Music Video Lesson: How to choose the right musical piece to study

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin here at virtualsheetmusic.com. Welcome. Today's subject is how do you know the right piece to study. This is such an important part of your progress as an instrumentalist or singer. For teachers, knowing what repertoire to give students progressively is vital for success of the students.

How do you know? The fact of the matter is you must progress methodically so that any piece you study shouldn't take an inordinate amount of time to learn. Of course, a more advanced student has the maturity to work on a piece that is of great length that could take weeks or even months to master. On the more elementary levels, however, it's important not to spend more than a couple of weeks, two, three weeks on a piece before it's mastered. Because here's the thing: some teachers will give their students pieces that might take half a year to learn. In that same amount of time, another teacher might give a student a dozen pieces to learn. By the time they learn the 12th piece, they're on the level of that piece that the other student has been struggling with for half a year.

If you are progressive, you can always be learning new repertoire, amass more and more music than you can play, and the level grows over time. This is not an exact science. I have had some students sometimes who really were itching to play a piece far above them. I'd tell them outright well, you know, I think that you could do this piece, but you would have to practice more than you've ever practiced before because this is above anything you've done before, and if you have a commitment to really go for it, I will give you that opportunity to try, but you have to promise that you're going to give that level of practice. I've had students rise to the occasion and take their whole level of technique and raise it up to a level that might've been six months beyond them, but they did it in one fell swoop with just total commitment and dedication to practice.

This does happen sometimes, but for the most part I think all too often teachers will want to glorify their own image of what their students are studying by advancing them too rapidly to the detriment of the student who struggles. It's more important to master your music rather than to learn long extended compositions that take forever to learn and may never master. Be careful to choose music that you can learn and play on a very high level within enough of a time frame that you have the maturity to handle. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at virtualsheetmusic.com.

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