Gaga Videos

Find out how your favorite players reached their goals. Often times this is hard to do since you can’t always sit down and talk to some very famous musicians. But interviews exist as well as a few biographies on some musicians (especially dead ones).

Its not uncommon to see the player’s advice be summed up in a grand total of three words: Practice! Practice!! Practice!!! Well of course we all know that practicing is the main ingredient. But rarely are we told much more than that. In my long quest to become an excellent player and to help my students do the same I carefully took note of what worked and what didn’t. What parts conventional wisdom is accurate and what parts are (at least in my opinion) are not. I believe the twenty concepts that have proven to bring great results to those who use them are:

Believe in yourself. You have probably heard that phrase many times before. Its unfortunate how many people still refuse to invest their own beliefs into themselves. I wrote an article on Perseverance which deals indirectly with believing in yourself. Please read it if you have a problem believing that you can reach your goals.

The only time one needs to learn lots of different styles of music is because your goals REQUIRE it. If you truly love a lot of styles and want to learn them all, then go ahead and do that. If you want to be a studio musician or a jobber, then you will need that versatility. Its very hard to be REALLY good at many styles.

For instance, the process may go like this: I notice I have trouble with a fast scale passage in a piece I am playing. I notice a particular note starts disappearing when I reach a certain speed. The note is being missed.

Now that we have the proper attitude in focus, let’s talk about how to go about “managing” the process of changing bad playing habits. How do we actually conduct ourselves, and our practicing and playing? As I have said, some people become paralyzed, afraid to play, afraid of undoing work done in practice sessions by what they do when they play. And for those who play professionally, it is of course, absolutely necessary that they continue to play, even if they are doing “remedial” work on their technique.

What I didn’t know was that even though I was learning to keep up with these chord changes, I had so much muscle tension in my arms and other parts of my body, that I was locking in tensions that didn’t have to be there, and would come back to haunt me a few years later as I attempted the classical repertoire, where you don’t really get away with things like that. As the years went by, and especially in teaching others, I realized that it doesn’t have to be that way for anybody! There is a way of going about it that doesn’t create or allow this situation.

Bar chords are what I am referring to. I am going to address the physical, technical aspects of learning these chords in a way that will enable you to avoid the difficulties that attend the learning of them for most players.