How can you measure your progress if you don’t set goals? Even beginning music students should set goals in order to stay motivated and track their acheivements. Our beginner piano student Julie is sharing her musical goals with us as we follow her through her first music lessons. With the help of San Diego piano teacher Jordan M. Julie has completed five lessons so far, but is she closer to reaching her goals? Find out in her blog…
I’m halfway through my 10 week piano lesson course and have just completed my 5th piano lesson with Jordan. My ultimate goal in taking these lessons was to learn how to read and play some entry-level music on the piano. However, when I initially set this goal for myself, I also thought that I would far exceed what I set out to accomplish. In retrospect to that goal, I think I’ve made a lot of progress over the past 5 weeks taking lessons with Jordan and practicing on my own, yet I most definitely have not exceeded this goal.
I’ve always been a fast-learner and one of my biggest personal strengths is my ability to rise to new challenges and adapt quickly. This quality has helped me become more successful in every aspect of my life including school, sports, and my professional career. Yet, the learning curve for piano has proven to be bigger and more difficult than I anticipated it to as I’ve come to realize even more that music is not something that comes natural to me. However, because piano has proven to be a bigger challenge for me, I’m also more determined than ever to continue to get better and improve my skills.
Since I struggle a lot with keeping a steady rhythm, Jordan created multiple different exercises for me to practice with to improve on this weakness of mine. One of the exercises is playing some of the simple songs I know at a very slow pace with a metronome. The slower I play, the more difficult piano is for me because I habitually tend to speed up the pace of the song I’m playing. So this exercise is very effective for me in learning pace restraint and control against a slow rhythm.
I need to improve on my sight reading skills and rhythm in order to achieve my goal of playing a few songs well with both hands. Although I still have a lot of work to do, with continuous practice and Jordan’s help, I know I will reach my goal.
For more in this series, browse through our Student Spotlight tag!
Suzy S.