Essential Practice Tips

Being a musician is more then just a hobby; it’s a lifestyle – one that takes a lot of commitment and self-awareness to succeed at. Learning Music in Lincoln at Blackwood Studios is about having the self-control and dedication to practice regularly - it's the only way to improve on your chosen instrument. So here are a few practice tips to get the most out of your guitar lessons/drum lessons/singing lessons at Blackwood Studios…

Playing vs Practice

Make time and space:

Be sure to know the difference between playing your instrument and doing practice on it. Practice time is a chance to work on your technique such as drum stick control or various different plectrum styles or vocal exercises. Enjoying playing what you already know is important too but it isn’t practice.

Drummers – use a practice pad:

When you practice, you should spend half of your time on the full drum set and the other half on a practice pad. This is something that most drummers know to do, but rarely do it. The benefit of using a practice pad is that you are forced to develop your stick control. When you play on a full drum set, you have a lot of other distractions.

Set a Goal for each Practice Session:

Nothing impossible just a very reachable goal. Challenging but sensible and focused.

So you might decide to work on tempo by attempting to get up to 120 bpm one session, and 125 bpm the next. If you keep going wrong you’re probably going way too fast. Rather than get frustrated just slow down to the speed you can manage. With enough successful identical repetitions, the natural learning process can take place and before you know it, you’ll be playing it at full speed on autopilot!

Use Spaced Repetition :

Spaced repetition is a learning approach that uses increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect. Basically....understand this graph....

Make it easy on yourself - practice when you've only forgotten 10%

Have Fun!

So play what you want to play - and practice what you want to practice - and stay positive. As you improve at your instrument you should also aim to improve your approach to practice. So with good practice habits you’ll be sure to get the most out of your music lessons at Blackwood Studios.