Playing music, either on an instrument or by singing, is an incredible experience.  Everyone has the inherent ability to make music and to enjoy playing and listening to music.  It's fun, it's easy.

We've all seen the ads

Learn to Play Piano in 30 days
Learn all of the Guitar Chords in an hour
Master the Sitar in 10 minutes

No doubt, making music is fun.  But you can't even tune a Sitar in 10 minutes.  

Learning music takes time.  You have to learn the musical language and vocabulary.  This takes review and repetition.  It takes study time away from your instrument. Trying to learn something and apply it to your instrument at the same pretty much guarantees you'll run into trouble.  Many learners will then, improperly, attribute this failure to their lack of ability.  What they don't see is that it's the learning method that's wrong, not them at all.

The team of professional educators here at DSM and DLP have taken what we've learned through the years in teaching well over 250,000 individual music lessons to establish the DLP curriculum.

We've broken music learning into an easy and logical 3 step process;


1- Discover
2- Learn
3- Play

This expedites the learning process and assures music students, and parents, that they are learning the musical language as they learn their instrument.  This is not always the case, in music education.

But, this is no magical musical mystery short-cut.  That does not exist.  Learning the musical language and building the physical skills to play your instrument, takes time.  But the great parts of music are:

- there's no finish line
- you can enjoy the music you make at any level in your development.  Playing an instrument is fun.

In this blog we'll discuss STEP 1, Discover, learning the musical concepts.

Click on 1 DISCOVER (circled in RED above) to get to STEP 1 for your lesson.  You will then, see this;

Click on INSTRUCTIONS and listen to a walk-through of  STEP 1.  These instructions are at the top of each page, and should always be the first thing you do when you get to a new page.

The first thing we do is to encourage you to take your time and spend a lot of time on STEP 1.  It takes time to understand and remember the concepts for each lesson.  Lesson 1 has the most concepts to learn because we are introducing you to the basics of the musical language.  But, know that the educators at DLP have placed the concepts for the Kore Series in a logical and sequential order that, we feel, is the best path to follow in learning the musical language.

Take the time to read and review all of the text in STEP 1.  Review the diagrams.  You can even make flashcards, if that helps you to review.  Learning the concepts is the most important part of learning music.  You need to understand before you can apply it.  We also know that it's the step that most people want to spend the least time on, because it takes you away from playing your instrument.  But this is, without a doubt, the step that you should focus the most time and the step that will help you see faster development on your instrument.

You should also continue to review this material with any questions you run into on Quizzes (STEP 2) or problems you have with Songs (STEP 3).

Learning music is an incredible journey.  We're glad to help you with that.  Follow our road map, avoid skipping steps, don't spend too much time on scenic routes and you'll get there in good time.

Happy musicking!

One of the first questions that music students and parents ask is:

How Long Should I Practice Every Day/Week etc.?

and my answer (and my colleagues at DSM would answer the same) is:
I Don't Know

because time, in itself, is not the answer to progress, growth and development in anything.  But knowing how to use that time, establishing habits/routines to be productive, planning what to do before practicing will help assure that you're moving forward in your musical goals.

1) ELIMINATE WASTED TIME- Isn't the Internet and this vast social media world we live in wonderful?  If you're like most people you get up first thing in the morning, open a browser and check-in.  You browse your social media sites, check your email, maybe send out a few tweets and email replies.  It's your routine and you enjoy it....and in most cases, it's a huge waste of time that starts your day out on the wrong path.

Do you really need to:
know what your old college roommate had for dinner last night?
know what bar your local Batista partied at, with complimentary photos, last night?
See photos of a co-workers dogs sleeping?

Probably not, in most cases.  
Do these things get your brain warmed up to being productive?
Does this time help you reach your goals?
Do you ever feel fulfilled after 20-30 minutes of this each morning?

I'm willing to guess NO, to all.

Write down your musical goals.  List both short-term and long-term goals.  They can be simple things like finishing a song or longer and more involved things like understanding Chord/Scale relationships or writing a song for your wedding.  Having these goals and reaching them, helps you see your growth.  

How about starting your day, after your morning Coffee if required, with 20 minutes working on steps to help you reach these goals?  Maybe, you can't play your instrument because everyone else is sleeping when you get up.  Great, spend some time studying the musical concepts that you're working on.  You have to understand concepts before you apply them.  Go through some of our Quizzes.  Re-read the Lesson area, read an upcoming lesson.  Write lyrics.  Do something to truly wake up your brain and get it thinking.  There's no benefit to having your brain in neutral for the first hour of every day.  

This will become your routine. Your brain and body will expect it and look forward to it.

2) THINK BEFORE YOU PRACTICE-  Your music educator should help you be aware of your musical  weaknesses and the trouble areas of the music you are working on.  These are always the things we should spend the most time on and start our practicing with.  Everyone, no matter their skill level, has weaknesses and things they don't do well.   Plan your practice sessions to work on one of those, each time before you start.  Human nature is to play/sing the songs/material we know and do well.  But, in order to get better and move forward we need to address and focus on our weaknesses.

3) MAKING MISTAKES ARE PART OF LEARNING- Even the greatest musical performers make mistakes.  Most likely, all of your favorite recordings have mistakes or things that the performer would like to fix.  Making mistakes and having trouble with, both, technical and knowledge issues is part of moving forward and learning.  Accept; that you will make mistakes, that there will be concepts you don;t understand at first, that you will need to ask for help and guidance from people.  This is all a natural part of the learning process.  Making mistakes means that you are moving forward and not just staying with the familiar and comfortable.

4) STEP AWAY, TEMPORARILY, WHEN YOU GET FRUSTRATED- You've identified your weak areas, you've written a plan for what you want to accomplish this week, you've planned your practice areas, you're getting up very morning and working from the plan.  Yet, you just can not master this one thing this week.  You feel upset with yourself, you feel like it's a waste of time maybe even.   Step away from your instrument and do something else.  Nothing else productive is going to happen when you've reached that stage.  Do something else.  Maybe that IS actually a good time to watch some movie trailers or check where your friends have checked in at.  When you come back to it, you may find that the problem has solved itself.  If not, and you still have trouble, keep removing things until you find the one thing that gives you trouble.  Take away the Dynamics and focus on Notes and Rhythms.  Still not getting it? Slow down the tempo.  Not yet getting it right?  Work on notes only or rhythms only.  Eventually, you will find what the problem is.  If not, send us a question via your Personal Workspace. 


Take control of your time or it will gladly control you.

"Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time' is to say 'I don't want to.'" - Lao Tzu 
 "Time is what we want most, but what we use worst." - William Penn  
"Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save." - Will Rogers 

(image- "The Persistence of Memory"- Salvador Dali  1931)



[side note- I have posted details of my dinner and photos of my sleeping dogs on social media sites, so please blame me for your wasted time if you like.]

Our plans with the DLP Jazz Series are to help you learn the language of music.  Music, like all languages, has an alphabet, a grammar and set structures.  You need to have an understanding of these concepts to communicate and create ideas in this language.  This sounds like a daunting take, but it's not really and we're looking forward to helping you learn to improvise.

But then, the next step is.... What to do once you have all of this knowledge. 
How do I create music that communicates ideas, that reaches listeners, that makes other musicians want to play with me?

Listen

Listening to what other people in your group play and reacting to that are a key component of being a musician in all styles.  Be a part of the ensemble, accept and play off of each others ideas.  This is when magic happens on a bandstand.

Here's a great TED talk on that topic by Stefon Harris, titled, "There Are No Mistakes On The Bandstand"


http://www.ted.com/talks/stefon_harris_there_are_no_mistakes_on_the_bandstand.html 

The DLP Jazz Series will be released in early 2012. Once in a while when we're describing the Kore Series or Jazz Series to a potential new user they'll ask, "Will I be learning REAL songs in here or just exercises?".  The answer is, we believe, that these are real songs BUT that they are also songs that function as exercises to review ONLY the concepts you have learned up to that point.  They are songs built specifically for where you are in your musical learning and for where you are in your technical development on your instrument at this time.

So, from a concert I did this past Monday (12/12/11) are 2 songs from the upcoming DLP Jazz Series.  These feature; myself on Keyboards, Jennifer Escue (from the DLP Staff ) on Vocals, Jeff Plant on Bass, Larry White on Steel Guitar and Lamont Taylor on Drums.