How To Practice Music

Fiddling with life and learning with the occasional dad joke thrown in…

 

 

Alternate between a tune and its scale

Here’s a simple yet powerful practice technique: Alternate between a tune and its scale. If you’re practicing Arkansas Traveller, alternate between playing the tune and the D Major scale. Use a D drone to help with tuning and to make the practice more fun. Also alternate between playing small phrases from the tune and the … Continued

Three Warmup Steps For Fiddling On A Tune

Like a sprinter placing their feet in the blocks and their hands on the ground, you can do a few things to prepare for playing a tune. On your mark, get set, go…⁠ ⁠ Check your posture, breathe and relax the body. Bring awareness to what you’re doing now. 👁⁠ Visualize how the tune goes. … Continued

The Fun Fiddle Practice Of Chaining

Here’s a practice technique called “Chaining”. The basic idea is to incrementally add to what you are practicing. You can slowly piece together notes to create scales and tune phrases. Then you can piece together tune phrases to build out tunes. You can even chain tunes to create sets and medleys. <span data-mce-type=”bookmark” style=”display: inline-block; … Continued

17 Ways To Practice Jenny Lynn

In this lesson, I demonstrate 17 ways to practice the tune Jenny Lynn. This will make your sessions fun and productive. You’ll learn the tune at a deep level as you improve various aspects of your technique. Before we get started, here are lessons I’ve made on this: Jenny Lynn – Basic Jenny Lynn – … Continued

Creative work takes time

Last weekend I finished a recording session with my old friend Joe Rut. Overall, it went well. We did six tunes in about two and a half days. Three of these are long form “fiddle raga” pieces, while the other three are shorter, more composed pieces. Here’s what I learned…   It’s hard to predict … Continued

The Jenny Lynn demo

Here’s a bluegrass tune by Bill Monroe called “Jenny Lynn.” I just made a lesson for this along with the Round Peak variation.  

Oh Resistance! Your power is strong, but I will keep going!

I’ve been reading The War of Art, which is about overcoming resistance in creative work. Though I’ve been making things my whole life, I still have to do battle with Resistance. For example, I’ve been writing and practicing tunes for an album with the working title “Fiddle Stories.” I’m exploring ways of re-inventing these tunes … Continued

Mix Up Your Music Practice With Interleaving

Interleaving is alternating between different skills as you practice. Instead of pounding away at a difficult scale for an entire session, a difficult bowing in another session, and then a hard tune in still another session, alternate between each skill multiple times in a single session.   If you find you’re getting extremely frustrated doing … Continued

Practice What Matters Most

It would be nice if we could make music all day long. But life gets in the way: work, chores, social obligations, health issues. Shoot, sometimes we just need to relax on the couch with Netflix. So most of us have a limited amount of time to practice music each day. The question is, how … Continued