Recently, I decided to learn the guitar. You would think that given my musical knowledge and background, my good ear and great fine motor skills from playing piano for over 40 years
In Part 1 of this blog I talked about ways to get students to sing more confidently, as well as the three ‘essentials’ for good aural training: Singing, Practising and Memorising. Now, let’s look into some of the sections of the exam more closely.
Hi 🙂 I’m Courtney, Samantha’s daughter. I’ve been learning piano from mum for an extremely long time now, about *mumbles* years. In my experience, she always has some quirky way to get her students motivated to practice, and this
Wouldn’t it be great if there were never any misunderstandings between teachers and parents? Wouldn’t it be amazing if everyone was on the same page re things like practice, missed lessons, budgeting for music? In this blog post I
We’ve re-opened the BlitzBooks Aural Survey. If you missed out on taking the survey the first time, please click here to take the survey now.
In the February BlitzBooks newsletter, I wrote an article summarising some of the survey results. This contained some fascinating data, including the fact that professional musicians had only slightly better aural skills than non-musicians. Here, finally, is a much more detailed overview. Just to recap my reasons for setting up this survey in the first […]
A while ago I wrote a booklet containing tips, tricks and techniques which can be useful for those who find the aural aspect of music a bit more challenging. This booklet was only available for a very short time, and only as a promotional giveaway. So I thought it might be an idea to reproduce […]
At the end of last year, I announced to my students that everyone would be participating in the 40-Piece-Challenge, the origins of which are explained by Elissa Milne in her excellent blog. They were excited at the thought of participating in something official, and I spent a good deal of my time over the holidays […]
When it comes to playing piano – in fact any musical instrument – I think there are enormous similarities between sport and music. For example: 1. It is a physically demanding activity that takes hours of practice/training each week to do it well; 2. It is not possible to ‘cram’ – that is, ignore practice […]
Although it feels like going against the culture, it’s absolutely, positively FINE not to do exams. Here are five good reasons NOT to do an exam.