Learning “Music” is a few different things. I’m just going to cover the basics of playing here, and other aspects of music in future blog posts.
Learning to Play Music
Learning what music is and how to play it can be a very daunting thing if you’ve never really done it before. It may seem more difficult as you get older, and your brains (and other parts) aren’t quite as flexible as they were, but that isn’t usually as big a problem as you would imagine.
Initially, playing music is simply a mechanical task. Like typing. On a piano type keyboard, it’s almost exactly like typing. You press the relevant key for a certain note, just like you would press the relevant button for a particular letter when you use a computer to write something, such as an email. Pressing several piano keys in the right order, one after the other, will result in a tune.
Like most skills, playing music can be broken down into simpler parts, like the following:
Patience
At first, playing an instrument can feel awkward because of the unfamiliar movements and combinations, but here’s the thing: Everyone can get the first note of ANY musical piece right, because anyone can be quickly taught to play just that ONE note. This also holds true for the 2nd note. Someone can show you how to play that, and you can do that.
The tricky bit, is moving from one note, to the next note, and the note following on from that, smoothly and in time.
Practice
Although it might be difficult, and will sound messy to start with, by repetition (or practice, as it is known!), you will develop what’s called muscle memory. Moving from one note, to the next, and the one after that. The deftness and agility of a musician, is purely down to this: Repeatedly playing each note, or small phrase of a few notes, slowly to start with, then building up until it can be done automatically at the right speed. If that’s hard, then start REALLY slowly. After time, the brain adapts and it will fall into place.
Then it’s just a case of taking those phrases, and practicing putting them together until you have a whole line, and so on, and on, in small manageable chunks, until you find, after a bit of time, you can play the whole piece through.
Time
And that really is it. It is very simple, but it’s not easy. It requires patience, practice and time to acquire musical skill. The best thing though, is the more you practice, the easier it gets and the more natural and better you become. )
If you want to learn more quickly though, it helps to have a good guide, and of course, that’s what a music teacher is for. They will introduce you to different techniques and theory that you could eventually discover naturally, but having someone show you helps things move along more quickly.
Alternatively, there’s an app for that, as they say. I found this: Flowkey – Now, this is NOT a recommendation. It’s something I saw advertised and I thought it looked like a really good idea, particularly for beginners, where the app shows you where a note is, then listens and waits for you to find it, and play it as you go through a piece! If you check it out, let me know how it goes 🙂
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