Music Practicing 101 - Alternating Hand/Bar Drill

My students and I started playing around with this practice drill last week. It's an accuracy drill to clean up notes, fingering and wonky timing. Try playing the left hand alone in bar 1 and then right hand alone in bar 2, etc. Check out this video for a demonstration.

Sight Reading Tips

While cleaning up some archived entries on my teaching blog, I found this one on sight reading tips, called (predictably) Sight Reading Tips. Here are some other articles and vblogs that I've come across that also address how to practice sight reading.

• Five Steps to Mastering Sight Reading

• Sight Reading A to Z

• The Sight Reading Box

This is a pretty good tutorial. I like the driving analogy.

Practicing Piano Technique by the Root

This is more for the advanced students, music teachers and anyone who wants to learn jazz chords and scales. Instead of practicing your technical exercises by key, practice them by their shared root. For example, play through:

• C major Scale

• C major Modes

• C minor Scales (natural, harmonic, melodic, jazz minor)

• C minor Modes

• C Penatonic Scale

• C Blues Scale

• C Whole Tone Scale

• C Octatonic Scale

• C major tonic chord/triad

• C minor tonic chord/triad

• C7 (dominant 7th of F major)

• Cm7 (ii7 of B-flat major)

• Cm7(♭5) (viiø7 of D-flat major)

• Cdim7, A.K.A. B#dim (viio7 of D-flat/c# minor)

• and so on.

This was one of the first things I learned when I took jazz piano lessons with jazz pianist, clinician, adjudicator and examiner Derek Stoll.

Music Practicing 101: Every Other Bar Drill

This week, I've been working with my students to either increase the tempo of their repertoire or improve on the flow in their music. This is a drill that I did learn about at a piano teaching workshop or conference - the Every Other Bar Drill.

It also works well if you do every other beat.

Another Way to Practice Technique

This is more for the advanced students, music teachers and anyone who wants to learn jazz chords and scales. The bottom line is that instead of practicing your technical exercises by key, you are practicing them by their shared root: Getting Started on Jazz Technique - Musespeak Studio