Hi, group! Almost a year ago I started writing a small "booklet" compiling the most effective tools I use and teach my students to use for solving methodologically any passage's difficulty either technical or musical. These are tools that many of us use most of the time but I never saw them all together systematically explained. The pdf was first distributed in spanish with great feedback from all over and I have now translated it into english and share it with you. The text is Creative Commons License. I'm not in the bussiness of monetizing my materials. I prefer to share with everybody, but if you think it is useful and want to contribute to the cause I won't get mad about it. Just let me know. You are free to use this as you see fit, share it with whom ever you think may profit from it and teach from it, if you think it is adaptable to your teaching process. I have posted some videos in my Facebook and Instagram pages (in spanish) about the uses and reasons behind each tool and you are welcome to look for them. I´ll probably also upload them to Youtube in a while with subs. I hope you'll enjoy them. Feedback is very welcomed!!

I want to share something that has come up (again - and again and again) today with my students. The need to arrive prepared. This can be extrapolated to many situations, of course, but I'd like to talk about the mistakes we make while studying or performing. And it is very closely related to many posts and answers I've been reading in many previous posts. It relates to efficiency but also to expressiveness, to relaxation and to security. Some times we clearly identify some bars or passages or motives that present some technical difficulty and since we have them identified, we isolate them and study them conscientiously and dedicate quite a bit of time to them... and then while we are playing two things happend: a) we make mistakes somewhere else, or b) we fall down in that same place we have been studying like crazy. This is due to some missconception that the complexity is local to the passage instead of the piece as a whole (and even the situation as a whole but that's another matter). Many times we resolve the passage in question but when we are playing we arrive to that passage in different conditions to the ones we have studied it isolated (i.e: more tensed or tired or with the fingers or hand in a different position). We tend to dedicate much more time to the things that are more difficult to us than the ones that come up easier. And I think that's a mistake. For once, neglecting the easy parts many times is cause of distress during performance and cause of "miss-interpretation" exactly in those easy parts. And then, many times not having studied the easy parts or the parts previous to the "difficulty" cause us to arrive at that point not in our best disposition. Dedicating time of study to the easy parts: prevents senseless accumulation of tension, allows for maximum enjoyment through the piece, gives rest to both hands in very narrow windows, allows us to arrive to more demanding passages in our best shape and over all gives us the chance to do more music.

Hey everyone! Hope you had a good weekend. What are you all practicing this week? I am actually not practicing anything as I am enjoying a little break from concerts until November! In a few weeks I will be recording new videos of pieces I commissioned and releasing one each week over about the course of 2-3 months. So I am enjoying a little break and then will come back fresh with renewed enthusiasm and inspiration for the recordings 😊 Do any of you ever take scheduled breaks ?

I don't like Asturias / Leyenda. There, I said it. It's boring. (I hope I don't get booted from the list 🙂). I came back to the piece this week after 4 decades away, and it still doesn't grab me. Any other true confessions out there?