Music Tip - How's That Bubba Section Coming?

Some of my students are playing intermediate level songs and need some guidelines in practicing them effectively.  It’s easy, when you practice short songs to just tell your students to play them 4-5 times every day.  But when the pieces get longer, playing the whole piece 4 xs can get really tedious, besides being very unproductive. 

So I like to teach my students to practice in sections.  If you take a section and then play that 4-10 times (depending on size), you get a much more productive practice session and learn the piece faster and easier. 

But sometimes it hard to notate on the student’s practice sheet just where those sections are.  Of course, you can always write down the measure numbers, but what fun is that?  So I like to create weird, funny names for the sections and even have the students help think of names for the sections.  This involves them and helps keep up their interest in practicing.  You can also name sections as the “star” section and put a star sticker on the page to denote it.  I found some really cute fairy stickers once and the girls loved to use them.  

I divided one student's piece into three sections

and called them Larry, Curly, and Moe.

Silliness, funny names, stickers—anything for the sake of good piano practice!

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