Performance Anxiety and Nervousness 

It's ten minutes before show time, the recital hall is full of eager concert goers who are excited for an evening of classical guitar music, your guitar has fresh strings and is well tuned, the chair is in place, and the lights will dim soon, and you are experiencing that sense of panic we all know as Performance Anxiety. You have two choices at this point, to either walk out on that stage and perform or run away as fast as you can I recently taught a lesson, and my student was playing a short waltz by…

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Starting a new piece of music 

In my years as a young classical guitarist I cannot count how many times I took on a new piece of music and quickly hit the notorious "brick wall". Every piece no matter how big or small, poses various issues, but if you have a well developed game plan, any piece can perfected in a reasonable amount of time The Game Plan. 1) Breaking things down. The first thing I do with a new piece of music is to spend some time simply looking it over, without my guitar. I like to read though the music and read it…

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Practicing 

The last thing I say to my students as I finish a lesson is "Make sure you practice this week!" I'm sure if you are a teacher you have said this to your students more times than you can count, and if you're a student, you've heard it as many times as well. For students and teachers this can cause some amount of stress. To avoid this in my lessons, I make sure to explain as clearly as possible how I would like my students to practice First- I assign all my students with an important task within the first…

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Sight Reading 

For years I have been sending students to the NYSSMA Competition. NYSSMA stands for New York State School Music Association, and is an opportunity for school aged students to perform Classical and Jazz music for adjudicators for a number grade, and that grade goes onto that student's school transcripts. Students are required to perform various selected solos, scales, and sight reading. It is the sight reading that I have found to be the most stressful for my students, which isn't surprising First, I…

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