have with a more ideal practice routine. But it’s not a competition, not with anyone else, and not even with some hypothetical you that you find yourself truly unable to be.

The point is that there is a threshold. The outer edge of the target itself defines a threshold. Stay on that target, and you keep scoring points, even if you might not be getting as many points as you would by hitting closer to center. You aim for the bullseye every time, but you can still feel good about scoring even when you don’t hit it every time or even at all.

Likewise, come to target practice often enough, and do it carefully enough, and your overall experience can be on the scoring side of a similar threshold. Even with a practice routine that’s less than ideal, not quite hitting the bullseye, your performance with the bow and arrow can be satisfying enough to keep you coming back for more.

As with any threshold, though, there is a space beyond. When the arrow misses the target entirely, you score nothing. Likewise, the farther your archery practice routine is from the ideal, the more likely you are to get smaller scores and to even miss the target more often. At some point you’re just not likely to want to keep doing archery.

The same goes for piano. There may be no formal scores being kept, but you’ll know from your own experience where things stand. You’ll be stuck in the plateaus and even the valleys of your long-term relationship with music, finding little ability to get out — and finding that your relationship with music isn’t going to last for much longer unless you fairly quickly find a way to get your routine back on target.

Also be aware that your teacher has a similar threshold, a threshold of willingness to keep you as a student. If you are succeeding well enough, your teacher will be happy to keep teaching you. If you are too far from doing what’s been set down for you in the program, your teacher may let you go. Your threshold and your teacher’s will almost certainly be different. You may reach the point of wanting to stop first, and your teacher will be sad to see you go. Otherwise, your teacher may determine that it’s time to stop even though you wanted to continue. It takes only one of you to reach their threshold, and your involvement with your teacher and this method will end. Rest assured, though, that your teacher is always on your side, wanting very much for you to succeed, and being as disappointed as you if you don’t. Don’t feel threatened by the possibility of dismissal, channel your energy into motivation to succeed. That’s what both you and your teacher want.

Nobody can say for sure where anyone’s threshold is. It varies from student to student and from teacher to teacher. On one side is progress that’s somewhere between ideal and less than ideal, but wherever it is, it’s continual and sufficient progress. On the other side is progress that simply insufficient to be sustained. Ideally, you’ll never even discover where that line is for you, because you’ll always stay on the side of sufficient progress.

If you do feel that line approaching, and especially if you cross it, then you must ask yourself if you want to keep music in your life. If you do, you’ve got some work ahead of you to get your practice routine back on target, and the sooner you do it, the better. Whether or not you ever find that line, if you find yourself between that line and the bullseye, it’s always worth asking yourself what more you might be able to do to get even closer to the bullseye. The more you can do, the better your abilities and experience are likely to be.

In the end, the key with piano, as with archery, is to always be clear about where the bullseye is, to always aim for it, and to do so as often and as well as you need to keep progressing. At the same time, be clear that success is not defined by only ever hitting the bullseye. The closer you are to the ideal with your practice routine, the more success you will find. Can’t get to that ideal? Don’t worry too much. If at any point you find yourself in that zone of sufficient progress and honestly able to say that you’re doing the best you can, content yourself with that, and enjoy the companion you have in music.

The Lesson Line tends to be written as if talking directly to the student. It’s made clear in the very first lesson, though — the Foundation Session — that there are three roles involved in undertaking piano lessons. The student is one of those roles, the other two are the student’s coaches, and all must play their part for the student to succeed. Whatever role(s) you may play, all these pieces try to provide value for you, and this piece in particular may prove crucial for you.

Students, of course, are what it’s all about — learning to play the piano and eventually becoming their own musicians. It takes time and effort to get there, to be sure, but the student’s role can be defined pretty easily. Learn. That’s really it. That’s what students do — they learn. And with piano, they learn through practicing.

To succeed, though, that practice must be done effectively. That’s what these writings have been about so far. It’s important, then, to recognize that making sure the practice gets done, and done well, is not really the role of the student. That may sound odd, but it’s true. It’s the job of the coaches — the method coach and, especially, the life coach.

The method coach is the teacher, bringing a worthwhile curriculum and presenting it as well as he or she can in the short amount of lesson time available each week, helping make sure that students are clear about what to do between lessons.

It is there between lessons that the magic, the learning, really happens. And it is the life coach who is there for the student during those other 6 days, 23 hours and however many extra minutes that are left in the week. The life coach is therefore in a position to help make sure that the magic happens — and so the student’s success relies to a great extent on the participation and contributions of the life coach.

For children, a parent or guardian usually fills the life coach role. For adults, it is usually the students themselves who serve as their own life coaches. Either way, the role is an important one, and very distinct from the student role. Any students who cannot yet serve in the life coach role for themselves need someone else available to support them in maintaining their relationship with music — and to teach them, over time, how to self-coach. Students capable of being their own life coach benefit greatly from seeing themselves as taking on two separate roles and knowing when to put each hat on, since they will be better students as a result of coaching themselves well.

If you are the student reading these pieces, get as much as you can out of them. If you are also your own life coach, wear that hat as much as possible when you read here. And if you are someone else’s life coach, even though the writings may often seem to be directed at students, know that, until they can see themselves through, these pieces are far more for you than anyone else. The students in your charge still need you to help ensure that everything talked about here actually happens.

Here, then, are a number of questions. They are written, just as the Lesson Line usually is, from the perspective of the student. They are designed, though, to spark conversation between student and life coach — whether those roles are held by separate people or just one. Answering them provides an opportunity to evaluate how well the student’s learning process is being supported. Ask these questions regularly, always looking for both successes to celebrate and improvements to make. When there are areas to work on, don’t be daunted by however many there may be or however big they may seem. Break things down, working a little bit at a time, just as in learning a song or building a repertoire. Decades from now, whenever students play music, it will be the life coaches they have to thank for their success.

Questions for Practice

• What is my weekly practice schedule?
• Do I practice at the same time each day?
• Do I practice every day?
• Where do I practice and what is the set-up?
• Do I practice new assignments the same day they are assigned?
• Do I watch the DVD within 24 hours of my lesson?
• Do I use all of the Student Home Materials (SHM) and all of the learning strategies when I practice?
• Do I manage my practice routine daily by referring to my Notes book and marking my Playlist?
• Am I “working the piano” most days of the week?
• Do I take time with my repertoire songs to “play the piano” for pure enjoyment?
• Do I keep my repertoire alive?
• Does my life coach monitor and support my practice?
• Do I play for others?
• Do I sing when I play?
• Do others sing or play when I play?
• Do I improvise and compose my own songs regularly?

Questions for Lessons

• Do I have all my materials ready for lesson?
• Is my Playlist updated and opened to the current page, ready to be reviewed?
• Am I ready to learn?
• Am I supportive to my fellow classmate(s)?
• Am I focused and actively observing when I am not at the piano?
• Is my life coach actively observing and supporting my learning process at lesson time?

Questions for Life

• What are the benefits of playing the piano?
• How has playing the piano affected me?
• How can I use my piano skills in the future?
• How has being an active Simply Music student helped me in other areas of my life?
• Am I learning mastery and self-discipline in general?
• Do I enjoy playing the piano?
• Do others enjoy my playing?
• What’s the best part of learning Simply Music as a student?
• What is my role as a student?
• Do I understand the “long-term relationship”? Can I explain it?
• What pays more, working at McDonald’s or teaching piano lessons?
• Do I realize how many people want the opportunity I have?
• Am I willing to put in the hours on the piano bench to be an accomplished pianist?

Next week, the ninth Lesson Line piece. These first nine pieces form a sort of primer for success with Simply Music piano lessons, and so I’ve put them out weekly to make them useful quickly. After the next piece, I’m going to switch to monthly Lesson Line updates. Hopefully that will give you some time to catch up on any of the primer pieces you may still need to read, and then it will make it easier for you to keep up in the future.

You’ve put a lot of solid and efficient work into your current projects. You’ve moved them through the process and have built a repertoire. Keeping all those songs alive, though, requires a different kind of practice compared to current projects. It requires playing the piano instead of working it. It requires that each of your repertoire songs be played at least often enough to keep it alive and thoughtless.

At first, a newly alive song might still need daily practice to keep it alive, though now it only need be practiced once instead of allotting several minutes as you did when it was a current project. Soon enough, you can drop down to five or six times a week. Eventually, you’re likely to only need to play it once or twice a week to keep it alive, and perhaps even less often than that later on. Just like getting a song to come alive in the first place, how fast a song gets to this point depends on the person and the song.

Adding a check in the Playlist after practicing each song, you’ll start to see a pattern which will grow increasingly familiar. The songs at the bottom of the list, added most recently, will tend to be current projects, with checks all the way across as they are practiced daily. Slightly farther up the list you’ll tend to have blank spots scattered as there are days you can afford to skip those songs. The higher you go, the longer you’ve been playing the song, and the more likely that the checks will be scattered, few and far between amidst larger blank areas.

However many days a week you’re practicing a repertoire song, strive to play it a little less frequently. If you find you’re having a tough time starting or otherwise playing the song, increase the frequency again. Your checks will let you know around how many times weekly each song needs to be played to keep it alive. Strive to strike a nice balance — neither practicing more often than needed (unless you really want to!), nor too little so that mistakes start creeping in.

You might consider using your pencil to write that number of weekly practices in the margin next to the song — 2 for a song that you practice twice a week, 7 for a song you practice daily, etc. As you adjust frequency up and down to keep each song in the sweet spot, you can actively erase and update its number.

Another Playlist variation to consider for songs that are no longer current projects: instead of checks, score each song each time you play it:

• 5 - I can play this easily and musically (and have fun!)
• 4 - I can play this quite easily but it’s not quite “there”
• 3 - It flows but I have to play it slowly
• 2 - I know what to do but I really have to think about it
• 1 - I sometimes don’t know how to put the song together

Songs enter the repertoire at probably a 2 or a 3. As you continue practicing them, they work their way up to 5 even as you come to play them less often. Using this scoring system, though, gives you an added awareness of just how your songs are doing as you try to decrease the frequency of practice. The day you have to knock your score down one notch compared to the previous time you played the song, you know you’ve probably gone too far in decreasing frequency and ought to play the song a little more often. If you ever let a song get down to 1, it’s time to stop playing that song and start working it. Add it to your current projects list with a pencil dot, removing the dot only once the song is back up to a 2 or 3.

However you stay on top of how often to play each song, the result should be that you actually end up taking less time to practice. This is because you now practice your repertoire songs only as often as needed to keep them alive. Without this guideline, you can easily practice those songs more often, and your overall practice time can start to feel crowded and stressed. With current projects and a growing repertoire to manage, you’ll want the efficiency brought by adjusting the frequency of repertoire songs.

Another reason you’ll want that efficiency: the time spent keeping your repertoire alive should be in addition to the basic 15-20 minutes (or 30-35 minutes as you progress through the program) you’ve set aside each day for practice. That time is needed for your current projects. Additional time is needed for maintaining your repertoire.

How to incorporate that time into your practice routine? Perhaps play your entire repertoire once or twice a week. If you use the 5-point scoring system, playing the whole repertoire at once is a great way to get really clear about just how all your songs are really doing.

Since different songs will best be practiced at different frequencies, you can play a few songs each day, adding just a few extra minutes to your daily routine. You may find that playing one or more repertoire songs in between current projects creates a nice rhythm for your practice sessions.

A combination of these approaches can work well, too — occasionally playing your entire repertoire just for fun and an overall snapshot, while also practicing individual songs on a more regular basis. A particularly good time to go through the entire repertoire is when a new month begins. Knowing that all songs have been practiced prevents you from needing to flip back and forth to the previous month to manage different songs’ performance frequencies.

How you do it is up to you. Figuring out and managing a system for coordinating repertoire play with current project work will take some effort. For that effort, though, you’ll reap the rewards of a growing repertoire that stays in great shape with the least effort.

When you first started lessons, you were told to practice for about 15-20 minutes each day at the same time each day. From around Level 4 or so onward, a little bit more time will be needed to continue to accomplish as much, perhaps about 30-35 minutes a day. Either way, this daily practice time is to be spent on current projects.

Current projects include any pieces you’re working at the piano, i.e., any pieces that aren’t yet or are no longer alive and thoughtless. They also include particular kinds of assignments not tracked on the Playlist, such as improvisations, composition projects that aren’t yet named or in their final state, reading assignments, etc.

When an assignment is given during your lessons, information is provided for your Notes Book. When it’s time for your your first practice session after the lesson, get out both your Notes Book and Playlist. Add to your Playlist any new pieces for working the piano, along with a pencil dot in the margin to indicate each new piece’s status as a current project. Make sure when practicing to always refer to both books, since the Notes Book can contain assignments not tracked on the Playlist, as well as occasional important advice on particular projects.

You already know the nuts and bolts of how to practice an individual piece. If, however, you were to follow that process with a piece from the beginning until the point where it comes alive and even becomes effortless, it would be far more than the length of a single day’s practice session. And if you did spend the necessary time all in one block, you’d end up having spent far more time than necessary in learning the piece. We learn best when putting in a small amount of time each day, consistently over the course of time. The practice process must be spread out from day to day.

This leads us to the key principle in managing the time you spend on current projects. Call it incrementalism, call it divide and conquer. The point is to put just a few minutes a day into each current project. Why? Diminishing returns. Beyond a certain point, doubling the amount of practice on a project in a given session doesn’t double the amount of progress. Put in too much time on a particular project, and you start losing focus. This causes you to make more mistakes — and if you keep going at that point, you start learning the mistakes. This is what we want to avoid at all costs.

Further, if you were to work on, say, a single current project each day, you’d be reducing your progress even beyond the issue of losing focus. With this scheme, you’re ensuring that any given project might go ignored for days at a time. In addition to the reduced progress you had from pushing the bounds of focus the last time you worked on that project, now you’re rusty at even what you did accomplish, simply because you’re, literally, out of practice with that project.

It’s okay in any given practice session if you don’t feel you’ve gotten very far with a particular project, if you feel you didn’t get to a point that feels satisfying or complete. It’s okay if you had left off the day before still working on one particular part and still haven’t mastered it in the few minutes you’ve allotted for it in today’s practice session. Spend just a few minutes a day on a current project, check it off on your Playlist, and move on, getting to each project each day. This will ensure that you’ll be making progress on all your current projects, and that little bit each day over the course of time adds up to a lot of progress.

Think, perhaps, of “striping” your practice time. The first few minutes of a day’s practice on one current project, the next few on another, and so on, and the same thing each day. It’s as if each project has its own stripe running across your calendar during your daily practice time. Some projects will need a longer stripe, running across more days than other projects, perhaps even across several weeks. Some people will need a longer stripe for the same project than other people will. For each person, each piece must come alive in its own time. There is no deadline by which any particular person needs to learn any particular piece.

There is, on the other hand, a deadline for each stripe, i.e., for each individual current project practiced on each day. It’s impossible to advise a very specific amount of time for each project during a day’s practice session, but perhaps 3-5 minutes is a good guideline for the most to spend at one stretch.

You will often be tempted to keep practicing a particular project for a longer time. Resist! If you need to, get a timer, and set it for a few minutes each time to let you know when to move onto another project.

If you’re desperate to give more time to a particular project on a given day, come back to it after finishing the rest of your practice. Even better, finish practicing and then take a break. Get a drink or a snack. Do something else for a little while. Then come back and give just another few minutes to that project.

When you give appropriate and effective attention to a current project, it will move through the process and come alive. Upon realizing that a song is alive, erase the pencil dot that was in the margin next to its name in your Playlist. This is why you used pencil for the dot in the first place — so you’d be able to erase the dot when the song stopped being a current project and became part of your repertoire.

Take a look at how you’re doing in terms of moving current projects through that process. At any given time, the ideal is to have a relatively small number of current projects. There’s no one right number, but with 3-5 minutes per project as a guideline, you could fit 3-7 current projects into 15-20 minutes, and 6-12 current projects into 30-35 minutes.

If you have more than these numbers of current projects, you might have to divide your time up so that you give a bit less time than usual to each project. You may find that you’re able to pull everything through — or you may find that the current project list continues to grow and that you’re not able to get out from under the piling up.

In such a situation, ask yourself if you’ve been practicing effectively up until now. Be honest with yourself. If you’ve ever spent any amount of time failing to practice as much or as efficiently as you should have, you’ll need to make up for lost time and catch up if you want to get on track. How to catch up after falling behind, whether from a vacation or any other situation involving a prolonged period of insufficient practice, will be the subject of another article somewhere down the line.

If you have practiced diligently from the start but still find yourself with a too-large number of current projects, then perhaps you are proceeding too quickly through the curriculum. Let your teacher know that you think you may need to slow down.

With the right pace and your commitment to put in sufficient practice time, following the principle of consistent, incremental progress will get you where you need to go. Accept whatever small amount of ground you cover in the practice process for any given piece on any given day. Fail to do this, and you’ll spend more time than necessary on each song, practicing with more difficulty, and you’ll end up having a harder time managing things as your playlist grows in number and complexity. Follow this advice, though, and you will learn each song as quickly as possible, spending the smallest amount of time practicing each piece to the point of coming alive, and remaining capable of effectively managing your advancing playlist.

Luckily, once a song is alive, it starts to require less and less practice in order to keep it alive. However, if it doesn’t get enough practice, you’ll start to lose it. You’ll play with less confidence, perhaps making recurring mistakes, perhaps simply forgetting what to do. When any of this happens, it’s time to add a pencil dot again, putting that song back on your roster of current projects, removing the pencil dot only once that project becomes fluent again.

Of course, we want to avoid losing songs from the repertoire in the first place. Once a song is alive, we want to keep it that way. How to manage that for your entire repertoire is the topic of the next piece for the Lesson Line.

Potluck Creative Arts proudly presents these workshop offerings for the Summer 2009 term, Monday 6/29/2009 to Friday 9/4//2009.

• Simply Music Beginner Piano Workshops
• Songwriting Workshops
• Singalong Workshops

Simply Music Beginner Piano Workshops

Learn how to play a number of great-sounding songs, as well as variations and improvisation, in just 8 lessons — great for students of all ages!

Schedule options:

Day/Time: Mondays 9:00 a.m..
Dates: TBD — 8 dates bewteen 6/29/2009 and 8/31/2009
Offering Code: OG09001

Day/Time: Mondays 10:00 a.m..
Dates: TBD — 8 dates bewteen 6/29/2009 and 8/31/2009
Offering Code: OG09002

Day/Time: Mondays 11:00 a.m..
Dates: TBD — 8 dates bewteen 6/29/2009 and 8/31/2009
Offering Code: OG09003

Additional workshops can be added if there is interest! Contact us with your preferences.

Information for all workshops:

• Location: The Potluck Creative Arts studio in the Village of Red Hook, NY
• Cost: $180.00 — includes tuition at $21.00/lesson plus $12.00 for materials
• Materials to Bring: Simply Music Student Workshop 1 Student Home Materials will be provided to you at your workshop’s first lesson. Bring them each time thereafter.
• Register by: June 1

Learn more about Simply Music piano lessons and beginner piano workshops, and enroll now!

Songwriting Workshops

No current regularly scheduled offerings. Learn more about Songwriting Workshops and contact us to tailor your own.

Singalong Workshops

No current regularly scheduled offerings. Learn more about Singalong Workshops and contact us to tailor your own.

In the last Lesson Line piece, we looked at an optimal approach for practicing individual songs, in particular Foundation pieces. Let’s now start to take a look at how to think about your practice time so that the work you do on individual songs adds up to the efficient and effective development of your entire repertoire.

Why Build a Repertoire

Most other piano methods don’t explicitly focus on the building of a repertoire. There are, however, several compelling reasons for why this is done as part of the Simply Music program. It’s worth making clear just why it’s so valuable.

• It’s fun! — When you can sit down at the piano and play a variety of songs across a variety of styles, you really experience yourself as a musician. That’s a great, enjoyable experience.
• You can focus on musicality — Once you’ve really become fluent with a given song, you’re then free to give extra attention to making it sound really beautiful and adding your own sense of expression.
• It’s the foundation — Keeping your songs alive so that you can effortlessly play your repertoire gives you a solid foundation for moving confidently onto more complex pieces, reading, theory and other advanced material.

So many other piano methods fail to focus on the building of a repertoire. A student works on new material each week, and once it seems in satisfactory shape, it’s ignored from that point forward. The only songs such students maintain in their repertoire are the few songs, if any, that they personally like enough to continue to play. This is like creating a garden by carefully planting each new plant only to let it die as you focus on each new plant you’re planting. The result of this approach would be something quite different from the beautiful garden you might have had in mind.

Simply Music, on the other hand, focuses on the maintenance of a repertoire precisely so that you will have a musical garden that is not only always growing but in which everything ever planted there continually flourishes. Just like with a garden of plants, this is only possible through regular cultivation.

Two Types of Practice

To start to see just how to cultivate your repertoire, let’s first distinguish two different ways of practicing songs, both of which you’ll need in order to manage your practice routine.

Playing the Piano

This is what it’s all about. Being able to just sit down at the piano and know how to play something. This is what was meant when we talked about practicing an individual song and getting it to the point of being alive. This is a song you, quite simply, know how to play on the piano. It has become part of your repertoire. While you will continue to develop greater fluency and musicality with the piece, formally practicing it is now just a matter of playing it and enjoying when you do so.

It’s really important that you have time to just play all the songs in your repertoire and bask in the glory of what you are able to do! No fixing problems, just playing through whatever mistakes may occur. Mistakes here and there in songs you know are totally normal, and recovering from them in the middle of a performance is an important skill to learn. You’ll learn that skill as you refrain from dwelling on mistakes while playing the songs in your repertoire. The point here is to simply enjoy the experience of making music.

You only get to this point with a song, though, after a fair amount of work has been put in. This brings us to the second type of piano practice.

Working the Piano

Until a song is fluent and you are able to play it, you need to work it. This will be true of:

• Newly assigned pieces.
• Other pieces with which you’ve not yet become fluent.
• Older songs that entered your repertoire but that you then didn’t practice enough, so that they now have weak spots, recurring mistakes, or perhaps you’ve even forgotten how to play them.

You’ll spend the majority of your practice time on current projects such as these. It’s not enough to merely play them through a couple of times each day and expect that you’ll easily get them to the point of fluency. Use the approach described in the last Lesson Line piece. Use and remain conscious of the learning strategies for each part of each song. If a part is particularly difficult, go over it as many times as you may need to work things out. Get comfortable with each part before moving onto another. Everything prior to the point of the song coming alive is what’s involved in working the piano.

Balancing Work and Play

In a way, it’s the story of life in our modern world — how to balance work and play? All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy — and Jill a dull girl. This won’t work for us, because one of the key reasons to learn piano is enjoyment. At the same time, as some extend the proverb, all play and no work makes us each a mere toy. Try to have only fun, and there’s no surer way of failing to get anything done. Only through both work and play can we get to that real enjoyment.

How much time to spend working the piano, then, and how much time to spend playing it?

Spend too little time on your older songs, and they may get out of shape. But spend too much time on them at the expense of newer songs, and you’ll never get songs solidly into your repertoire in the first place.

Spend too little time having the experience of just playing songs for enjoyment, and you may lose interest in the piano. But spend too much time playing for enjoyment and failing to address problem areas, and we won’t be able to really enjoy what we play anyway.

The key is to find the right amount of time for each — and that’s very different from finding the same amount of time for each. Work and play have different needs. If you meet those needs properly, you’ll actually find that your practice routine can be very efficient. Each song will take the shortest possible amount of total time to learn, your practice sessions will be as short as they need to be to build and maintain your repertoire, and you’ll be able to manage an ever-growing number of projects.

In the next two pieces for the Lesson Line, we’ll explore each area in detail — how to efficiently and effectively manage both working and playing the piano.

It’s really good. It’s helping me a lot. Mark helps me with new songs and I get better at them.

He’s very, very nice.

Katerina, age 7

Learn more about Simply Music Piano Lessons and Workshops.