If you've ever taken music lessons.. answer this question please

[toddzilla]

why didn't you practice????


i taught for several years and it's basically why i quit, i got tired of doing the same thing with people week after week.

[XanaDUer]

1. I do practice

guitar, I guess I practice for the satisfaction of getting better and better at it.

[Maple]

2. Because it was

dull and repetitious, and not at all the kind of music I wanted to play.

[ramapo]

3. Takes dedication

I most always practiced but I was into it. I too taught for a time and only a small percentage of students were serious and practiced.

Some have the luxury of only taking older, serious students who are much more likely to practice. Makes all the difference.

Things are worse now. So many other things to do and practicing is work.

[toddzilla]

6. part of the problem

i worked at a small music studio and i was low man on the totem pole. my boss got all the older students and i got stuck with all the teenagers pretty much. i really enjoyed the older students i did get, and i'd probably still be teaching if i had more of them. the really frustrating thing is when you do get a student that has enough raw talent to play well, but doesn't seem to care about it. always made me nuts to have to sit there for an hour trying to get them to do anything. sometimes i wish i still taught, since my skills were pretty amazing after a period of teaching for 20+ hours a week and doing drills on my off-time.

[GAspnes]

4. I did practice

Child of a harpist, grandchild of a pianist. I practiced for *years*, on half-a-dozen instruments. I never got any better. I'm just no damn good at it. Wish I had been, though.

[Blue-Jay]

5. I *did* practrice!

The Alexandr Glazunov concerto paid my way through college. Listen to any version aside fom Gene Rousseau version (his intonation is horrid).

[BigMcLargehuge]

7. I did practice

And I was very good too. Violin was my weapon of choice.

Then at 13, a week before starting high school, I accidentally slammed my arm through a plate glass window and severed some nerves and tendons. Couldn't hold the bow after that.

Recently tried to take up the guitar, but I can't feel the strings.

Sucks.

[toddzilla]

10. have you tried playing left handed?

also, there are more than a few prominent guitarists that have pretty severe physical limitations but went on to be amazing performers.

django rheinhardt-legendary jazz guitarist, burned his fretting hand in a fire and two fingers fused together.

tony iommi-lost fret hand fingertips in an accident, made some "caps" for his fingers and went on to play in black sabbath.

jeff healey-blind guy!!

etc..

if you have talent, you should pursue it by all means. it's a very rare thing to have natural ability!

[BigMcLargehuge]

12. didn't say I stopped playing guitar

I just haven't figured out how to get over the tactile absense... I'm working on it though. Right now I can make alot of noise and little else... but it's better noise than it was when I started.

[toddzilla]

13. good!

keep at it, it will get better!

[tridim]

8. Because I was a kid

and had better things to do.

In retrospect I wish I would have practiced piano and guitar more as a kid, but I did win first chair violin throughout grade school and Jr. high.

[Kimber Scott]

9. I took piano lessons

for three years starting at 36. I practiced voraciously, obsessively to the point my first piano teacher said I "stressed her out." She said I wanted to go too fast. Meaning - play more and more complicated material. I found another teacher who pushed me to my limits, which in actuality weren't really that far, but much farther than my first teacher wanted me to go.

I quit taking lessons when I couldn't afford them any more. I'm sad, now.

Why'd you bring it up?

:cry:

[toddzilla]

11. sorry..

didn't mean to bum you out!

i'm trying to get back in to playing and just wanted to talk music i guess..

my sister bought me a keyboard last year for xmas and i haven't messed with it as of yet.. shame on me!!

i do play a little drums and some bass.

[kixot]

14. Never took lessons. Just bought books and jammed.

But, then again, thatks to tablature it's pretty easy to get by in guitar without ever having to learn to sight read. Not that I can't read music, I found a great book called "how to read music" that gave me all of the theory I needed up to about counterpoint so no problem there. I was serious for a while but not having a guitar for a few years and getting involved in other issues sort of fizzled my "career". I can still do some mean fretwork, though.

[alwynsw]

15. Can't answer that one

Started with the usual assigned practice. By the time I was 14, it was 4-6 hours per day. By 18, it was a minimum of 6 per day. Then I got serious. You don't want to know how many hours were involved among rehearsals, woodsheding, and performances. Let's just say that I ended up in the USAF Band. We averaged just over 450 performances per year. Yes, we often did 3-4 performances per day.

After I got discharged (not my choice - cutbacks), I did Vegas for a while, studio work, then some other things, including work with some minor orchestras and such.

I play for me now.

Incidentally, the USAF Band kept me out of the mud in Nam.

[Bushfire]

16. I realized thru lessons that I'm tone deaf

Some have the natural ability, and/or drive to become a success. Having a great teacher who will go out of his way to help you succeed, whether it be giving extra time after your lessons or taking time to learn a song you like. They might want to jam along on the song the student is learning to give them some confidence. If it's wham bam for a 1/2 hour thanks for the moola, you won't keep students very long. Sometimes its unavoidable if you work in a music store that books students right after each other though. A friend teaches in a store, and he'll go 7 hours some days without a lunch break. Another friend teaches out of his house, and has them packed one after another some days, but not others. I hope your new career is satisfying whatever you choose to do now. :hi:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. I took piano and violin as a kid

but I never got to be very good at them, mostly because I was too fidgety to practice. A half hour was my limit.

I also learned to play the recorder at age ten when my church youth choir director formed a recorder quartet (soprano through tenor) to double the hymns during the service. Since those practice sessions occurred in a group setting with lots of kidding around, they were easier to take.

Unfortunately, we moved away after two years, so I never got to be very good on that.

I've been primarily a singer since then. At least my instrumental experience taught me how to read music.

[Nicholas_J]

18. I took them

But to be honest, they didnt teach right. What happens is, that they teach by some basic ideas of learning chords or scales, when what most peoplewant to do is learn a song. So when I started teaching (after a years of lessons, I decided to teach myself rather than follow their rules) I willl never be an astounding classical or jazz guitarist, or pianist, but by simply deciding to start out with one of thhosw how to play piano in ten minutes book and then getting a few simplified Bach and Beethoven books I was able to learn more on my own than anything a i learned in the year of lessons on guitar.

My technique may not be correct, but I can play most of what I want and have been able to teach other people by using the method of letting them choose a song the want to learn and then teaching them scaled down versions of it.And then moving on. I have on person who has been learning the same song for the last year, becasue it is their favorite, and each week I add more and more comlicated little components of the song to it.

There is some guy on PBS who does the same thing with piano lessons. I dont remember his name but basically its the same idea. He asks for a song you like and then gived the three chord version of it in an easier key and then goes on from there.

It is much more effective than tyelling someone to practice the G Scale and its relative minor.

[toddzilla]

19. i was a very good and dedicated teacher..

i always split the lessons up into sections of songs, technique and theory. i never followed the "teach everyone the same" approach. after my initial month or so of teaching, i kept all of my students until the end when i just lost all interest in it, and finally quit out of disgust.

i would download songs and figure them out at home and bring them in for the students, and would certainly go over time if needed.

i do disagree that teaching ONLY songs is an effective method of learning, you need to know why songs are the way they are if you want to go farther than just messing around.

a fellow teacher explained it best to me..


"imagine knowing a whole novel's worth of exciting matierial, then imagine never being able to tell anyone anything beyond the first chapter or so"

and many,many people that teach simply shouldn't. being a good player has NOTHING to do with being a good teacher.

[TrogL]

20. Wasn't seeing results

I wasn't getting any better. I'd hit the best I was going to be and more practice was just pissing me off.

I'm never going to be able to play Liszt, Rachmaninoff or the major Beethoven piano Sonatas. It just isn't going to happen.

[BurtWorm]

21. I didn't practice because it wasn't fun.

I think I started too late. My first guitar teacher was a very nice lady who didn't care at all about form. And she was too nice to correct me. So I had to start all over again, putting the guitar on the correct knee, elevating my left foot, holding the neck properly, relearning how to pluck the strings. I did much better at practicing when I taught myself how to play rock and roll. Then I could practice for hours.

My daughter started piano at 6--she's now 8. Her teacher is very attentive to her posture and technique, without being overbearing. And my daughter loves to play the piano. She's not crazy about practicing, though she loves to get a piece right when she's worked hard enough at it. But she loves to noodle at the keys when the practicing is over. Just yesterday she did something she's never done before, and it's nothing her teacher told her about. She transposed a piece she's been playing for several weeks into a different key. I'm just amazed at how interested she is in how the whole keyboard fits together.