Amazing Guitar Lessons in Tulsa | Daily Guitar Practice Routine Part 2
“This content was created for Curtis Music Academy”
Hi, this is Andrea with Curtis Music Academy with another podcast on my daily practicing routine. This can apply to amazing guitar lessons as well So I finished the last podcast with talking about my warm ups and my scale’s kind of going into some music theory and also just warming up the finger muscles. So that is huge. So if you missed out on that podcast, definitely listen to that one. And the next part of my piano practicing routine is I refresh a difficult song. So that just keeps me at a certain level where I can play the difficult levels of music. So let’s just say I have 10 songs that I can really play well in there at a more challenging level, I might just run through one a day.
So when I refresh a difficult song, it’s not a long, lengthy process. It’s really playing it from start to finish and just having fun, basically. So I just enjoy that. So I just rotate them out every single day. I do a new song from my repertoire. The next part of my daily practicing routine is I sit down and I learn a new amazing guitar lesson on the piano. So for right now, I am really learning and growing in the area of extended chords and plurality and playing the challenging chords. Normally we learn major chords, minor chords, and for many years that’s all the chords that I knew. And honestly, for many years I didn’t want to learn any other chords. I thought, well, I just know the basics.
That’s all I need to know. But actually there’s so much more that gives depth and gives different aspects and shows you different things on the piano and it makes it sound unique and it just adds more flavor to playing. So I’m learning about all these difficult chords. They are used a lot in jazz or blues or things like that, and I don’t know if I would necessarily play them in that context. But first of all, I think that understanding this new amazing guitar lesson of plurality in the extended chords, it’s going to help me as a musician. It’s going to deepen my understanding and it’s also going to add flavor to my playing and to my composing as well. So that is my goal.
I do like to stretch myself when it comes to new amazing guitar lessons I have been playing since I was eight, and so I have reached a certain level of playing the piano, but I always want to be constantly learning and growing, even if it’s not something I’ll ever perform in front of anybody. I think there’s a lot of things that could be added. Like, for example, I might never, never play a jazz piece on the piano, but I might use a certain chord while I’m playing a song that I’ve written or in a band in some context. So in that ways, I think it’s going to add a lot more dimension to me as a musician. I grew up in a very classical trained environment, so I’m really strong in that sense.
But I want to keep growing and at least understanding some of these different avenues of playing the piano like blues, like a jazz and even some different genres like funk, or there’s just so many varieties. You can also apply these to amazing guitar lessons. And I think that if you’re only able to play classical, for example, you just limit yourself. So I might never be a jazz pianist, but I want to continue growing. And that’s another thing like I think just in life, that you should never stop growing as a person. You should be a lifelong learner. And so when it comes to playing the piano, I’ve adopted that in my methods as well.
Like, I never want to say I know it all. I can play it all because honestly, there are so many things out there, like I feel like I’ve been playing for 20 years and I’ve really just touched the tip of the iceberg because there’s so many different things that a person can learn about music or about playing the piano. So that is what I am learning right now. And again, I usually take my practice time and I break it into segments; the same goes for amazing guitar lessons. I usually don’t sit down and play start to finish. And that just helps me as an adult because I’ve got lots of commitments. I might hear my phone buzzing, so I’ll just stop and get my phone and then come back later and continue practicing.
So that is more than welcome. In fact, I recommend that just sit down five, ten minutes at a time and accomplish something at the piano or during amazing guitar lessons. The next thing that I am working on is sight reading. And I just want to say sight reading is not one of my strengths and that is OK. I am a natural memorizer. I like to just play things through by rote and just committed to memory. And I have some students who are like that too. So and that’s actually a gift. It’s their learning style. It’s my learning style. And so that should be celebrated and appreciated because I think that they can take you very far as a musician.
So although memorizing is my go to, I do like to focus on sight reading for a couple of different reasons right now as I’m teaching the piano, I want to be a good sight reader as an example to my students and I want to be honest with them and just say, hey, this is a struggle for me too. I’ve got some strategies that that I use that help me. And and then that way I can help them as well, because that reading is it’s some people are strong at it. Some people are. More weaker at it, and that’s OK. Another reason why I want to continue learning to read is because oftentimes when I’m teaching the amazing guitar lessons, there will be an opportunity to play a duet with my student.
So I want to be able to sit down and say, oh, here, let’s play this duet. So that is a huge motivational factor for me. And duets are so fun. And so that’s one of the reasons why I continue to just sit read a little bit every day. So I might sit down and read for maybe five, 10 minutes and then go away from the piano and then come back later on, my last area is composing and recording. So about a year ago I bought a Spier s i r e a little recorder. It’s like three hundred dollars. It’s not very expensive because I wanted to record some of the songs that I do. One of my biggest challenges for myself is I grew up playing classical music and so you actually just kind of do as you’re told, which in a lot of ways that’s great because there’s so many great songs out there and just you can have so much fun playing that. The same applies to amazing guitar lessons.
But I’ve noticed that sometimes myself, in all my years of playing, I haven’t really explored any creativity because I’ve been so busy playing and just reading music and playing songs that other people have written for piano or amazing guitar lessons. So I wanted to challenge myself and so I bought a Spier. And this goes beyond just playing the piano. I play other instruments as well and I also sing. And so the SPIA is really for amateur musicians and they want to be able to record and play music. And the cool thing about this little device is that you can record up to eight different parts. So sometimes I get my cello out and I play on my cello. Sometimes I, you know, put my keyboard in.
Sometimes I’ve done a drum beat with my gendre drum and sometimes I sing. Sometimes I play the guitar during amazing guitar lessons. And sometimes I had harmonies with my singing. So I just have a blast singing and recording and playing. And it’s just one of the most fun things ever to finish a song adding in all of the different parts to the song. So I have done all different kinds of music. Sometimes I only add one or two parts. Sometimes like one song I did up to like eight. Now I’m sorry, not eight, but I think I did several singing parts for it. And so it was almost like a little choir. It was really fun.
And so I just challenged myself in that way too. Because another thing is, I know it’s not just me, but I know that there’s creativity in all musicians. And more than that, in in every person, I want to begin to dig into mine out the creativity in myself. And so it’s a challenge in some ways. Yes. It’s EDI’s easier to just sit down at the piano and play a song that you already know, or it’s easier to play a song that’s already written. But it’s a challenge to just get in there and find chords, find patterns that, you know, sometimes it’s like you’re just having fun at the piano and you stumble across something whether on the piano or during an amazing guitar lesson. You’re like, Oh, that sounds good. That’s the easy part.
The hard part is taking that in, then allowing it to become something much bigger than just twenty seconds of something that sounds good on the piano. So that is part of my journey of playing and practicing every day. Now, I don’t always get to practice every single day. I usually try and shoot for practicing six days a week and that is my goal. But you can see how I have gone down several different avenues of practicing, you know, with the sight reading, with the warm ups, with the composing in the recording, with learning a new lesson about music theory. So that is really why I do I want to become really well-rounded as a pianist. So that is my goal for every day. I hope that helps you in your practice time. And I will look forward to seeing you next time.