Home-lesson recaps – Page 8

Practice log leads (for today) to holy grail

Today I tried something different. I made up a weekly practice log that lists all the things we need to practice during the week. I set my own arbitrary parameters — e.g., we will practice two review songs a day and will practice all of them in the course of the week. (You can see a blank log on Scribd.com.)

Within those parameters, though, I let M pick what to do. And each time we completed something, I gave her a blank playing card whose back she can color (I will write the names of practice activities on the front so we can use the cards in future lessons).

After our lesson, which took a little over an hour (note: she didn’t have hands on the instrument all that time), I was telling my wife about the new chart and that the lesson went well. In the background, M chimed in:

I liked doing it.

So for today at least, I found the holy grail: a productive practice that M enjoyed.

We did:

Targeted, repeated listening of Meadow Minuet to learn the notes and the structure.
- For structure, we counted groups of eight measures and said A, B, C, or D at the beginning of each group of eight measures.
- For notes, we sang the melody.
Practiced the C section of Meadow Minuet once I knew M could sing it. I played the bass notes.
With Steady Hands — played through once or twice, but because M still has trouble knowing when she’s at the end, we played alternating sections: B1 (me), B2 (her), A1 (me), A2 (her), B1 (me), B2 (her), A1 (me), A2 (her). This way, she was responsible for knowing when the piece ended. It seemed to help.
French Folk Song — played through once, but then focused on two 4-bar sections, B and E. We played themrepeatedly with the metronome and gradually increased it to 176 bpm. M still played with ease at this tempo.
Allegretto — played through a couple of times.
M conducted me playing Lightly Row and Aunt Rhody while she sang the note names. Flawless.
G scale — played a few times.

When we went over the practice log before starting, M added a practice item to our choices by writing on the page: “Make up song.” Then she wrote a song name with arbitrary German letters. Today’s completed log, with M’s annotations:
Suzuki guitar book 1 practice log – first draft, filled out

Too much struggle

Not a great lesson today. I probably tried to change things too much, too fast.

I watched a video by Edward Kreitman today about listening. In the video, he emphasized that a student should have an internal mental image of a song before she begins to play it. He noted that if a student runs out of notes when singing a song, she’ll run out of notes when playing.

So I decided to check M’s inner image of Meadow Minuet by asking her to sing it. She could only reliably sing the A section (the first 8 bars), even though she can play the B section (the next 8 bars). So I decided that we would not practice it today, which did not please her.

Also, she wanted to start by practicing in Read This First, and I refused this request too so we could focus on her review pieces and the Guitar Olympics material. This did not please her.

Also, she was extremely fidgety when we started by doing note reading on the couch, and so we were in conflict over that (a fidgety body leads to a fidgety mind, so I insist on a certain degree of stillness).

We ended up doing:

Note reading off the instrument with the metronome. This was improved. She can’t read E/F/G very well, so we worked on those three notes.
With Steady Hands.
- She does have a pretty solid mental image of this song, but she can’t keep track of what she’s doing reliably, so she doesn’t (for instance) know when to end because she doesn’t know where she is.
Conducting Go Tell Aunt Rhody and Lightly Row, with note names. She did better than yesterday.
Playing Perpetual Motion on the G string after first playing the G scale. She kept playing C# instead of D. She was able to identify the problem note, though we didn’t solve it.

I wish I could figure out how to make our lessons more cooperative and less of a struggle.

And I feel like it ought to be possible, because I’ve managed to indoctrinate M into seeing herself as a guitar player. Proof: today she made a birthday card for a friend, and next to her signature, she drew a little guitar.

Continuous quality improvement

Today we started our lesson by watching the portion of Pumping Nylon about plucking. I asked M to pay special attention to her tone as we began playing and illustrated varieties of tone and the vocabulary to describe it. The we did:

The first half of Meadow Minuet, with M playing the melody and me playing the bass.
The “open A” scale, with M letting each note ring until she could no longer hear it.
May Song with the metronome at 50, 80, and 70.
A “fix-me” game where I coached M to figure out why my right hand was getting out of position.

Throughout, I asked M to evaluate her tone and her right-hand technique. More often than not, she accurately described her playing.

But I noticed an old technical problem that resurfaced, and we got sidetracked on one behavior issue: how she was holding the guitar.

The technical problem was her right-hand position. I noticed at the end of playing May song that her right hand was smack in the middle of the soundhole, even though it began at the edge. It turns out that she was moving her hand by rotating around the point where her arm sits on the lower bout, rather than moving her arm like a tonearm straight forward and back.

She was unaware that she was doing this, so I walked her through identifying the problem by demonstrating the behavior and asking her (1) to identify the line along which my hand was traveling as it moved from the edge to the middle of the soundhole, (2) to identify why my hand was moving that way (because I was moving by rotation), and (3) to identify how my hand should be moving (in a direction parallel to the line of my arm, not rotating around a point). She succeeded in doing all three.

This was a reminder that technique needs continuous improvement. We spent a lot of time on this right-hand-movement problem last summer, and it kind of faded into the background. Now it’s back and again needs attention.

The behavior problem was her treatment of the guitar when she wasn’t playing. My concern with this particular behavior is a little idiosyncratic, and I tried to keep that in mind as I dealt with it. Basically, it drives me nuts when kids are careless with musical instruments. And M tends to kind of tip her guitar up and down when she’s not playing it — not a lot, but enough that I find it both worrisome (because the guitar might fall) and troubling (because it shows a lack of respect for the guitar — both the instrument and its study). In fact, the only time we ever left a studio lesson early was when, a few months after we started, she deliberately dropped her guitar in protest against the lesson. I asked her if she remembered this, but she didn’t.

Tonight, I wasn’t terrifically skillful — M was resistant when I told her to hold the guitar in a formal rest position so it wouldn’t tip, and I was angry when she kept tipping it. But I stayed pretty calm, and she eventually complied. We’ll see how long it takes for her habits to change.

Be careful what you ask for

After yesterday’s unsatisfactory practice, I thought hard about how to do things differently today. At M’s last few private lessons, her studio teacher has been emphasizing tone production, so I decided to try to make that the focus of our practice today.

Also, today I read some more pages in The Inner Game of Music before I returned it to the library. (My copy’s on its way from Amazon.) And I was reminded of the importance of awareness and self-evaluation.

So to begin today’s lesson, we did two listening exercises:

First, I asked M to listen as she played a scale, and to play the next note only when she could no longer hear the first note ringing.
Next, I asked M to get right up next to my guitar and to listen as I played a note, raising her hand only when the note stopped ringing.

She paid good attention while playing her own scales, but I noticed a new problem: She was keeping tension in her plucking finger after she played the note. I nonverbally drew her attention to the problem by placing my finger on her plucking finger after she played and while she was waiting for the next note, and after a few notes, she started to relax her plucking finger. (She did it in an exaggerated way, but I think it was enough that she figured out and tried to address the problem.)

My other idea when I noticed this tension was to watch the small portion of Pumping Nylon that’s about basic strokes, but I couldn’t get the DVD to play. It’s been a while since we’ve seen it, and it’s probably about time we look at it again as a refresher.

Next, we worked on assessing tone quality on the melody of the first few bars of Meadow Minuet. First, I played, and I asked her to identify which note I played with the best tone and which I played with the worst tone. I realized quickly that I needed to break it down to just 4 measures (6 notes) at a time, because (not surprisingly) she couldn’t keep more notes in her had to compare them.

Then I asked her to play 4 measures and to identify the best and worst notes. And I noticed something odd: She was doing weird, counterproductive things with her left hand (e.g., flattening out her index finger all the way and pressing down too hard with it), as if she were deliberately trying to sound bad.

And she was: She took from her assignment the idea that a note had to be bad, and that she had to be able to identify that note. So, quite sensibly, she thought to herself, “Let me play this note really badly, and then I’ll play a different one well.” She explained this to me when I mentioned that I saw here doing something unusual (and counterproductive) but intentional-seeming with her left hand and asked her why.

So I learned that my first instruction — identify the best and worst notes — was flawed. So instead, I asked her to strive to make every note sound as beautiful as possible, and then if one note was the best, to identify it, and to identify the worst note if there was one.

Also, I realized that I had to be more specific about the tonal vocabulary. When I asked her what her best note sounded like, I was getting answers like, “Pretty good,” and “Nice.” These answers don’t really tell me anything — in fact, they don’t even enable me to tell whether she is just calling a random note her “best,” or whether she in fact really listened to what she was playing. So I gave her a more specific vocabulary: thin, fat, weak, round, bell-like, buzzy, snappy, even.

And on one run-through of a small portion of Meadow Minuet, we had some success: she identified her high E as snappy, which was exactly right. And the rest of the notes were all pretty good. (Her tone was actually pretty good on some other repetitions, which reflects — I think — that she was listening to herself, but she was only expressed an accurate judgment of her playing one time.)

So she didn’t get a lot done on the instrument, but she paid much better attention than yesterday to the things that she did do.

Notes aren’t enough

Pretty weak lesson today, not surprisingly: M went to a birthday party after school and jumped around in bouncy castles for 2 hours, which would sap anyone’s energy.

So she was tired and distracted during our lesson. We worked on:

the A scale;
French Folk Song; and
Tanz 2 (J.C. Bach).

The two songs were really rusty, and she played Tanz 2 so carelessly it was depressing. I think we need to break these review songs down into smaller pieces and have her play those small pieces with care. I certainly don’t want more of what I got today, which was M playing as if playing the right note, regardless of how she played a note, was all that she should do.

But fatigue surely dragged M down today, so I’m thinking happy thoughts and telling myself that today was an aberration.

Tips from Suzuki Association videos

In today’s lesson, I incorporated two items from the Suzuki Association videos that are being offered this month.

First, I shared this slogan with M at dinner:

Average performers practice a piece until they can get it right. But excellent performers practice a piece until they cannot get it wrong.

Later, each time we she finished a review pieces, I asked (after asking her what musical things she noticed that she did well) : “Do you know that song so well you cannot get it wrong?”

Second, I used a tambourine as a nonverbal cue/post-song reward for review songs. With each song, I asked her to focus on one thing — either keeping her right hand properly oriented to the plane of the guitar (i.e., not falling down), or keeping her eyes on her left hand. I told her that as she played, if I noticed her not doing the one thing, I’d tap the tambourine. And if she played through the song and I tapped it no more than once (I deliberately didn’t require perfection), she would get to shake the tambourine herself like a crazy person. (A Suzuki teacher recommended doing this with a desk-hotel-style bell, but a tambourine was the closest I could come). This was a very effective tool.

Overall, we did:

The first 16 bars of Meadow Minuet. M needed me to play some of the new passages for her, but she got the notes quickly and was more cooperative than yesterday. I did have to slow her down — she was playing the notes pretty carelessly, without paying much attention to her tone.
Three review songs, picked from our review-song bag:
- Brother John. On this, I had her pay attention to her right hand and her tone. She did well, though the notes are very rough.
- Lightly Row. On this, I had her look at the left hand. She played this very nicely, with sensitive crescendos.
- Perpetual Motion. I also had her look at her left hand, and she did remember some crescendos. She didn’t get the form entirely right, though.
Conducting: She conducted me on Lightly Row and Aunt Rhody. She’s much more solid rhythmically, though she is saying the note names by memory, not by imagining what she would play. Apparently the latter is what her group teacher wants her to do. But she memorizes pretty quickly, and I doubt she can put aside the memorized notes to think about what she would be playing as a way to name the notes.
Note geography: As I was retuning her guitar, she went through 12 of Andrea Cannon’s flashcards and identified the notes found on the first 5 frets of strings 1 and 2 and the first 2 frets of string 3.

Sight reading, singing

Short lesson today because I had a class tonight. M and I did:

Sight reading in Read This First. We worked on the transition from one line to the next, to eliminate the pause she introduces at the beginning of a new line as she orients herself.
We practiced the first 8 bars of Meadow Minuet and moved on to the next 8 bars. We listened first, and she can sing the melody easily, but she struggled with playing it. So we sang it at the top of our lungs a few times.

Before our lesson, we were discussing review, and she asked, “Can we do a lesson that’s all review some time?” I said yes.

I’ve been watching some videos that the Suzuki Association is making available in their “Parents as Partners Online” webinar. Some are very helpful, and I plan to post my notes for future reference. They really reinforce the importance of review.

Starting Meadow Minuet, working on wandering eyes

Today we did:

A little note reading off of the instrument.
Meadow Minuet
- First, we listened all the way through. Then we worked through the first 8 bars, stopping at one point to listen and sing along a few times. M got frustrated at one point when she wasn’t hearing the next right note, but eventually she got it when I played it on my guitar out of her sight. M also kept trying to play the bass part along with the melody, and I had to remind her that it wasn’t part of our assignment.
Song of the Wind with the metronome.
- M did well on this when she watched her hands, but her gaze and attention often wandered, and she missed a lot of notes whenever that happened.
- To combat this, I gave her a noticing job along with her listening and playing jobs: I asked her to notice where her eyes went as she played. And after each repetition, we compared notes about where her eyes had been. During one repetition, she played the first half of the song nearly flawlessly while looking at her left hand, and then botched the second half the minute she started staring around the room. I pointed this out to her right when it happened, and I think it had an effect — I think she’s buying in to the notion that if her eyes wander, her mind wanders, and her playing suffers.

It pays to take a break

M’s left-hand index finger finally healed enough that she could use it again. M worked on three things in tonight’s lesson:

Played Strawberry Popsicle until I got a satisfactory take;
Did some note reading off the instrument;
Played With Steady Hands for the first time since her private lesson last Saturday (almost a week ago); and
Played French Folk Song for the first time in probably six months.

I posted Strawberry Popsicle with the rest of the Twinkles.

I expected With Steady Hands to be rusty — she hasn’t played it in almost a week. (I would have brought it back into our lessons a few days earlier, but her injured finger threw things off.)

But far from being rusty, it was better than ever. This is a good reminder that significant breaks are sometimes helpful (as long as you’re still doing lots of listening during the breaks) — they give the mind time to process things.

I have posted below her performance of With Steady Hands, along with our post-song discussion. I’m getting in the habit of asking her to self-evaluate, and she can pretty reliably identify key areas to work on. Today, she forgot to introduce dynamic contrast — but she knew it.

French Folk Song was very rusty, but in playing it M did two things that I loved:

First, just to sound serious, she asked, “What time signature? 2/4? 3/4? 4/4?”
Second, when (about 1 minute in) she couldn’t find a particular note, she listened her way to the right note (with only a little help from me).

I’m posting the French Folk Song portion of our lesson below too.

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Still injured

M’s still got a cut finger, and we got started late today, so in a short lesson we did:

Conducting: M conducted me playing Aunt Rhody and Lightly Row. We used the metronome.
Perpetual Motion on the G string. She is really getting this.
Allegretto and Lightly Row in “zero position,” i.e., played with the 2/3/4 fingers instead of 1/2/3.

Proof that she listens at group class: At breakfast, as she was holding a banana in her hand, she exclaimed,

Look! It’s like a guitar! It’s a ganana!

And in fact, she was holding the banana with all four fingers on one side and the thumb on the other, in (almost) the proper position for the left hand on the guitar neck — a position that her group teacher demonstrated last week: