So your kid is learning a musical instrument! Last week I offered some general techniques to improve success, including how to cultivate a positive attitude, set up and structure a practice session, and deliver helpful praise. This week I’ll focus on specific things you can do while sitting in on a practice session...
Your Daily Role as Coach
I suggest letting your child self-direct his practice sessions much of the time. But do keep an eye out, and when he gets frustrated, sit down to see what you can do to help. There are plenty of ways to direct his efforts toward more efficient progress. Once you establish that your help is actually helping, he’ll likely start asking for it when needed. Over time, he’ll learn to implement these techniques for himself, but as he’s starting out some simple guidance from you can help get him past that “I don’t know if I can do this!!” phase.
Find Out What It Should Sound Like
If you aren’t familiar with the instrument yourself, talk with your child’s teacher about what sounds you should expect to hear early on. This may be covered during parent orientation, but if not, be sure to ask. For example, Evalyn’s trumpet instructor let us know to expect some strange sounds at first. She started out just buzzing the mouthpiece and doing some vocalizations to practice breathing in rhythm. Then it took some time before she could consistently catch and hold a steady pitch on the instrument. Knowing what to expect gave us confidence she was on the right track.
As your child advances to assigned pieces, it will be helpful to know what each piece should sound like. Of course she will hear each piece at school, and the ultimate goal is for her to be able to read music off the page. But for a beginner practicing at home it’s easy to forget and become frustrated, confused, and uncertain about pitches and rhythms. A quick listen to the piece can help sort things out.
If you can read music and you have a keyboard or other instrument available to you (there are plenty of free instrument apps for smart phones!), then you are good to go; you can play the piece for your child whenever he needs to hear it. Just keep in mind that different instruments are in different keys. For example to match a Bb trumpet part on a keyboard, since Bb is one half step lower than C (always the reference point), you’ll need to play each note one half step lower than what is written.
If you’re not so multi-talented, don’t panic! There are plenty of other ways to provide a reference for your child’s ears. His music book may have come with an audio CD or computer software that includes recordings of each piece. If not, it’s worth checking online or with your band director to see if such a reference exists and can be ordered.
Barring that, you may need to ask if you can drop by with your smartphone or camcorder to record your child’s instructor playing a week’s worth or month’s worth of pieces at a time. If her instructor is unavailable, perhaps he can recommend an advanced student to help you out. Or check with your local high school, college, music store, or church. Heck, if your kid is learning trumpet, I’ll record some lessons for you!
Take a Quick Break
Another source of frustration with a new instrument is physical discomfort. If your child’s third attempt at a piece sounds worse than his first, he may be fatigued. Watch for this and suggest a quick break to revitalize the affected body parts. Wind players may need to buzz their lips, strings massage their fingers, percussionists stretch their arms. Any player will benefit from shaking out their hands and standing for a good full-body stretch. A little revitalization now and then will help him survive an entire timed practice session.
Correcting Mistakes - Encourage Self-Evaluation!
You’ll want to do what you can to make sure your child corrects her mistakes as efficiently as possible. Practicing a wrong note over and over can slow progress quite a bit. The longer she goes before addressing a problem, the harder it will be for her to un-learn the passage, then re-learn it correctly.
Once you know what your child’s assigned pieces are supposed to sound like, it may be tempting for you to interrupt her playing to point out mistakes. Please don’t! You’ll do her a much greater service if help her practice self-evaluation. She needs to learn to hear her own mistakes. And since mistakes happen even in performance, she also needs to learn to play past a mistake and keep going with confidence to the end of a piece.
After listening to your child play through a piece try asking, “Did you hear any mistakes?” If he points one out, ask if he knows how to correct it. Play your reference recording if needed to determine the right note. Correcting one or two mistakes at a go is plenty. Then have him play the piece again. Give him a high five when he gets it right, and move on. If you run into something the two of you can’t figure out together, mark that spot with a pencil and encourage him to ask for help with it at school.
If your child has trouble evaluating her own performance, record it and play it back for her. (Use a smartphone app, computer, or camcorder.) Have follow the printed music as she listens. It will be easier for her to hear her own mistakes this way. If you notice a persistent problem that your child isn’t catching, you can point it out gently by narrowing the focus: “Do you hear any problems with your pitch right here?” or “Do you hear a problem with the length of this note?”
Remind your child that it’s always okay to make mistakes. If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t learning anything new!
And go easy on yourself, too. You won’t catch everything, especially if you aren’t musical yourself, and that’s perfectly fine. The main point is that you help your child establish habits of self-evaluation and self-correction. As she gains confidence with the instrument she will rely less and less on feedback from you.
Slow It Down, Break It Down
A brand new piece may look like an unclimbable mountain to your beginning student. Encourage her to take it one step at a time.
There will be spots where your child knows the correct fingerings, pitches, and rhythms in her head, but they just won’t come out of the instrument they way they’re supposed to. When fingers are fuddled, try having her slow the tempo way down. If you can snap your fingers to provide a beat, great; if not, use a metronome. There are plenty of free or cheap metronome apps for smart phones. Once she can play a passage consistently well at a slow tempo, try again at the regular tempo.
If your child is unable to get through a piece, have him break it into shorter sections and practice one section at a time.
Have your child work out the first section until he can play it three times in a row with no mistakes. Then move to the next and do the same. Then put the two together. Then work on the third section, fourth, put those together, put all four together, and keep going until he can play the entire piece. If this sounds tedious to him, point out that notes, rhythms, and phrases often repeat, so the work will get easier as he goes.
Another way to break it down is by elements. When your child plays a piece she is synthesizing various streams of information from the page and from her own musical and motor skills. There’s a lot going on at once, which is part of why learning an instrument is so fantastic for brain development! This is also what makes it a challenge.
So break it down by focusing on one stream at a time. Fingerings, pitches, rhythms, breath marks, dynamics, etc: Any of these can be practiced individually or in combination.
When my daughter has trouble with fingerings, I have her hold the trumpet away from her mouth and sing the piece while moving the valves. This way she can focus on getting her fingerings down. When she feels confident with that we go back to blowing in the instrument and the improvement is dramatic!
If rhythms are the trouble, try having your child clap and count through the piece. Once he has that down, try with the instrument.
Breath marks can be a challenge for a beginning wind player. These are the little apostrophes at the top of the music staff that show where to breathe. If your child is thrown by these, have her put her instrument down and sing or even clap through the piece, focusing on when to take a breath. Then try with the instrument.
Sometimes removing a single element is key. On the trumpet, students must learn to move the third valve slide whenever they play certain notes. I noticed my daughter was missing a note every time she moved the slide. So I asked her to play the piece without using the slide. Once she got the piece down, adding the slide motion back in was no problem.
Slowing a piece down, breaking it into sections, and breaking it into elements: any or all of these can be used in combination, too. Once you’ve tried a few different ways of breaking it down, you’ll get a feel for what works well for you, and so will your child. You’ll be able to start asking him, “How can we break this down that will help you the most right now?” And eventually he’ll start doing it on his own.
Be a Learning Role Model
My daughter loves teaching her mom the routines from her dance classes, and in the process she discovers which parts of the dance she still needs to work out for herself. If you are willing to learn along with your child it will help keep her engaged and motivated, it will show her that you value life-long learning, and it will give you the chance to model positive ways to handle frustration and deal with mistakes.
If you are already a musical person, perhaps you can borrow or rent your own instrument so that you and your child can learn together.
If music is unfamiliar to you, picking up some basic knowledge and skills can help you help your child. Learn the names of the notes and their positions on the staff. Learn the time values of different notes and work on counting out beats and rhythms. Learn all the different symbols on a page of music and what they mean. Your child may be picking up these basic elements as well; if so you can do it together. If she already knows the basics from music class, have her teach them to you. Basic information is also easy to find online.
Good luck, don’t panic, relax, and have fun! If any of this helped you I would love to know about it. Please post your questions and comments!
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