The Amazing Joy of Learning Guitar in Tulsa
Hi, this is Andrea with Curtis Music Academy, and I’m here with another podcast about the joys of music. And this particular podcast is about getting parents involved with the student’s journey of learning their instrument. This can apply to learning guitar in Tulsa. Now, when a student takes piano or guitar lessons, there’s a range of how they practice at home. They either practice every day, maybe, you know, 30 minutes a day, or we have the other extremes of students who never practice at all.
And I really my personal belief, although other people might disagree, is that if a student only plays their instrument when they come in for learning guitar in Tulsa, I personally feel like that is not ideal and it would be ideal for them to practice at home throughout the week. So when I was a student, I. Music was my thing and I just loved playing. And so I practiced the piano. It was my goal to practice every day besides the day I took a guitar lesson. So usually I’d practiced five or six days a week and I would practice each assigned item that my music teacher gave me at practice at five times each.
That was just my rhythm and I did that for years while learning guitar in Tulsa. And so that would be how I would practice the piano. And I know different ages practice differently. So if you tell a six year old to sit down and play for 30 minutes, it’s not going to work because they can’t play their song over and over again for 30 minutes. It would actually be more ideal for them to practice their songs through maybe a couple of times, maybe equaling five minutes. And that’s OK, because it’s just refreshing it each day. I do think that the more the students practice the piano, the more I feel.
And so I believe that for any age, even adults, that if the student sat down at the piano for five, 10 minutes a day, it is better than just practicing a couple of times a week. And so that is my personal philosophy. And so I would recommend that students practice every day in shorter increments. So refreshing it every day, a couple times for our young beginners who are maybe six, seven years old, running through their songs a couple of times would be really ideal, you know, for the for the students that are learning guitar in Tulsa for about a year and they’re progressing maybe a little bit beyond that.
So in our particular curriculum, we use the Alfred curriculum and it is really great. We love it for a lot of reasons. And they start off with the Purple Book, that’s our children’s beginner book. And then they advance to the Red Book and then the Blue Book and then the Orange Book, and then they’re on level three A and so anyway, it just progresses on from there. But as they get more and more advanced, the practice would look differently, maybe practicing each song three times and they’d have more variety to practice, not just a couple of songs while learning guitar in Tulsa. This might include some scales, some chords, arpeggios, some things on the side, maybe some goal songs and different things like that.
Learning Guitar in Tulsa and Why It’s Fun
And so it gets like a little bit more and more complex as the student progresses. And that is ideal. And now my biggest reason why I think that students should practice is because if they never practice and if they’re only learning guitar in Tulsa, then they won’t advance very quickly and they’ll get bored with piano or guitar lessons. And so the reason why they’re bored is because they’re like, I’ve been in the same book for months and I’m just inching through it and it’s getting boring. And I would actually have to agree with them because there are so many fun things at the piano. But when you don’t practice, it’s forcing yourself to move very slowly through materials.
And if you move very slowly through materials, you can’t learn the extended fun things to do at the piano. And so I am shifting some of the things I do in the practice realm. First of all, I am going to be implementing something to get the parents on board because a lot of times parents actually do not know what goes into playing an instrument. They just think, I want my student, I want my child to play the piano. So they sign up for lessons while learning guitar in Tulsa. Maybe the parent has never taken music before themselves, so they don’t realize that it really takes dedication in practice for it to really become. A key part of their lives and more of a hobby rather than just something they struggle through.
So I am going to be just starting to encourage my parents while the student is learning guitar in Tulsa, maybe printing off something that’s very uplifting and just informative, saying that this is what I recommend, that each student practices at home and it might just start off like three or four days a week, dedicated practice of going through the materials that were assigned. So that is something that we could start off from the beginning doing that I think would be really ideal. And then if they’re not practicing, I would like to talk with the parents, not in a way that the student is in trouble, but just in a way to encourage the parent to be encouraging the child at home, to be practicing. It doesn’t have to be a negative thing. It could just be a part of the daily routine.
You come home, you do your homework, you practice your piano. After that, you have free time. So it’s just that type of thing, like, you know. And lastly, as I’m kind of winding down, another reason why I really want my students to practice is so that they don’t struggle through lesson while learning guitar in Tulsa. And when they don’t practice, it’s just struggling and it’s just hard and it’s not very much fun. And so it just reflects that, you know, it’s unfamiliar and they have to really toil through some different things in the piano or guitar lesson because the materials keep increasing and getting more challenging. And so the struggle is there if there is no practice. And so I want to make the piano as enjoyable and positive for the students as possible.
And that’s what I’m going to be implementing, some new tools to help the student practice at home and and help the parent understand what practicing looks like for the child at a certain age that they’re at. Well, thank you so much for joining me in this podcast, and I will see you at the very next podcast about learning guitar in Tulsa