As the New Year approaches many folks are considering what they might do in this next year to make progress in your music studies. Many of you have been able to make some progress in learning music as part of your overall approach to learning your own specific instrument. Please keep up the good work.
What I’ve Been Hearing Lately
In casual conversations with those that have played musical instruments in the past, a few have told me how hard music theory can be. Drilling down on why they say these types of things the answers are pretty typical.
Most of these people studied an instrument and were taught a chord here and a scale there, but they never had taken the time to really study music principles in depth.
When talking with those musicians that understand the principles and theory really get excited about music because they have learned to apply that knowledge to creating music and quickly understanding how songs are constructed and not just playing it.
If you haven’t gotten music theory down cold, this next year is the time to really think about accomplishing that goal.
Now, More Than Ever, Is The Time To Get The Ball Rolling
Thinking that you will learn what you need when you need it is a sure way to taking forever to get it accomplished. If you will take a simple, straightforward, and systematic method of learning music principles you’re going to be much happier with your progress and your accomplishments.
One way to do it is simple to take the time to write out what you don’t know. That is if you know what you don’t know and specific study a music item or element for a few minutes every week.
Let’s say you don’t know all your major scales. Maybe you need to study E A and A flat scales. Simple focusing on just one in a week.
What You Can Accomplish In Just One Year
Take time to write the scale out, play and talk your way through it on your instrument, check fingerings and practice a couple of octaves in that week you will accomplish 40 to 50 pieces of new information in a year. And you can do it with less than a half hour of effort in a week.
Don’t get me wrong, it takes more than a half hour to practice and prefect expression and confidence in learning any one thing. What I’m promoting is that you have to work on new things on a focused effort in order to move on to master of music. Now is the time to set objectives and layout a plan to increase your music knowledge.
You will find many sources of reference information about the music elements. The Music Learning Workshop has developed a 12 month subscription course for the fundamentals to intermediate music theory. Here’s the way to get up to 4 years of study and knowledge under your belt in one year from now.
Tags: casual conversations, creating music, hard music, learning music, major scales, music studies, music theory, new years resolution, octaves, systematic method