Adult Guitar Lessons | Learning How to Practice Guitar
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Hi, this is Andrea with Curtis Music Academy. I am a piano instructor, but we have many amazing instructors that give adult guitar lessons in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I love teaching students how to play the piano and I teach a wide variety of students. My youngest student was three who has just turned four, and then my oldest student is adults. And so I teach a wide variety anything from classical music to pop, rock, contemporary and music theory and all kinds of things like that. So I kind of touch base with a lot of different areas of the piano and I have noticed something that’s really important in all of my students and it’s the area of practicing at home.
And so I do have some thoughts to share about practicing some strategies that will help students maximize their practice time at home when they are taking adult guitar lessons in Tulsa. First of all, it’s really important to practice as often as possible. So what I say with that is it’s better to practice 10 minutes every day than an hour long practice session twice a week. And so the reason for this is it’s very scientific, but it creates a habit and the consistency will take you farther along than if you just practiced a longer period of time a couple of times a week.
So even if it means sitting down at the piano 10 minutes a day, I would recommend that getting that daily practice I saw another piano teacher recommended that her students just play a few minutes at a time as they’re passing the piano. And it’s understandable that most people have live busy lives, especially adults. And so it’s hard to just sit down and play the piano. But I would recommend every time that you’re sitting down, every time you’re passing the piano, rather, that you just pass and you play for a couple of minutes. And that’s actually what I do at home, to keep myself fresh and keep myself polished as well.
It’s hard for me just to sit down and play for 30 minutes, although that is my daily goal. What usually happens is I sit down and I do my warmups for five minutes and then I go do the dishes and I go vacuum or just whatever else needs to be done during the day. Later on in the day, I come back and I work through a new song that I’ve been working on and that might take five to 10 minutes as well. And then I’ll go about my business and do other things later on and I’ll come and learn a new lesson in the adult guitar lessons that I am working on to better myself as as a musician, personally and as a teacher.
And so you see, just in those little examples, I usually attack the piano practicing a few minutes at a time throughout the day, and that really works for me. And I’ve noticed that my finger strength in my finger muscles are more able to go the distance. I notice that I have some really difficult pieces of music that if I’m not playing the piano consistently on a daily basis, I’m not able to play those high parts with a lot of fast movements. And so that is really key for me. I’ve noticed that when I have been practicing daily and building up my finger strength, when I sit down to play a difficult song, I’m able to do it.
And so that is just confirmation for me personally of practicing in the consistency. So no one is consistency and it’s better just to practice a little bit at a time. Secondly, I would recommend splitting up your practice into at least three areas, which would be warmups, scales, arpeggios, anything of that nature. I often assign my students finger exercises or Hannon’s. All of those are really great that to build up your strength. And so you might reach a certain level of the piano where you don’t want to go farther you like. I have reached as fast and as far as I want to go, I’m playing the difficulty level.
I want to play out even still, when you’ve reached that level, it’s really important to continue your finger strength when taking adult guitar lessons. It’s like if you were playing basketball and you’ve reached the NBA, but you still have to keep your muscles functioning. You have to keep running, you have to keep doing drills in order to stay sharp. So I recommend for any student at any level to continue the scales. They arpeggios, the chord inversions, the hand warm ups. And I have a whole list and that’s probably for a different podcast, but I do them every day just to keep fresh.
Ok, so if you know anyone interested in adult guitar lessons in Tulsa, the second area that you could work on is new material, whether it’s something that your parent teacher has assigned to you or like for myself, I am pushing myself onward. Into learning about extended courts right now, and so everything right now that I’m learning new on the piano is about extended chords, about the 7th, the 9th, the 11th, the 13th, the 15th. And so I’m really like working towards that goal. And so that’s the new material that I am learning. So that is the second part. The third part could be playing through some fun songs in your repertoire.
That could be something as well, like songs that you played in the past. Maybe you played at a Christmas recital or a spring recital from anyone taking adult guitar lessons in Tulsa. And there’s that one song that you love and it’s important to keep that fresh as well. So those are just some different ideas when it comes to practicing the piano. Furthermore, I usually tell my adult students that it is really important to strategize your practice time because I actually read I am a student and just continuing learning more and more.
And one of the most important things is how you practice when you are taking adult guitar lessons in Tulsa. And so there have been numerous studies of the brain and it shows that you can actually like let’s just say you’re in college and you’re preparing and studying for a test. Well, there’s different ways that you could go about it. And some strategies actually work better than others. And so let’s just say you’re a student studying for a big test and you sit down and you study for like one hour, two hours, three hours. And it’s just you are just really digging in and studying. Well, people who have studied that and how the brain works, they say it’s actually not as effective.