How to be a better musician

How to be a better musician

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it time and time again, getting better at anything requires a lot of practice and hard work. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying to you. While some people are born naturally gifted in some ways, no one achieves mastery without discipline and dedication to their craft. I don’t intend to teach you some music theory concept that will improve your musicianship but rather give you some tools and tips I have learned along the way to improve upon your skills.

Habits are everything

Habits are the greatest tool to improving at anything in life. Want to be a cleaner person? Set a daily goal of cleaning anything for 10 minutes a day. After a week you have spent 70 minutes cleaning and your significant other is happier that you live there.

The same applies to music. If you want to be better at guitar then set a daily goal of practicing for 30 minutes a day. This is slightly different then saying practice makes perfect, we will get to that next, rather showing up to your daily routine is what is important. It keeps you on track and doesn’t allow for excuses to be made.

When you tell yourself you don’t have the time, it is a complete and total lie. 30 minutes in a day is one television episode in the evening, one coffee drink in the morning spent on your phone, or one drink missed at the bar. Time is going to go by whether you like it or not. Would you rather have hours of goals being achieved or more excuses about how busy your life is and how you couldn’t make it happen? The point is make a habit of practicing and show up every time. Don’t make excuses and results will follow.

Study like you’re in school

If you are no longer studying music then you are not going to get much better than where you are at now. Experimentation will get you a little further along but making huge leaps in skill won’t happen without a study program to follow.

If practicing 30 minutes a day was important, studying for some portion of time everyday is equally important! You need to continue to learn new concepts and techniques in music. You will never be done learning if you are serious about getting better.

Learn music theory, new scales, how to construct new chords, interval training, chord progressions, how to get different tones, how to play new rhythms, and new styles of music. Learn literally anything you can and do it every single day.

When you are constantly studying music your creativity will be free to explore music differently every time you decide to play. New ideas can be generated from your new knowledge and practice may be less boring because the material will be new more often.

Practice makes perfect

Everyone your whole life has told you that practice makes perfect and its true. Nothing beats routine practice for improving and solidifying skills. The key is how you practice is just as important and how often you practice.

When practicing guitar for instance, many people will sit down and just repeat a scale over and over again for 10 minutes and call it a day. While that repetition is good you need a little more than that to get much better. Add in different rhythms and faster tempos to your scale runs, maybe add a chord on every root note and 5th to vary the practice. The idea is to get your brain and muscle memory engaged. If something has gotten automatic and proficient then you have to jump up in difficulty somehow.

The most important thing to practice is incorporating new concepts and skills learned through your studies. You should constantly have new concepts and techniques to work on. Ideally every time you start your practice for the day you will have so much material to go over that the time flys by.

With all these new concepts and techniques to work on how are you supposed to practice all of it while still learning? The biggest asset in my development has been to practice just enough to learn it and then leave it for a little while. Come back to a concept right at the point where you almost have forgotten what you learned. It’s at this point that your brain has to go into the file cabinet to retrieve the information you had stored away. This forced recollection is what solidifies the learning into long term memory. This way you can consistently learn and practice new material just remember to come back to it often enough so it is never forgotten.

The truth

Habits, studying and practice might seem obvious and boring to you. The truth is, that is what’s going to be the difference between mediocrity and greatness. It is the only way proven time and time again to achieve consistent results. So stop making excuses, stop blaming life and others for your failures, and get to work!

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