keysandfrets

I wonder why so many students tell me “I could play it at home, but when I get here it all goes wrong”?

Imagine you play darts. You stand on your mark and throw darts at your board until you get treble twenty every time. (If only). Then when you play somewhere else you miss every time. Why? Is YOUR mark positioned exactly the same distance from the board as the one at home? Is your board the same regulation size? Are you using the same darts?

OK. When you arrive at your lesson, is the seat the same height? Are sitting in the same posture as at home? Are you using the same instrument?

It might seem an obvious thing, but a LOT of people practise sitting down all the time, then go and do a performance standing up – and wonder why they don’t play as well as in practise!

I believe it to be very important to understand what you’re playing. If you don’t, you just read notes off a page and reproduce them so your performance is flat and unemotional. No notation can describe an emotion. Loud or soft is certainly not an emotion, just a volume level – and there’s no musical notation for “this bit is supposed to make people laugh” or “make them cry here”.

Going further, even J S Bach wrote chord sequences. If you just slavishly follow the notes but don’t understand the chords (harmony) and why it moves as it does, it is much harder to learn. There’s logic in the harmony (especially in J S Bach!) and if you know the logic some of the learning is automatic.