Have questions or thoughts you'd like to share with others here at Lessonface? We invite you to take part in the Lessonface forum. Teachers and students are posting on topics that go before, alongside, & beyond lessons.
It's that time of year again! As holiday festivities wind down and the new year is upon us, it's a great time to step back and reflect on your progress in 2018. Did you articulate some concrete musical objectives at the beginning of last year? Which of them did you accomplish? If you fell short of some goals, do you know why you didn't meet them? Learn from both your successes and failures, and articulate some fresh aims for the new year. Be sure to make your 2019 resolutions specific, measurable, and achievable.
It would be lovely if progress were a smooth upward incline from playing our awkward first notes to maturing into a skilled, expressive musician. It would be great to finish each practice session playing everything better, and if, signing in to each lesson, we were confident in having advanced since the last class. However, musical growth doesn’t happen in a smooth easy line. We have our leaps and bounds forwards, but we also have setbacks, plateaus, and sometimes feel our playing has worsened.
Alex Skolnick, the extraordinary thrash and jazz guitarist, was interviewed by Ray Suhy in our second installment of our Lessonface Presents series on November 1, 2018.
You can watch the entire conversation by enrolling (for free) here.
Skolnick delighted us by demonstrating some of his techniques on our trusty classroom guitar, sharing great anecdotes and insights, and even creating a lesson on the fly from the Whale of Fortune.
Our first Face the Music event kicked off on Thursday, October 18, with 2018 GRAMMY® winner for music educator of the year Melissa Salguero. With deft questioning by Chris Ott, dedicated teacher trainer and lifelong educator, who himself was part of the Lessonface staff around 2013-2015, Salguero discussed her tools and techniques for engaging her kids and remaining motivated herself.
It was a fascinating look into a stellar educator's process. Watch the entire discussion here below.
Celina Charlier, flute, and Fábio Pellegatti, cello, are performing at the Lessonface studio on November 3 for their concert entitled Metaphora Intangibile! We invite you to join us, either online or here at our studio in the West Village!
Try this exercise for a week: Each time you set your instrument down after practicing, write down exactly what you can do now that you couldn’t do at the start of the session. If you have doubts about whether you have accomplished anything concrete, or even if you have trouble articulating what it is, odds are you are not practicing correctly. Follow these steps to refine your approach to practicing and accelerate your progress.
