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People become interested in playing music for varied reasons and at different times in their lives.  I have students that range in age from 9 years old to over 60.  My oldest student started playing fiddle at age 72.....but that is another story.

Some start an instrument with previous experience and others start with only a desire to learn to play and have never touched a musical instrument before.  

We’ve all heard of the person who is a musical “genius,"  started to play at age 3, and is now a brilliant player at age 30.  The story usually goes this way:  “My parents got me started in violin lessons at a very young age and gave me lots of encouragement but made me practice every day.  I got involved with the school orchestra and later went to college to study music, and that led to studying in Europe with (fill in the blank), the famous violin teacher from Russia.  I practiced 6 to 8 hours a day, 7 days a week for 10 years and got my big break on the concert circuit after I was on the same bill as (fill in the blank), the popular and famous concert/recording artist.”

This is a generalized story about the kind of person we admire and would like to emulate.  But...the fact is that what we do and what we want do not always correspond to each other.  As a music instructor, I hear the desires of my students and most of them want to be excellent players.  If that is not a spoken desire, it is certainly implied,  and after all, who wouldn’t want to be excellent?  What I often see is that there is a general misunderstanding of the correlation of time and effort with results.

There have been many conversations between me and my students about why they are not making sufficient progress.  And let’s face it, learning fiddle, banjo, or mandolin is not an easy journey to manage as they are difficult to learn.  The biggest problem is that most students underestimate the time it takes to learn to play well.  I am often asked, “How long should I practice every day?”  I always pause before I answer that question because I am always thinking  “I wonder how long this person wants to take to learn this instrument?”  Logic and just plain mathematics should tell you that the later you start in life and the less you practice, the longer it is going to take.  So from that information, one should be able to extrapolate that at some point, given a late start and very minimal practice time, the chances of learning to play well diminish to about ZERO.

“So, what is the upside to all this then?” you ask.  Well...thanks for asking!  Since you cannot roll back the clock to an earlier time and start at age 5, the only other alternative is to PRACTICE MORE!  SORRY, Folks....there is no other alternative.  HEY!  I’m a music teacher...what do you expect me to say?

The reason I’m writing about something so obvious is because I have people tell me every week that they are a bit disappointed in their progress and in just about the same breath, tell me that they “didn’t practice as much this week as they’d like.”  I usually don’t say anything about that, but what I’m thinking is, “Well....what do you expect?”

I worked with one of my students, trying to find some available practice time for him.  He said he didn’t have much time to practice.  My  first question was what he did after he got home from work.  He said he had dinner and after he ate, he sat down and watched the news,  then the next program, and the next, and the next, and the next.  I tallied up the hours that he watched television and it added up to about 30 hours per week, including weekends.  He was a bit surprised to hear he watched for so many hours and admitted that his practice time could be increased by at least 3.5 hours per week (1/2 hour per day.)  I suggested he make a commitment to do that for 2 weeks and at that point see if he had improved.  HE DID!  (Did you really expect otherwise?)

The moral of the story is that time is valuable.  Make the most of it!  If you rearrange your schedule and prioritize your time differently, you will have more time to practice and then you will get better, faster... and when that happens you will undoubtedly be more encouraged to practice because you are seeing positive results.  

Who knows?  Maybe you’ll eventually be able to study in Europe with the famous Russian 5-string banjo instructor Dimitri Scruggsakov.

Stick to Picking!

Robert