Making Musicians: Slow the Pace, Play More
The urge to teach can interfere with your students' urge to learn.
This is the first in what I hope will become a series titled “Making Musicians”, which will be a collection of lessons I’ve learned as a private music instructor.
The Compulsion to Teach
The accumulation of knowledge is empowering, but it is also inspiring: We feel compelled to seek out others who share our knowledge, even if we have to first teach them what we know. This is why fan cultures develop around highly specific topics. It's why adults seek communities of fellow hobbyists. And it's one reason why musicians teach.
However, this urge to share can disrupt the private lesson experience. I personally have to refrain from lengthy digressions nearly every day that I’m in the studio. A mundane topic, like how to bend a note, can easily grow into a presentation on various bending techniques if I allow it. For me, one of the principal traits of an effective private music instructor is restraint.
Controlling the Pace
When directing a band rehearsals, I follow a rule of only stopping to work on one thing at a time. I’m like the guy who gives you advice on your golf swing: If I tell you to straighten one leg, relax the other, extend one arm, open your club face, and follow through more on your swing all at the same time, you’re less likely to do any of these things. But if you hit a bucket of balls while focusing only on your left leg, then another while paying attention to your follow-through, and so on, you’re more likely to reap the benefits of the advice.
This principle applies to private lessons. If you hear a lot of things in a student’s performance that need attention, don't expect them to remember a list of corrections. Fix one problem, rehearse it, and then move on to the next. And by "rehearse it," I mean repeat the living crap out of the passage you're fixing. I would rather have my student spend a half hour repeating the same passage than listen to me pontificate on the finer points of whatever they’re trying to learn.
I have so many mantras regarding the learning process that I might as well start numbering them. So here we go with Mantra Number One: Music is a physical skill.
The better you get as a performer throughout years of practice, the more knowledge you glean regarding music in general. But knowledge follows action. Practice and experience prime the mind of a musician to receive information, and then it is received and retained. A teacher who presents information without prior practice only casts knowledge into the ether, where it dissipates.
Beginning piano students need to hear a tonic triad and play it many times before it is defined for them in words. Guitarists should be taught how to play a blues progression, and learn a few songs that use one, before the abstract concepts of 12-bar blues progressions and I, IV and V chords are explained to them.
One very powerful effect of this approach is that, once students get around to learning the theory supporting music they already instinctively understand, they’ll feel like they’re just learning labels for things they already know. I’m sure it’s already happened to any self-taught musicians out there reading this. Didn’t you feel like a genius then?
Remember Your Own Timeline
Whether you’re self-taught or formally trained, how rapidly did you progress? Imagine a measurable timeline of progress: First, you might have learned two simple chords. Next, maybe just the opening riff of a Nirvana song. After that, a blues shuffle pattern, and so on. How many weeks passed between each new skill? How granular were those skills — were they smaller components of some other multiple-step skill?
For teachers, music lessons aren’t paced like a sitcom; you can’t expect to cover a new topic every week. Each new idea needs to “settle”. You might even have to occasionally set aside a song or an exercise that isn’t well-suited for the student yet and return to it later.
For students, however, lessons are paced like sitcoms in the sense that character development is slow, and milestones are surmounted only once in a while. In a TV show the father gets a new job, the family adopts a dog, the daughter gets married, etc., but only every few weeks or months. That’s the pace of learning an instrument. You play the part of “guitar player”; and now and then, your role is expanded by one new detail.
It can be easy to forget how slowly we progressed when we were new to the instrument, especially for those of us who began as kids. I have to remind myself that my progress was not linear — it was long plateaus interrupted by sudden “Eureka!” moments. I didn’t notice or care how slowly I was progressing, partly because I was a kid and time was all I had, but also because every step along the way, I was simply enjoying the instrument for what it was. That’s why I routinely tell my students Mantra Number 2: Practice is the Point. To what ends are we practicing? None. It never ends. We perform sometimes, but performances are just snapshots of our current state.
As instructors, we get impatient with our students’ progress, when we should be giving them permission to simply enjoy what they’re doing.
They Come to Play
After emerging from a university education, I was wrapped up in the concept of music as a class. But it’s an activity. Many of your students come to you expecting to do stuff, like in other organized activities such as ceramics, karate, or basketball. Theory and history are super fun, naturally, but it’s probably not what they signed up for.
As “trained” musicians, we like to dump information on our students, and we’d be lying if we claimed that it isn’t at least slightly due to narcissism — we want to establish our position of expertise. The downside of lessons being more about the student using their hands than using their brains is that we don’t get to play the part of expert instructor as often. The upside is that when you treat your role as coach rather than professor, there’s less pressure to be brilliant. Students generally react more favorably to lessons in which they’ve played than those in which they listened.
Good Students Teach Themselves
There’s a paradox in teaching: It takes very little guidance to send your best students on their way toward self-motivated discovery, but the students that you’d think could use more guidance are more easily overwhelmed by the effort. In other words, the most engaged students need little from you, and the ones who need the most from you don’t use what you give them.
I’d much rather hear a student excitedly tell me something they learned on their own since our last meeting than tell them myself. I know I probably won’t keep the self-teachers for long, but while I have them I try to fill their lesson time with as much hands-on activity as possible. They’re more likely to intuit the conceptual lessons behind physical lessons, without any prompting.
And the less engaged students? Keep them playing as well. For many of them, it might be the only practice they get this week. So you get the double advantage of boring them less while instilling in them a sense of accomplishment.