steps

In the course of teaching guitar you keep going back to the same few bits of advice -which all seem to be quite difficult to take in and make part of the way you practise or tackle new pieces. Practise slowly, practise in small bits (small enough that you can quickly analyse and then repeat many times until they become automatic).

We all want to get there but most of us don’t want to put in what (at least at first) feels like a long slug, the drudge work of developing finger dexterity, finger strength, finger control. The interesting and difficult thing is to make the acquiring of that discipline less of a chore and more something you can enjoy in itself. Some of us eventually learn to do this, many don’t. It is one of the bigger challenges for an instrumental music teacher to get your pupils to develop this, to get to like their practice.

I reckon there may be many answers to this, all with different advantages and shortcomings. I will try and elaborate on these topics later on.

The main goals, though, remain the same:

– getting the pupil to take in the information available to them. We tend to take in bits and ignore large chunks of what is in front of us.

– getting the pupil to learn to break the task into manageable chunks

– to practise slowly

– and to repeat what they have learnt so it becomes ‘automatic’ , where each of the many steps involved in the task no longer have to be explicitly stated.

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