There’s a lot to learn when you’re studying a musical instrument, and plenty of things that need regular practice: tunes, scales, techniques, and a wide range of musical skills. The challenge is that music lessons are usually short — 30, 45, or 60 minutes. Apart from beginners just starting out, there is rarely enough time in a face-to-face lesson to address everything a student needs to be working on. This isn’t a flaw in the lesson itself, but a reality of learning music, and it’s why managing practice time between lessons is so important.
When you learn an instrument, you will need to work on techniques and skills like
- positions and fingerings of notes
- important and useful patterns like scales, arpeggios, and chords
- sight reading and sight improvising
- comping, time playing, grooves and patterns on rhythm section instruments
- recognising and understanding rhythms by sight and by ear
- etc (there are plenty more)
In music lessons you’ll also learn tunes and pieces of music, and you’ll need to practise these between lessons. There will also be theory to learn, and more. This is not a complete list, but you can see that there is a lot to cover. So, what is the problem?
The challenge is that a good teacher doesn’t have time to cover everything you need to work on in each lesson. The trap for students is that they can mistakenly assume that if the teacher doesn’t look at something in the lesson, they don’t need to practise it that week, or any more. However, successful students take responsibility for their own learning or have parents or other supporters who help them manage their learning effectively between lessons.
If you have a 30-minute lesson each week, that’s barely enough time to do more than just the briefest check-in with the teacher. Working on, say, a piece of music in any depth will use up most or all of the lesson. But just because your teacher doesn’t go over all your scales in the lesson doesn’t mean that they cease being a “thing”. They still need to be practised. Lesson time is limited so, therefore, you the student need to take responsibility for making sure you are still covering everything you need to practise.
Yes, teachers should guide students through what they should be practising regularly as a matter of course, and they usually do. But students pretty routinely ignore this and resort to weak excuses like “but you didn’t write it in my notebook this week”. Unfortunately, outsourcing all responsibility is more likely to lead to musical disappointment rather than achievement.
Finally, once you’ve moved on from looking at a piece of music or a scale, or whatever, in your lessons doesn’t mean that it is “finished”. It is still there, and as a musician you should be building a repertoire of music you know and an ever-expanding tree of skills. Remember music you’ve studied in the past and keep scales alive in your skill tree and you’ll give yourself the best chance of achieving or surpassing your musical goals.
In this post, we’ve looked at why lesson time alone is rarely enough. In the next post, we’ll look at what effective music students actually do between lessons to support steady, long-term progress.
