If you're free, you can check out this article regarding how studies have shown that in various fields (including music, sports, games and other skills), the amount of practice correlates very closely to one's skill level, whereas "innate ability" has little or no bearing upon it at all.
Here is an excerpt from another article on the same subject:
Several researchers have studied populations of high musical achievers (sometimes in comparison with lower achievers), to discover if there are systematic social or individualfactors that high achievers have in common. For instance, in a study of 250 young people learning musical instruments during the 1990s, a research group of which I was part (Sloboda, Davidson, Howe, & Moore, 1996) found striking correlations between achievement level and the amount of daily practice undertaken. By the age of 12, children who would later gain a place at a specialist music school were undertaking, on average, two hours of daily practice. This compared with a norm of 15 to 30 minutes per day for the averagechild learning a musical instrument at this age (that is, a 400-800% difference).
The same study showed that, in general, high achieving musicians started music lessons earlier than the lower achievers. It is hard to find high achievers in classical music who started regular instrumental lessons later than the age of eight. If we know the amount of daily practice done by an individual, and we also know the age at which practice started, we can compute a very useful statistic, which is the total amount of practice accumulated by a particular point in the lifespan. This statistic shows:
- It requires an average of 3,500 hours of practice to achieve Associated Board Grade 8 standard, which is taken as the minimum entry requirement for higher study in classical instrumental music.
- Young adult musicians at the start of their professional performing careers (i.e. after conservatoire level study), tend to have accumulated around 10,000 hours of practice on their chosen instrument (as compared with less than 7,000 by conservatoire graduates ona teaching track).
Given the limitations on how much daily practice is feasible at different ages, it normally takes at least 10 years to acquire the amount of practice needed to perform at a level that would generally be recognised as excellent.
Anyway, what I really want to say is: MAKE SURE YOU PRACTICE THE TWO SYF PIECES AT HOME. A LOT. If you can't get the timing right yet, you should get the notes right first, because sometimes the timing depends on coordination with other parts or is difficult to count due to the use of syncopation in the arrangement.
At the same time, I suggest you download the 2 songs into your MP3s somehow, and listen to them as many times a day as possible without going crazy.
By the time you can easily and confidently play all the notes correctly, you should also have those 2 songs stuck in your head for life, hence allowing you to get the timing of your now-correct notes right. As an added benefit, you will now also know what all the other parts sound like, and will hence be able to tell if you are out of time with the rest, or if somebody plays wrongly.
With this idiot-proof two-step training programme, I'm sure any and all of you can become SYF standard in no time. Oh, and did I mention, you also need to practice at least 2 hours EVERYDAY for this to work. And no, listening to the pieces on your mp3 player does NOT count within these 2 hours.
Good Luck.
Jia Jun
No comments:
Post a Comment