Hi there Blitzers,
It's November already - where did the year go? We hope Term 4 has been a good one for you so far! In this month's newsletter we have some exciting releases for your music education programs.
Plus, part 2 of my article on getting rid of mistakes.
First up though I'm very pleased to announce that...
Sight Reading Book 3 is Ready
Sight Reading Book 3 is now complete. It prepares students for the sight reading section in a Grade 5 exam in any piano syllabus, as well as general 'real life' sight reading such as accompanying and transposing.
The stickers are extremely yummy (literally... the theme is confectionery!) and there are lots of interesting rhythm and transposition activities!
Sight Reading 3 is available now from all good print music stores.
End of Year Motivation Tips
Are your students finding it hard to keep up the motivation to practice in the final weeks of the year? If so, then perhaps these tips can help:
1. Prepare a concert for the family and perhaps get other family members involved i.e. 'Family's Got Talent'
2. Polish up a few favourite pieces from throughout the year and make a recording of them, which can be a great Xmas present
3. Get composing – do a 'mash up' of favourite pieces!
Free Downloads
Free Grade 4 Theory Teacher Guide and Musicianship Answer Book
The Grade 4 Teacher Guide is now available as a free download.
It's another fantastic teacher resource which outlines common mistakes made by students and variations of acceptable answers in AMEB exams. The teacher guide also examines the changing trends of AMEB papers and contains extensive information on many different topics based on my own experience.
At the end of the guide there is an excellent 'Preparation Guide' which helps to plan out the last term or so before the exam and gives suggestions of when to give students past papers.
Also available this month is the new edition of the Grade 4 Musicianship Answer Book, which complements the newly-released workbook. Both of these are available from our Downloads page.
MP3 Downloads Coming Soon
Throughout books 1-3 of the sight reading books there are many challenging rhythmic exercises. Many teachers have commented that the students try to practice clapping at home but often don't know if they're getting it right. In just a couple of weeks all of the rhythms in Levels 1-20 will be available as a free MP3 download from the BlitzBooks website. In this way students can pop them straight on to their ipods and listen while practising!
Featured Article
How to Get Rid of Mistakes - Part 2
Last month we covered Part 1 of my article on How to Get Rid of Mistakes. This month we complete the article with a discussion of the 5 ways to eradicate mistakes:
We don't want to spend a lot of time recreating and we certainly don't want to reinforce the mistake any more than it already has been, but to be able to actually recreate the mistake means a student knows exactly what the mistake is, and is aware enough to avoid it next time around.
A mistake in the sound is often quite straightforward to recreate. But if the mistake is a fingering mistake, a problem unique to pianists, students may be completely unaware. It takes very careful playing to figure out which finger you are supposed to use vs which finger you DID just use! Fingering is a bit like choreography – keep changing it all the time and eventually the whole routine will just crash.So it really is worth figuring out which fingering you're accidentally using, even if that means realising you're using a different fingering each time. This is still valuable information.
Getting back to the acronym, so far we have 'I' for isolate and 'R' for recreate.
The 'R' according to the flute teacher was for 'rhythms'. Playing a passage in different rhythms certainly does help it to become more smooth and confident. But this assumes that the notes themselves are already correct. There are lots of different strategies students can employ to get rid of mistakes, so the rhythms strategy will be incorporated into… 'E' for eradicate.
Eradicating a mistake, or as one of my [teenage boy] students put it, to 'surround and kill' a mistake, means to completely and totally erase it from existence. The most common way that most young pianists try to do this is by playing the passage separate hands over and over. The mistake appears to be gone. But then they play it with both hands, and the mistake comes back. This is because the mistake only occurs when both hands are playing at the same time. So to eradicate it, the student must use both hands at the same time.
Here are a few suggestions of ways in which pianists can eradicate mistakes:
1. Rewind one or two beats before the mistake you're trying to correct. Start playing and 'freeze' on the note or chord that was going wrong, taking special care to play the right notes with the right fingering. Do this quite a few times. At first there will be big pauses while finding the correct notes to 'freeze' on, but after a while the brain starts to anticipate the notes in question and everything becomes more fluent.
2. Play in different rhythms AND different accents. This mainly applies to scale passages.
3. Practice 'backwards' – that is, practice one bar, then the bar before it, and so on.
4. Practice the passage at different speeds – not just slower, but sometimes a lot faster
5. Go backwards and forwards between two tricky chords, sometimes playing each chord two or three times each.
So now we have 'IRE' - Isolate, Recreate and Eradicate. This is good. But eventually we really do want to play through from the beginning. How do we put the piece back together?
This is where 'C' for connect comes in. It would be fair to assume that a mistake that has been isolated, recreated and eradicated successfully within the context of the small passage being practised should then be gone when the piece is played form the beginning. But so often the mistake reappears when it is put back into the context of the piece. This can be so frustrating! What needs to happen at this point is a widening of the practice 'area' – that is to include a few more bars before and after the mistake, and continue to apply the 'IRE' concept. The fingers need to play the newly corrected notes under all sorts of conditions, and it may take a few days before the mistake really is gone. Now we are connecting it – and for the sake of assonance, we'll change 'connect' to consolidate.
Isolate, Recreate, Eradicate, Consolidate. This systems works to get rid of mistakes. Hope you find it useful!