Learning Music Effectively

This book will be available soon, see the table of contents below.
Download the podcast: Learning Music: Practice and Performance (6.5mb, 16minutes)

Table of Contents
About the author

1.DO YOU WANT TO BE AN EXPERT?
Brain Connections
Nature or nurture
10 000 hours
Marshmallows
2.REPETITION
3.CHUNKING
4.SLOW PRACTICE
5.META-COGNITION
6.IMAGINATION
7.MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCE
8.MOTIVATION
Flow
Regulating difficulty
9.LEISURE
10.SIGHT-PLAYING
11.PLAYING FROM MEMORY
12.PLAYING BY EAR
Enjoyment
13.STRESS
14.PERFORMING UNDER PRESSURE
15.UNDERSTANDING MISTAKES
16.LESSON TIME
Mobile phone 

Podcast comments

This podcast taught me that it's not just playing the piano itself that makes me better, but different things I can do everyday. I can improve my piece by taking a closer look at my music, playing on an imaginary piano, going over the song in my head, humming or singing it, counting out loud, and other ways. I learned that repetition is a very good strategy used by all successful performers, teachers, and students. Another interesting fact is that the average piano master plays 3 hours each day or 20 hours each week. I'm strongly encouraged to go back and practice my pieces from years ago, and split the piece into parts to memorize and master each area. Now I would recommend students to get a metronome, and turn it to the slowest tempo and take it up a faster pace after they master the previous speed. I learned that this will help me accomplish my goals set for that piece of music. I think that this podcast is very encouraging to anyone that is involved in playing an instrument. This also helps anyone struggling with their musical performance to "get back on track" not only with their instrument and what they play, but for everything they do. Thank you for the wonderful podcast! - Hannah, 13, U.S.A

Thanks ! This podcast really helps!!! Now I can try to practice better when I'm playing my instruments. - Katherine, U.S.A

The best post I've come across in the past couple of weeks was from Michael Griffin at Music Education World. In this podcast he sums up an approach to practice which very closely matches our own ethos here at HTP. 

This is a fantastic article on the brain and music learning. Just a few days ago, the very excellent iSchoolBand Blog published a guest article by Michael D Griffin entitled How to Learn Music Properly. In his article, Griffin draws many of the same conclusions that I have discovered in my own personal research of modern neurology and how it affects music learning. I agree that most performing music programs never teach their students how to practice or how to think meta-cognitively. As science begins to understand how the brain functions with new scanning technologies, we as music educators need to pay attention and apply those findings. I highly recommend this article. Be sure to give it your attention. - Thomas J. West Music