Guitar Lessons Tulsa | Practice Strategies
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All right. So today we’re talking about practice strategies for your guitar students. So I am a guitar teacher in Tulsa. I give a guitar lessons in Tulsa, for the Curtis music Academy and we are talking practice strategies for our students. So without further ado, my name is Steven and I’ve been a guitar teacher in Tulsa for going on six years. I, I love teaching. It is one of my favorite things to do in the world. I love helping students to achieve their goals, to sound better, to play better, to be happier, to have another way they can output kind of another, another output in their life.
You know, how some outputs could be dancing or one out, another output could be writing.I think learning a musical instrument is also an output. It’s also a way for you to, or an outlet where you can express yourself. It’s, when I think of an outlet, I think of something that you, you plug something into to get power from. You know, in this case, you know, you are plugging the guitar or the piano into yourself. You know, you’re, you’re learning to play in guitar lessons Tulsa and that you’re giving it power, you know, you using it is causing is a, is it you’re making power there, you know, through influence and influence influencing others. You’re creating power by, you know, someone seeing you, you know, you being excellent.
You know, one we’re excellent at things in guitar lessons Tulsa. It inspires others. So, you know, this really isn’t outlet for you. So it is a world of knowledge and there’s a lot to learn but, and there’s a lot to apply. So we’re talking practice strategies and some of the practice strategies in my own experience, we’ll just start with that. I like to tell students, you know, when it comes to practice, you know, it is definitely a case by case thing. You know, their life is much different than another student’s life. There’s there, you know, schedule is much different than say another student’s schedule for guitar lessons Tulsa.
You know, you have people who are in their sixties or seventies trying to learn guitar and their schedule is gonna look way different than maybe someone in their teenage years or, or even younger and vice versa. So the practice strategies really do kind of vary when it comes to a particular student. So what I do is I just kinda take the principle, you know, when you look at the principals and when you have people apply principles, it’ll work for them no matter who they are. So one of those principles is repetition. You know, we want to develop repetitious, actions to, to learn, right?
We’re trying to pract the whole point of practice is to get better, you know, but we want to remember that practice does make perfect and it also makes permanent, you know, you can, you can get really good at the wrong thing. So we want to make sure we are practicing the right things. So perfect practice makes perfect, not just simply practice. So we want to make sure we’re practicing the right things. So I will typically give my students scales, you know, scales are the building blocks to chords. So even if it’s like a G major scale, let’s have them just run that scale top to bottom four times in guitar lessons Tulsa, you know, as opposed to looking at particular time.
The only time I will really reference time to a student is when, you know, they’ve got really busy schedules and they just, you know, only have a 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there, five minutes here, 20 minutes there, you know. So a lot of times with those students, I’ll refer more to time. Hey, you need to practice for 10 minutes on this specific thing, specific practice. This is a good point because anyone is going to get better if they focus their attention on one thing, right? If you focus your attention on one thing, you know, it’s, it’s a principle, you know, focus is the principal and when we apply focus we get better at said thing. We become more developed in that one thing and we can add more value to that one thing.
So I would say a lot with a lot of my students, whether it’s a time thing for them or whether it’s a repetitious and a certain amount of times that we need to repeat this one thing scale so to speak. I give both. So, so the students who, you know, they have much more time, they’ve got probably two, three hours in the day. I don’t want to take up all of their time just practicing guitar lessons Tulsa. Right. That would be amazing. That would be awesome. But that isn’t life all the time. So I’d say, Hey, you know, just practice the scale backwards and forwards, four to four to six times down and up the exact same way, the right way, and do that every day for whoever, you know, and whenever you can just do it four to six times the exact same way in guitar lessons Tulsa.
And then when they come back, they are, you know, 10 times better than the, when, when we started the week before. You know, why? Because they have been practicing, you know, four, six times honing in on that one scale and getting really good at that one thing. And we’re building, we’re building, we can go from there to learning, you know, terrific. And once they’ve nailed down a scale and they familiarize themselves with the scale they can familiarize themselves with. And once I’ve actually laid the foundation of, you know, they don’t have to look at their fingers anymore or you know, they can then begin to just play from their heart, right. Play with their feelings and they don’t have to just be so watchful of what their fingers are doing. They don’t have to relearn that.
You know, they’ve already learned it. Now let’s just do it. Right. So that’s, that’s one of the practice strategies I say is just focusing on one thing, another practice strategy. And this will be the last one is you know, for a lot of my time students is just blocking out certain periods of time. You know, some of them they’ve got, they work nine to five jobs, they’ve got kids or where they young kids, they have a lot of school, they have homework, they have other activities such as sports, things like that.
They can do what I call, you know, 10, 10, 10, which is in the morning. You practice for 10 minutes during the day. You practice for 10 minutes. Whether that’s a lunch break, you know, typically most lunch breaks are 30 minutes to 30 to 45 minutes, right? So there’s 10 minutes in there that you can, you know, whip out your guitar and just hit a scale, hit a progression for 10 minutes, right? Transitions for 10 minutes, right? And then 10 minutes at night before you go to sleep. I honestly think that before you go to sleep is one of the best times to practice anything because it’s before you go to bed, you’re going to bed feeling like you accomplished something and you feel good. You feel good about the day, you felt good. Like you, you’ve you’ve added to your skill, your skill set, right?
And that’s what this is. This is a skill set for taking guitar lessons Tulsa. So we’ve gone over the practice strategies of, you know, we have the time, the students who need particular time dedicated to a certain allotted amount of time dedicated to practice. And then you have students who are more just like, Hey, just tell me how many times I need to do this. Right? So there’s both of those. And then of course there is the practice strategy or method of 10, 10, 10, you know, which is very good for just about anyone who’s got a very busy life.
And then, you know, I say the F the same day, you know, even with that 10, 10, 10 method, practice the same thing one day and then practice something completely different the, the next day. You know, this really breaks it up. This breaks up the day. You don’t feel like you’ve practiced for eight hours straight. Your fingers aren’t hurting in guitar lessons Tulsa, right? 10 minutes after 10 minutes, your fingers are hurting enough, just barely. And you can kind of let go and move on to the next, you know, objective or task that you have at hand. But it isn’t taking up your entire day. And that’s the point.
You know, there’s something practical, there’s something little we can do, right? The little things lead to big things, which lead to great things, which lead to amazing things. So we want to build it little by little. It’s the little things that make the big things right. So now I’m going off on a tangent. I love talking about little things and principles and you know, breaking down and dismantling things like this. Because we, in our minds, we tend to kick something up to be way bigger, way more difficult than it is. But when we get, when we begin to chop something down and until little nuggets or little bite pieces, it really makes all the difference. And that is how we win.