Every section of the band, and indeed, every instrument, has their own skills and techniques a student must learn to become proficient. And over the next few weeks, we’re going to explore different sections of the orchestra, and the foundational skills that students should learn as they progress. But before we get into the weeds of each individual instrument, let’s start with the basic musical skills all musicians need.
Beginner musicians need a handful of essential skills to succeed and progress. These skills an be broken into three main categories: foundational musical skills, practice habits, and internalized musicianship.
Let’s dive into what all that means.
Foundational Musical Skills
For any beginner musician to succeed, there are four foundational musical skills they’ll need to hone.
Rhythm & Pulse
The rhythm, beat, and pulse is the fundamental backbone of any piece of music. No matter what instrument a musician plays, developing a strong sense of beat, coupled with the ability to count and play in time is critically important. Students who fail to build this skill will lose track of the beat, and lose their place in the song.
Building a strong “mental metronome” creates a sense of continuity, and makes moving on to skills like pitch and melody much easier.
Scales & Chords
If rhythm and pulse are the backbone of a song, scales and chords are the rest of the support structure. Learning not only the notes, but the relationships between them, opens the world of music wide. Basically every melody in your favourite music, dating back centuries, has relied on scales and chords, and how the notes play with each other.
Understanding this interplay is another of the key musical skills every musician needs.
Reading Music & Basic Music Theory
Every beginner musician must learn to recognize some basic music notations, such as the names of the notes (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) and how they appear on the page. This is essential for understanding how pitches relate to one another, and for reading music.
Reading music is similar to reading a book in a few key ways: symbol identification, pattern recognition, the combination of pieces of information into a larger, more meaningful, whole. The major difference between the two is the music’s instrumental skill, i.e. turning those symbols and meaning into sound and music.
Ear Training
The concept commonly called “ear training” actually has little to do with your ears. Instead, it’s really just memory training. In the same way you learn to recognize your friends’ and family’s voices on the phone, so too can a music student learn to differentiate notes and chords. The ability to recognize, identify, and understand different pitches, intervals, and rhythms by ear is an essential aspect of musicianship, and a foundational musical skill.
Practice Habits
No musician ever got better without practice, and no foundational musical skill was ever honed while avoiding it.
Purposeful Practice
Unfocused, directionless practice can actually do more harm than good. For maximum results, students should focus their efforts on specific lessons. Instead of simply playing songs over and over, beginner musicians would benefit more from working on single note exercised, scales, or basic chord changes.
Structure & Consistency
In addition to having a focused goal for each practice session, beginner students should further segment their sessions. Dividing practices into shorter, concentrated segments, with time for breaks in between, helps to maintain motivation.
Additionally, it’s important to set good daily practice habits. Students should set time aside, preferably at about the same time of day, everyday, to practice. At first, these sessions might only be twenty or thirty minutes long, but may (and should) grow with progress.
Proper Technique
Regardless of the instrument, including and especially vocal chords, proper technique is necessary. Not only is proper technique one of the essential musical skills, it actually prevents injuries. For some musicians, like violinists, this might mean a repeated motion injury, and for vocalists it may mean a strain.
Beginner students should be mindful of their posture, hand positioning where necessary, and breathing to build their skills effectively and avoid injuries.
Internalized Musicianship
The final category of musical skills involves brining the music inside, and feeling it with your body.
Listening
Beginner musicians should listen to a wide variety of music. Doing so helps with many of the previously mentioned skills, as it broaden horizons and shows the wonders that can be done with the basics of rhythm, melody, and harmony. The more varied the music a beginner listens to, the more opportunity for inspiration arises.
Movement
Simply put, internalizing the beat and pulse of music and expressing it through movement and dance helps to strengthen understanding of rhythm.
Final Thoughts on These Essential Musical Skills
These foundational musical skills are were the journey begins. Every corner of the orchestra relies on these abilities long before they get into the details of their own techniques. And it is from these essential capabilities that all music grows.
Stick around with us for the next several weeks as we dive deeper into fundamental skills from around the orchestra! We’ll be exploring the skills students need to study for vocal, piano, guitar & bass, drums, brass, woodwinds and strings.
And if you’re looking to begin your own musical journey in the Greater Toronto Area, or online, you’ve come to the right place! The Music Studio offers classes and lessons for a wide range of instruments, all for any age and skill level. Our professional instructors focus on offering the best in music education, customer service and value for money. We believe that these themes are reflected in the examples below and in the relationships we build with our students. We invite you to experience The Music Studio difference for yourself. Whether it’s in-person or online, The Music Studio has Music Lessons You’ll Love!
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