A Workshop for Music Teachers in Brooklyn - May 29th

Nurturing Motivation to Love and Create Music - A New Method

Michael Stegner has created a new teaching method that focuses on motivating students over the long term so that they can become self-sufficient and self-aware music makers. Michael slowly developed this method based on common threads shared by many great musicians he performed with, students he taught and advancements in brain science and learning research. This workshop will introduce the culmination of this work so you can immediately see the benefits and apply them in your teaching studio.

Details

Who: Michael Stegner (Presenter)
What: Nurturing Motivation to Love and Create Music - A New Method
Where: iBeam Studios located at 168 7th Street Brooklyn, NY 11215 - click here for directions.
When: Friday, May 29th from 9:30 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Cost: $45 per person - pay/register below through the "Add to Cart" buttons.

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Name (First and Last)

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The Story Behind the Session (in Michael’s words)

After years of bouncing from method to method (or piece to piece) in both group and private lessons, I tried a little experiment one summer several years ago at my school - we combined all of our students into piano ensembles. I wrote several 4-part ensembles with different points of emphasis and for various playing abilities. After a few weeks it became obvious that the energy level of nearly every student had grown exponentially and I needed to make some serious changes in how I taught music.

By leveraging the new-found motivation the students displayed, we spent the next five years working together refining a program where they developed the ability to CREATE music they imagined, read or heard - instead of RECREATE music they read from a method book or were instructed to play by a teacher. I wanted a quarter note (or do,re, mi) to be something they felt and internalized rather than something they just identified on a sheet of paper.

After several years of tracking students in our school who are in this new method, it has become clear that they are consistently far beyond students who use more traditional approaches. I believe this is simply because they are more motivated from within to play music and play it well.

We use a series of games and activities to introduce nearly every concept they will need to practice correctly at home. This makes the lessons have a very lively feel and positively challenges the students to go home and continue the momentum established in the lessons.

Logistics and space restrictions eventually left us with a few students each semester who couldn't continue in the group lesson format. They switched to private lessons with the new method as an “experiment” and we found that it worked great with very little adjustment for teachers or students. There are even some area band directors using the method for their beginning band classes on several different instruments.

Over the next few months, I will be releasing all of the music I have written in this method along with the games, activities and support materials. This workshop will be an overview of the four- to five-year method, it’s benefits, it’s challenges, economic advantages and turnkey ways to transition your approach from traditional approaches.

Michael Stegner Teaching & Speaking Bio

Michael Stegner is the owner of Creative Music Adventures in Seattle - a music school in the Wallingford neighborhood. Several of his students have been awarded full scholarships at the preeminent music colleges in the US. In the last five years, four different students have won Downbeat magazine student awards for composition, audio engineering and performances (in piano and voice). Students and alumni have performed with or opened for Bobby McFerrin, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Julian Lage, Larry Grenadier, Sheryl Crow, Wynton Marsalis, Ingrid Jensen, Geoffrey Keezer and many more.

As a speaker, Michael has presented at four MTNA (Music Teachers National Association) national conventions. He has presented at the Washington State Music Teachers Association and the Texas Music Teachers Association state conventions as well as several local and regional conferences in Washington state. He was a clinician for Roland US - helping teachers use Roland technology between 2003 and 2007.

Register and Pay By Filling in the Fields Below and click "Add to Cart"... Name (First and Last)

Email Address

Email michael@creativemusicadventures.com if you have questions.

Chords for the Piano in Eb Major

Here are the basic triads in Eb Major.  Learning these along with the video will help you play songs in the key of Eb.

Popular and Rock Piano Tips Part 2

This is the second video in this series of playing popular and rock piano styles.  It will expand on the previous concepts in the last video and add some more intricate rhythms between the hands.  You can try this with many popular songs that are played at this tempo.

Have fun.

Michael Stegner

Popular and Rock Music Piano Tips - Part 1

Here is the latest video on playing pop piano.  These are tricks that can be applied to many popular songs where there is a singer or a band.  It primarily focuses on the role of the piano in modern popular and rock music.  Have fun with this.

Practicing the Unknown

Once students establish an effective routine in practice, it is always fascinating to see what they do when they practicing.  Often we practice something for a long time only to feel that our progress doesn't match our efforts.  In my opinion, this is a choice to feel this way.  It is a choice in how we practice.  I only say that because I often fell into the pitfall of associating the amount of time to the success of my practice.

I used to be so impressed by the stories of people who practiced eight hours a day.  I did this for many years thinking this was the trick to improving a lot.  Then I realized that I wasn’t improving as much as I would like during the eight hours, so I became convinced by teachers and mentors that correct repetition during the practice sessions was the key.  This did help me considerably.  Lately through teaching and my own practice, I have found the element that was missing from the first two approaches was the “unknown.”

When I practiced something that I was already comfortable with for any amount of time, my focus dipped.  I could go on autopilot and waste valuable time.  Then my eight hours really turned into a diversion - not a practice.  

As a young student, it was stressed to me that I repeat something three times, five times or seven times in a row before speeding up the tempo or moving on to something else.  Neuroplasticians have proven that our brain does not benefit from this static repetition.  Mastery grows and our brains benefit from incremental practice.  Every time we do something, the stakes should get higher (or change).  The tempo should get a little faster.  We add another hand or part to the mix.  We change the key.  We force the issue into the unknown.

I can’t begin to count the times when I would dutifully put the metronome at the tempo recommended by my teacher and have it pound away all week as I repeated the assignment.  Not only was it boring, it wasn’t helping me very much because I could zone out.

The flaw with this type of practice is that it doesn’t encourage our connection and engagement with what we create.  This is very sad and frustrating.  I would even go one step further and say that we can’t possibly create when this is the method.

If we as music teachers get frustrated about sports, video games, dance and all the other activities competing with our time; we really only need to look in the mirror.  The thing that those activities have in common is that they emphasize incremental improvement.  Whereas we were often taught that the way to play music is to do the same thing over and over again.  When we play video games, we are excited for the next unknown challenge.  When we play sports we want to rise to new challenges and improve.  We get hooked on the unknown and the next adventure.

The culture of teaching music has become so repertoire driven, that teachers may confuse harder and/or “more fun” pieces as incremental progress.  Sadly, this only encourages students to perform moderately more difficult pieces in the same way they have played their previous pieces...  Good...  Average...  Poor...  All detached from the creative process of performing.  In sports they call it “going through the motions.”  It's not fun to do no matter what activity we apply it.

Since I use the motto in my teaching studio of “four or more,” let’s start with that.  We play each assignment four or more times each day.  Here are ways you could use the metronome (or MIDI/play-along tracks) to practice the same piece for a week.  Let’s say the piece has a suggested tempo or end-of-week goal of 105.

Day 1 (Traditional):

First Repetition - Metronome at 60

Second Repetition - Metronome at 67

Third Repetition - Metronome at 74   

Fourth Repetition - Metronome at 81

Day 2 (Traditional - Increase Tempo):

First Repetition - Metronome at 60

Second Repetition - Metronome at 70

Third Repetition - Metronome at 80   

Fourth Repetition - Metronome at 90

Day 3 (Traditional - Build Tempo Threshold):

First Repetition - Metronome at 75

Second Repetition - Metronome at 85

Third Repetition - Metronome at 95   

Fourth Repetition - Metronome at 105

Day 4 (Reverse Metronome):

First Repetition - Metronome at 60

Second Repetition - Metronome at 50

Third Repetition - Metronome at 40  

Fourth Repetition - Metronome at 30

Day 5 (Slow, Slower, Fast, Faster):

First Repetition - Metronome at 50

Second Repetition - Metronome at 40

Third Repetition - Metronome at 90   

Fourth Repetition - Metronome at 100

Day 6 (Extreme Tempos):

First Repetition - Metronome at 40

Second Repetition - Metronome at 30

Third Repetition - Metronome at 110  

Fourth Repetition - Metronome at 120

Try this out and let me know how it goes.  Be slightly uncomfortable and engaged the whole time.  Embrace the unknown and see if it doesn’t help your connection to the music.

Michael Stegner

Follow me on Twitter - @mstegner

“Like” me on Facebook - Michael Stegner Music Page

Creating Positive Musical Experiences Through Practice Routines

Several students have recently come out of musical ruts because we were able to get organized with their practice and they were willing to embrace a simple practice routine.  It is always frustrating when we as students or teachers think that something sounds better the previous lesson than it does at the beginning of the current lesson.  In group lessons, students get frustrated when they start to lag behind the others even when they are more than capable of keeping up.

When we go through these down phases it is often due to falling out of a practice routine.  It seems easy enough to just get back on the horse.  But it really isn’t.  We start to feel all the times we didn’t get our work done stacking up and creating an insurmountable “to do” list.  We make it bigger than it may be and therefore we put it off longer.

This is when you may hear your child or yourself say that it’s time to quit and move on from this whole music thing.  This age-old statement starts to pop up, “I just don’t like piano any more.”  In group lessons students going through these dips in practice can act out in classes with behavior issues because they feel they are slowing their peers down.

Lately I have found a simple and practical way to gently pull students out of these times and make them less traumatic.  I think there will still be these times but often practice routines are the root of the dissatisfaction in learning music.

Putting emphasis on one day of practice is most beneficial in regaining momentum for playing music.  A weighted practice chart of the days in the week is really helpful to students.  For example; if their lesson is on a Monday, Tuesday is the most important day of the practice week.  Then after Tuesday, Wednesday is the most important day of the practice week.  Then Thursday is the most important day of the week.  By emphasizing the days right after the lesson the students will retain the information and build momentum.  

Most of us get caught in a our ruts innocently enough when we decide we just had our lesson and can take a couple of days off before ramping things back up.  The problem with this is that the day you planned to practice coincides with soccer practice, birthday parties, weekend trips, etc.  Before you know it, it’s the day before the lesson and it’s panic time.  We don’t remember all the nuances of what was covered in the lesson, we cram our practice(s) in, show up to the lesson stressed and then the process repeats itself because the mountain seems more insurmountable the next time around.

This is an ideal practice routine for someone struggling to get in the groove (or any of us for that matter):

Tuesday - Lesson

Tuesday post lesson - very short review practice

Wednesday - Master one new concept on each assigned piece

Thursday - Master another new concept on each assigned piece and review Wednesday’s work

Friday - Master another new concept on each assigned piece - review Wednesday’s and Thursday’s concepts.

Saturday - Repeat the same thing.  Review previous concepts.

Sunday - Ideally repeat the same thing - but if you’re going to take a day off this may be the one.

Monday - Review everything so you feel good about Tuesday’s lesson.

I have found as a teacher, if I list out the days and have the students circle each day they follow the script then lessons go really well.  The students can see the cause and effect of doing the routine, having a great lesson and feeling really good about playing music.

High school and college students can make spreadsheets and email it to the teacher the night before.  This helps give them something very concrete to attach to their feelings about playing and practicing music.

It doesn’t take long for the youngest to the oldest students to see the correlation between spending productive time and enjoying the activity.

I’ll write a follow-up to this, but one essential component to this is that we work on new material when we practice.  Many of our ruts our self-induced because we stick with what we’re able to do.  No matter how great something is when we first learn it, it will get stale.  The energy of always working on something new will snowball into a sustained positive experience.  Constantly playing something we mastered a month, week or day before leads to a dip in the enjoyment and productivity of the creative/practice process.

Hopefully this is helpful.

Michael Stegner

Moving Mastery

Recently several of my students have found themselves on the tangible side of much hard work, frustration, hope and dedication.  The tangible side being the stage when we know we are onto something.  We know we sound better.  We are aware there is a command developed over our art form that allows us to be more fluid, spontaneous and creative.

This personal acknowledgement is often the most rewarding part of all the hard work.  After all, if we practice for the praise of our peers, teachers, parents, fans, etc.; we may become disenchanted very quickly.  Those things are out of our control and often have nothing to do with the quality of what we do.  The ultimate fulfillment is to know that we are able to communicate through our art - becoming aware of this is very special.

With my own practice and my students’ practice, I have seen this climb to the top of the mountain most often end up in disappointment and frustration.  This is mostly because of our programmed belief that we have passed the exam, we have graduated or we have achieved a certain rite of passage.  We see masters perform and create and think that if we just get to their level things become so effortless and easy.  As we experience these little epiphanies in our own creative pursuits, we relax thinking we’ve made it one step closer - or we are one step beyond what we worked on last week, last month, last year or decades ago.

This thought pattern is often the seed of us getting stuck.  We’ve all been in our ruts where we get frustrated, bored or tired of our own art.  We just can’t see how to get to the next level or break away from our bag of tricks.  If we can catch ourselves going down this path, I feel that we can create a cycle of momentum that can be monumental for long-term growth.  If we keep trying to graduate to the next thing, our art becomes less and less rewarding and meaningful - motivation becomes more and more difficult to come by.

The idea of graduating or passing from anything in performing or the creative process is ill-founded at best.  I have found over the years of practicing and teaching that the highs come when a strong foundation of concepts come together and the lows come when we discover (consciously or unconsciously) gaps in our foundation.

Just like most flowers can’t continually bloom all year round, our playing can’t continue to go from one peak to the next.  Our practice has to be always advancing and receding.  We have to have the courage to tear down what we do well and build up what we can’t do.  This process is very humbling but I believe that this is where we find our artistic voice.

When we master a song or concept and are feeling really good about ourselves, it’s time to change something.  Start with the basics...  Change the key - try transposing whatever you are doing into all twelve keys.  Change the tempo - if you are playing something at 180 beats per minute see how you sound at 30 beats per minute or 280 beats per minute.  Change the articulation - reverse all the legatos to staccatos and vice versa.  Listen to 10 recordings of the piece by great artists and emulate their phrasing and ignore what is on the page.  It will only make you able to execute what’s on the page better - or make well-rounded decisions on your own interpretations.

Recent studies by neuroscientists have shown that we do not improve with static repetitions.  If we do something “correct” three times in a row we are not improving.  We only improve if something changes each repetition and our brain make the proper adjustments.  Even moving the metronome five points one way or the other will benefit us more than repeating something the same way several times in a row.  Would video games be as popular if we sat and played the same level over and over once we mastered it?

The final approach mentioned in this article is the application of concepts.  If we can only apply a concept to the specific (or original) piece we are practicing, then we don’t own the concept - the specific piece of repertoire now owns the concepts and concepts will not be easily transferable.  When this happens, we will feel like we’re starting all over with every piece.  We’ve all been there and it is not fun.

Let’s say we get obsessed with playing “My Romance” like Bill Evans.  After hours and hours of hard work we can sound really good on “My Romance.”  Then we go to play through another tune and we sound exactly the way we did before we started on the “My Romance” project...  Maybe even worse since all of our practice time was taken up by this project.

If we are not able to apply the concepts from Bill Evans’ “My Romance” to “Happy Birthday” or Stephen Foster songs or nursery rhymes then we will always be starting over with each new piece and there will not be enough hours in the day to improve on each of them.  

Try taking whatever concepts you are working on and spend some time (even a little time) applying them to something else - keep it simple.  Find some simple folk songs from around the world and apply the concepts there.  If we can’t apply our most complicated concepts to simple applications, then something is not right and a rut could be waiting.

Michael Stegner
Copyright © 2012

Practicing and Performing

Throughout my playing and practice career I have often consciously and unconsciously struggled with being 100% connected to what I was playing. Possessed by a faithful autopilot, my hands and body sometimes carry me through a performance or practice session. Without respecting this disconnect; we typically endlessly analyze our performances, learn new material, push ourselves in negative ways and use external motivation to improve.

I found that even though many of these methods are great in theory, they didn’t change my performing or playing experience. However, when I started involving the creative process in my practice my musical life began to evolve quickly.

One of the biggest revelations in my musical development came when I realized that I didn’t have to wait to sound good. I would often trudge through scales, arpeggios, technical exercises, theory books, repertoire and improv exercises so that “someday” I would sound good. I was so focused on sounding good “someday” that I got in the habit of mentally checking out when practicing. I was told by myself and others that I wasn’t ready to sound good.

By the time that “someday” came around, my bad practice habits came to the forefront as uninspired and stressful performances.

I couldn’t believe how I instantly sounded better when I decided to take what I had and make it sound good!

In sports we have coaches who drive us to practice harder, push our limits and increase our focus. We are typically supervised several times each week. Learning to play piano was one day with my teacher and six days unsupervised to “work it out.”

When practicing my instrument alone, I often would be unproductively hard on myself or just meander through things without being present. In my head I would bounce between vague memories of my teachers’ suggestions and what I was going to do when I finished practicing, repeat something until I could do it at a certain level of proficiency or master something so I could move on to the next thing. And so the disconnect was born and nourished.

Now when teaching, I’ll ask a student if they would pay $10 to attend a concert where someone played the way they just did. So far in 15 years no one has said “Yes.”

When I ask “Why?”

They typically respond in a robotic, monotonic voice that recites something like, “It didn’t have dynamics, my left hand was too loud, I had a lot of pauses and it sped up.”

And I say, “Wow! I’m surprised that you would go pay for a concert and be inspired by that list of things. That doesn’t sound like a fun way to experience music. Is that what you think when you go see your favorite rock band?”

Finally, the student comes to the simple conclusion that they would be bored by their performance. And if they are really aware and honest, they admit that they were bored when they were playing (and practicing at home). We’ve all been there and still go there.

It is fascinating how we can be bored when recreating music written by geniuses or creating our own improvisations or compositions. At times it can even seem like the norm.

With all the elements of a solid performance in place, a performance can still fall very short. We somehow assume that we can practice void of any energy and excitement and show up for the gig and rock the house.

When the stage lights come on we are thrown for a loop because our nerves and adrenaline tell us that this time is different. Our newly obtained superhero abilities of focus and concentration zoom in on every little detail around us. We don’t know what to do with the intensity and our performances rarely live up to our expectations or potential.

Then we say, “I could have done so much better.”

Or, “I sounded so much better at home!”

And we create a divide between the practice and performance... the lessons and home... rehearsal and the gig.

So... what do we do?

We practice more hours. We switch teachers. We choose pieces that are more fun. We no longer play in front of people - the performance anxiety is just too much!

After trying all of these things at various stages of my life, I think they just avoid the issue.

I believe we owe it to ourselves to learn to practice in a way that can continuously renew our musical experience. Each day we should be entertained and inspired by the music with which we practice. Ironically, I feel this has very little to do with the actual repertoire but how we approach our day-to-day practice.

At it’s base level, music is about expression and communication. To effectively communicate we do need to improve our abilities and do the hard work. But we don’t do this by putting our creative self on hold. Our creative self needs to be driving the motivation to practice and how we practice.

This process does not need to wait until you get to a certain level. It needs to happen before we practice void of energy, quit or let the autopilot permanently replace us.

We perform every single time we sit at our instrument. These are opportunities to express and entertain ourselves or our audience. In our mind and attitude, there can be no difference between practice and performing.

Through teaching and practice I have come up with a few practice techniques that have helped my students and myself. I will share them here so that you can experiment and expand upon them in ways that work for your personal experience.

I will touch on techniques for the following:

• Scales, arpeggios and technique
• Playing written music
• Improvised Music
• Performing

Part two can be read here...

Michael Stegner

Copyright © 2012