Strategies in learning a musical instrument

Strategies in learning a musical instrument

As a musician, study music is considered as part of our daily activity. We are demanding to practice every day. During the practice, we will face a lot of problems, such as technique, passion and rhythm. Most of the people think that having a good teacher is very important, but I think, how to the practice by ourselves when we are alone in the practice room is more important. The good practice methods can help us to improve faster and perform better.

Firstly, practicing basic skills such as play open strings in slow tempo every day. The purpose of it is to let us observe our clear basics problems in our playing. For example, when we are playing the open string, we only need to concentrate on our right hand and don't need to consider about our left hand, we can listen to the sound we produce more carefully. This way of practicing can be used as a warm up exercise to relax our fingers. When we practice, the basic point is we should always practice with a metronome; to ensure our playing is following the tempo of the music and not follows our own feeling. If the music is very lively or intense, we tend to rush and play faster than the true speed, especially when the 16-notes come. Therefore, the metronome becomes an important tool during our basic skill’s practices.
Secondly, we should start the practice in slow rhythm. Which tempo is comfortable and control when we practice a new piece? I think the first thing is to make sure the piece can be played smoothly. When we practice in slow rhythm, the finger actions always follow our instinct and feeling instead of the muscle memory of the fingers itself. So if we more play slow tempo to practice, we can make sure every note can be memorized by finger. Slow practice helps us more clearly analysis music and help us improve our intonation. When we keep practice very fast, we didn’t have time to practice the perfect intonation and the exact tempo. We may not even recognize if it is wrong. But when we more use the slow tempo practice, everything can be much more easily.

Finally, we should be serious and very hard in major class .If the major teacher tell us this melody how to playing is better and where is we’re playing wrong notes or some problem, we need to take note, because this is a good methods to prevent us from getting forget teacher‘s ideas after major class. When we back to practice room, we need use teacher‘s idea correct the problem by ourselves.

In conclusion, I think music need talent, but if musician just only have talent is not enough .How to strategies in learning a musical instrument is very important. So as a musician, we not only need to hard practice our instrument but also need to good methods improve study. If we have good strategies in learning a musical instrument, we will become a good musician.