Practice

The Importance of Improvisation on a Musical Instrument Music is fun, and playing an instrument is even better when you can make up your own tunes! Improvisation means making music on the spot, without reading notes from a page. It helps musicians be more creative, learn their instrument better, and play well with others. Being

Learning to read music takes quite a while. There are all sorts of symbols and shapes that mean very specific things and it can be confusing trying to keep them all straight. Two common notations that people get confused are triplets and dotted notes. Dots and triplets modify other notes. They change how long beats

Time signatures come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. When they show up on your sheet music, it’s important to understand what they’re trying to say to you. Thanks to the power of math, you can trick yourself into thinking that many time signatures mean the same thing. But this is not always true.

If you’ve ever gone to the gym or played a sport, you’ll know that warming up is the first thing any trainer or coach will tell you to do. Warming up is the first step to performing any activity that is going to push you to your limits. In this article, we’re going to go

Reward In this final post, we’ll follow up the 4 stages of habit building with the final phase, Reward. Who doesn’t love a good reward? You work hard and you’re granted something for your efforts. So what rewards can we use to encourage our playing and how often should we reward ourselves? Daily Rewards A

Response So far we’ve covered Cues and Cravings. Next comes the third step in the habit loop which is response. The response is how you react to the habits you’re trying to create. If you’re trying to break a bad habit, your best best is to make it difficult. If you want to stop eating

In the previous post, I talked about habit making and “The Four Laws of Behavior Change”. I also discussed a bit at length the first of the four laws which we described as “Make It Obvious” or “Cue” and how you can apply these ideas to making guitar practice a regular habit. Today I’m going

Habits are a tricky thing. Every day we make hundreds of  conscious (or often times unconscious) decisions that will dictate our life. Those habits, as small as they might seem, have a compounding effect on our lives and can make a profound difference months or years down the line. I’ve been thinking a lot about