Deliberate Practice
blog posts

Teach music confidently without the stress

Recent Guitar Pedagogy Creativity Repertoire Beginners Studio Business

by Andrew Eales

If students aren't practising, is the teacher to blame?

by Nick Ambrosino

What is the end goal? How do we know if we've arrived?

by Sarah Buckley

5 Surprising Ways to Grow Practice Motivation Have you ever felt like a lone wolf in the practice room? Or like the repertoire you’re playing didn’t really connect with the rest of your daily life? If we have felt it, no doubt our students have too.

by Tim Topham

Thanks for watching my YouTube video about helping students turn off Autopilot when they are practising their scales: Here are well over 20 ideas to keep your teaching (and your students’ practice) fresh. This FREE download has 3 pages of fresh ideas that you can grab and print out today.

by Nicola Cantan

For most piano teachers, September brings a whole slew of new piano students through the doors. This is both an exciting and a super busy time in a piano teacher’s calendar. It’s also an opportunity to start fresh – to make practice happen from the get-go.

by Tim Topham

Hello, Practising the Piano readers! A warm welcome to staging.topmusic.co, a place dedicated to teaching piano differently and supporting creativity and innovation in music education. I hope you enjoyed reading my article: Making Practice Stick on Graham’s blog today. I had a lot of fun putting it together and hope it’s been valuable in your thinking about effective practice.

Plans & Pricing

by Tim Topham

I’ve learnt a few things about piano practice and motivation in my time as a musician and music teacher. Here are some of them: The most important thing we can teach our students is how to practice effectively Students need to be taught about practice methods including spaced practice, chunking, interleaved practice, etc.

by Andrew Ingkavet

Practising a musical instrument is a process that needs to be learned. It’s just like learning how to study any subject in school. In fact, good instrumental teachers should consider themselves teachers of “practice” just as much as teachers of “piano” or “trumpet”. How often do you teach students how to practise?

by Tim Topham

Intrinsic v Extrinsic Motivation in Music Students Building on the ideas of one of my previous articles: Why extrinsic rewards are so bad for motivation, you might have missed this great article from string teaching magazine, The Strad.

by Tim Topham

Should 10,000 hours really be the benchmark? You’ve no doubt heard rule of thumb that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of something. The statement originated in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” and, even if you haven’t read it, you’ve no doubt heard the statistic.

by Tim Topham

Slow practice: the importance of precision I was chatting with a colleague at the end of last term regarding teaching students about slow practice. He let me in on a great secret about F1 racing drivers that we should all share with our students...especially the speed demons!

by Tim Topham

For anyone who still believes in a high finger technique and isn’t familiar with the Taubman approach to technique: watch the following video (and the next three in the sequence). This will be the best 50 mins of YouTubing you’ll do this year! For more information, check out the Taubman Institute and Golandsky Institute websites.