MaryReid

What small improvement can you make right now to become a better musician?

It could be a posture adjustment, mastering a new technique or improving just a few notes in a tune.
Identify it, then dedicate your next practice session to this improvement. Small changes can lead to significant progress over time.

I encourage you to post your…[Read more]

Here’s a short summary of what I practiced during the OPS:

Here’s an outline of what I practiced:
– [[Practice tip]]: Vary the volume
– Warming with something easier: old-time tunes I just learned. Still not totally memorized.
– [[Rochester Scottische]]
– working out a way to play it that…[Read more]

What’s challenging? What’s going well?

If you’re serious about learning chord backup, then be sure to take the last Chord Backup Workshop I gave. In it I suggested you learn just three chords and then practice chord backup on 10-20 songs. Doing that prepares you to understand theory.

Next month we’ll do another workshop on chord backup on April…[Read more]

I’ve had this bad habit of raising my first finger in the air when I play fourth finger (pinky). I had a good teacher as a kid named Mrs. Osborn who tried to break the habit without breaking my love of music. I still do this. I don’t think it held me back too much. But now I want to try to re-train my hand. Let’s see if this old dog can learn a…[Read more]