Your questions answered #3
Finding confidence; finding inspiration; finding time; developing a creative practise routine
I love receiving your questions! They’re really interesting and they give me a wonderful opportunity to think creatively about how my teaching methods can be adapted to your own particular needs.
If you ever want to submit a question, you can do so here:
This time I’m answering questions on:
Helping students to find confidence
Helping students to find inspiration
Finding time for creativity in lessons
Developing a creativity practise routine
Finding confidence
"This is my first time teaching how to improvise. The student is in Adult Book 1 Unit 7, and she is 24. She is gifted. I am using Create First, because Scale & Chords Book 1 by Faber is not inspiring her. My student doesn't feel confident in improvising. Tomorrow I'll give her 3 notes to play, and fifths for left hand accompaniment. I'm grateful for your feedback."
Most adult students don't feel confident improvising, especially in the early stages of learning it. This is reasonable; over many years they've been taught to stay in control and improvisation feels dangerously close to losing control. I help my students relax by improvising myself and, when I play something that sounds bad, I say something like "whoops!" and laugh it off.
When using Create First, I highly recommend doing spending several weeks playing the duet version of the pieces before you start teaching her to play the solo version. This gives your student time to internalise the sound and feel of the music before they have to worry about co-ordinating both hands. Another advantage: playing the duets is a lot less stressful and a lot more fun!
Finding inspiration
When I try to get my students to improvise, sometimes they just look at me blankly and then just play random notes. What can I do to help them get inspired?
We’ve all been there! When you’re working with these students on an activity like those in Create First, I find it is best to give them very tight guardrails. This helps them to focus and develops their confidence.
The guardrails might be: giving them a rhythm to repeat and restrict them to just a few notes (e.g. C-D-E in C major). Do that for a couple of minutes, then swap to a different rhythm and a new set of notes (e.g. A-B-C in C major).
More generally, I find it’s best to figure out what pieces your students already love, and change them! Students find this really engaging. I will demonstrate how to do this in my Mozart Method workshop, detailed above.
Making time for creativity in lessons
I get many questions about how to make time for creativity in piano lessons. I’m not surprised — it can be tough!
I’ve written a series of articles on this very topic. Here they are:
Building a practise routine
This next question was really open and indeed was more of a comment, but they clearly wanted help as they left their email address. When I first replied I focused on building a routine (see below). In this post I’ve developed the theme a bit more to explore developing a creativity practise routine.
Here’s the question:
"I am starting over at the beginning and trying to build an effective practice routine."
Here’s how I answered at first:
The first thing to say is that it's never a bad idea to "start over". Actually you're probably not completely starting over, but rather revising old techniques and concepts that aren't yet fully internalised. That's great. I wish more people did it!
In general I think the best practice routine involves a mix of:
warmups
playing for pleasure
studying the music you want to learn away from the piano
focused practise time at the piano
Short regular practise sessions are generally better than long, irregular practice sessions. When I'm at my most effective, I'm practising for 10-20 minutes several times a day, including first thing in the morning and right before I go to bed.
Developing a creativity practise routine:
Perhaps the questioner wanted more help with developing a creative practise routine. This is a fascinating topic and I’m going to give a shout out to Hermes over on the Sound & Creativity Substack who writes excellently on this topic:
Here are my brief thoughts:
commit to doing it regularly, ideally daily
try to find a time of the day when your mind is fertile (mine is in the morning, but I know other composers who work best at night)
as part of your routine, explore music by other composers that you love — what makes it work?
These strategies have worked for me.
Any questions?
Send them over! I love answering them.