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…
Category: Music Lessons
The Importance of the Life Coach in Supporting Students’ Success with Piano Lessons
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…
Keeping the Repertoire Alive
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.…
Managing Current Projects
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…
Building a Repertoire
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…
How to Practice a Song
For the last few Lesson Line pieces, I’ve focused on some “big picture” ideas with the hope of helping you develop a constructive way of thinking about lessons and practice in general. Since all of that relies on getting each…
When Perfection is a Problem
The goal in learning to play any new piece is to get to a point where you are able to play it smoothly and evenly, hardly ever making mistakes. Because that’s the goal, you might think that if you can…
Making Mistakes
Everyone makes mistakes. Every musician makes mistakes. Every professional musician makes mistakes. It’s normal to make mistakes. So why do we have such a problem with mistakes? Well, we actually have two related problems with mistakes, one we know and…
Slowly, Slowly, Slowly
Welcome to the Potluck Creative Arts Lesson Line, a newsletter providing special information for students taking Simply Music piano lessons through Potluck Creative Arts. This introductory piece for the Lesson Line is the first of many writings to come where…