It’s undeniable that learning an instrument requires considerable study and practice. But what happens when the creative process takes a back seat to endless exercises, flash cards, and music theory? It’s easy to burn out while learning fundamentals and therefore it’s important to keep yourself, your students, or your child engaged by sprinkling in some songs to play along with and encouraging the creation of original melodies and songs.
We’ve noticed that this is an important method for keeping students engaged at AI Music Lessons, our website that teaches new and amateur musicians how to play an instrument with the help of a bit of technology: our AI listens to students play along with exercises and songs through their device’s built-in microphone, analyzes their practice, and offers immediate feedback on their timing and pitch to help them continue to improve—even after private in-person or remote learning sessions are over.
Here are five different ways you can encourage that spark of creativity during the learning process to remain engaged and maintain a regular practice schedule:
1. Apply it in practice
A great way to grasp new ideas and concepts is to put them into practice, migrating from memorized information to real understanding. For instance, one way to understand chord progressions could be searching for popular songs using specific progressions and breaking them down to their elements. Take this one step further by rearranging these chord progressions to make your own song!
2. Arrange your creative space
When searching for creative inspiration, changing your environment is a go-to strategy for many simply because it works. Perhaps the area that you practice your piano at every day, meticulously following along with lessons and exercises, stifles your creative juices because you feel stuck to the mindset of sight reading. Consider moving to a different room or sit out on your balcony when playing around with writing your own melodies.
3. Act on ideas
Creating something begins with putting an idea out into the world. Don’t be hard on yourself; you want to just let ideas flow in whatever directions they please. Embrace imperfection. After a couple iterations even your “bad” ideas can become something you’re proud of. Your first set of ideas may feel uninspired, but they simply need to end up on paper. Form a journal of your musical ideas and revisit the infancy of your journal to see how far you’ve progressed. Seeing how far you’ve come can be extremely motivating.
Our sister website, Frettable, can make this process easy. Record your song ideas using your laptop, tablet, or phone, and our AI will write the sheet music and MIDI and store it in the cloud to form your personal music journal. With one click you can upload your songs to online music notation editors like Noteflight or Flat.io so you can continue to practice music notation on your original material.
4. Look for inspiration
“What you learn from working with other performers and musicians is invaluable, really, and can only help you grow. I mean, if you spend your whole life focusing on yourself, you’re not really learning much.” — Damon Albarn (Gorillaz)
Creativity doesn’t come from a magic well. It’s a skill that takes practice and often it needs a jump-start from others. A group of musicians playing together is more effective than the individual parts because we feed and thrive off of each other’s ideas. That’s the power of collaboration. Check out Frettable’s active community of international musicians posting their early-stage song ideas for feedback, collaboration, and inspiration.
5. Go out of your comfort zone
The greatest moments of personal growth come from going outside of your comfort zone. The truth is, it’s really hard to do. As humans, we often gravitate towards a routine that we understand: actions have predictable outcomes and we develop a sense of control over our environment. However, if actions have predictable outcomes then there is little room to learn and grow. Try something that you’re unsure of musically, whether that’s a topic you’ve been putting off because it requires some mental gymnastics to understand or whether that’s tackling an element of a genre you like and want to have in your musical tool belt when creating. Bite off small pieces so you don’t get overwhelmed.
Practice your instrument by playing along with structured exercises and songs with instant feedback from our AI in the comfort of your home at aimusiclessons.com. It’s free to get started! Keep the creative juices flowing by keeping a songwriting journal at frettable.com, where our AI will write out the sheet music and MIDI from your instrument recordings. Wherever life takes you, keep learning and creating!
Frettable is our newest advertiser here on Music Matters Blog, and we are grateful for their support of the online music education community! If you are interested in finding out more about how you can promote your company, event, or product, just send us an e-mail and we will let you know about our advertising packages.
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