Joy
- Joy. Prioritize yourself. Do what you like, what gives you meaning. Keep learning, playing, studying something new, going to concerts, if this gives you enthusiasm.
- Playfulness. It is beautiful to learn something new, to do something we never thought we would ever be capable of, to discover a new talent in ourselves. Make it fun. Make it a game. Practicing shouldn’t be just a commitment but time we enjoy spending.
- Once you can transmit the joy for music you can ask for more commitment and a more goal-oriented approach to music/studying/learning/results.
- Listen to the desires of the students. What do they want to do? What brought them to learning music? What do they get from music? What motivates them? What music do they like to play? Be flexible, but don’t forget what you love and what gives you meaning.
- Share what you do: what are you studying? Play for your students, show them your own process: it shows them that you accept challenges, and that you can fail too. Share with them what gives you enthusiasm.
Safety
- Open/closed mode. Like the British actor John Clease (Fawlty Towers, Monty Python) said in a lecture: <<While we are creating there should be no fear of making a mistake and no time constraint. The essence of playfulness is openness to anything it may happen, a feeling that whatever happens, it’s OK. While we are creative, nothing is wrong.>> Once we have experimented enough we make decisions, we select what we want to keep and we then go into the closed mode where we work as efficiently and effectively as possible towards a concrete result.
- If a child is always quiet in your lessons, there is something odd. Work on making them feel safe. You should not block their potentially high level of energy either. Instead, try to channel it (“organized chaos”) if you feel comfortable.
- If necessary talk a lot to establish a good relation and the feeling of being in a safe space.
- Work on rhythm: it takes time. Make and give time, play together, eventually simplify it or change medium (percussion, voice, dance). When there is no fear (of judgment, of doing it wrong, of making a mistake), if there are no neurological reasons, everybody should be able to consistently and precisely play relatively difficult rhythms. Again: create a safe space. Rhythm is not just feeling and freedom, it’s knowledge too.
Learning
- Play a lot together with your students, it helps them in forming an auditory memory (of rhythm and articulation, for example) and in bringing the focus from 100% inward to partially outward, necessary for having a more objective feeling of time and pulse.
- If you can, accept the challenges offered by your students. They want to explore a new musical genre? They would like to improvise or make their own music? Help them as much as you can. Experiment in these fields, even if they are out of your comfort zone. Working with children in these areas can be a simpler way to learn and explore.
- There should be a bare minimum commitment, whether in terms of a daily or weekly amount of time dedicated to the instrument. Without regular practice, it is not possible to learn a musical instrument or truly enjoy playing it. Be clear about this with the student or their parents.
- You cannot play something you can’t hear. Train the ears: listen to music, teach what to listen for in music
- Repeat a lot: don’t stop when the student is capable of doing something, repeat until they feel comfortable with the task.
- Strategy in practicing and not just brute force. Sometimes we can’t get to the result by facing the problem directly, we have to be creative and take a secondary path.
- Study, dedicate hours, repeat. You will not learn if you don’t spend time practicing.
- Some students need a lot of structure, some of them just need some inspiration. Most of them, however, want to know that you have a plan: never forget the important things you said in the last lessons, you should know or hear what the student has worked on. Sometimes, you are the only person who can give them the feeling, by appreciating their efforts and small weekly results, that they are moving forward.
- Teaching is a learning process. Experience is the strongest learning environment but if you feel stuck, ask a colleague, you are not expected to know everything from the beginning.
- When you feel stuck with a student, talk to them. But don’t problematize and talk too much: explaining something verbally is not the only way to help somebody understand.
- With advanced students: listen a lot You will surely find something to say and offer them—maybe even just words of appreciation. If they follow lessons with you it’s because they value your opinion. If you can’t play what they do because you don’t have all the time in the world, or because you simply can’t, it’s not a problem, you can work with them on many other aspects of musicianship: broadening their horizons, refining specific techniques, listening to great examples, sharing your experience, or playing something from your own repertoire.
- There are people that need a lot of instructions (due to insecurity and a need for control) before they feel comfortable and free, others who feel free by nature and/or cannot handle many instructions because it blocks them. It’s a spectrum, not ‘A or B’. Don’t force them to change, students don’t have to learn exactly the way you do. What you can do is expand their possibilities and help them become more flexible.
- Technology will enrich your lessons. Useful tools include:
- Transcribe! (for transcribing, transposing, and playing along in loops)
- Various metronome apps with cool grooves (Soundcorset, eBatuque)
- Recording apps
- YouTube, Spotify
- Fonometer (to visualize dynamics)
- Musescore.org (to find scores) and Musescore (free) (to write scores)
- iReal (for improvising and playing along)
- Spectrometer (to see harmonics)
- Learning is changing, changing is not easy. Authority is something you receive, not something that you demand. Don’t force change.
- Give enough feedback, students want to know where they stand.
- Listen. You don’t always have the answer—at least not right away. Sometimes, you need to take time to think about it (see the point about open/closed mode).
- Learn to recognize and appreciate what is already good. As musicians, we often focus too much on what we cannot do or on what we can do better.
- Challenges: finding the right moment and amount of challenge for the student is an art. It requires a lot of knowledge and empathy.
- Don’t seek validation for your insecurities through your students’ performances. They don’t have to perform well for your ego. A performance where a student was forced to go beyond their limits due to fear of judgment is never positive. Even if the results appear good, they are coupled with feelings of fear and a lack of self-motivation. The long-term effects of such performances are negative. The student’s experience matters more than external perception. You cannot convince someone they did great if their own experience was awful.
It’s beautiful to see a student and reflect on how far they’ve come—growing as a musician and as an individual, becoming freer and more confident, and using music to express themselves.
This list is not meant as a guideline—it reflects my own process. It highlights what I felt I needed to work on and does not indicate the actual relevance of the different topics.
Some aspects, such as competence, curiosity, the desire to learn and improve, broadening horizons, self challenge, patient clarity and attention to detail, are very important to me even if I haven’t explicitly mentioned them.
Luca Pignata (last update 2-3-2025)
