Hi everyone! This is an excerpt from an article that I am writing about the importance of regular practice when learning to play an musical instrument. These concepts apply to learning to draw, paint or anything that takes some time to do well. The initial learning curves are very similar.
Before we opened Canton Arts Academy (can you believe it’s been over 3 years ago?!) I was teaching students in my home studio. Typically, students would continue lessons throughout the summer break. Over the past several years, I have noticed some things regarding summer break and progressing on your instrument. I want to share my observations with you in hopes that together, we can maximize our students’ learning time.
My first observation is simply that students learn more and learn faster during the summer. This is for two reasons; during the school year, their brains are “full” from all of the schoolwork, homework and tests. The second is that they have more time to practice in the summer. These two things combined are very powerful and can lead fantastic results in a shorter period of time.
The flip side of this is something that I have seen many times over the past 3 years at PLay!- students that take the Summer off from music lessons and instead of coming back refreshed and excited (as we might hope and expect) they have instead often forgotten much of what they have been working on all year and end up frustrated and dismayed. We often end up spending the next several months “catching up” to get back to the point that the student was at before the break. This has to do with the various developmental phases when learning something new, such as a musical instrument. If you have been playing an instrument for several years, certain things become “muscle memory”. You can take a break, come back and while you may be little rusty, your brain, muscles and body still remember those things that are stored in your permanent memory. Imagine not driving a car for 3 years. Because you have done it *so many times* it might feel a little strange when you first sit down and put the key in but you could do it successfully, even after that very long break. This is because the neural pathways of that part of the brain are very strong. For the first few years of learning something as complex as a musical instrument, this is not the case until things have been repeated enough times, over a period of time.
As teachers, we always want music and art to be fun and uplifting. One of our goals is to help our students progress and move forward as rapidly as possible. It’s challenging enough as it is without roadblocks in the way! With this in mind, I encourage all of our students to use the summer break to your advantage as a way to supercharge your progress. We hope to see all of you in the fast lane this summer!
Jonathan