Another PMEA Annual Conference is coming to a close, and as I sit in the lobby of the beautiful Lancaster County Convention Center, I am reflecting on all of the wonderful experiences I’ve had in the last few days.

First of all, Lancaster is a beautiful city! Being a naive westerner in this state, I assumed that this convention center would be in the middle of farmland somewhere. I couldn’t have been more wrong…it is a beatifully historic city that predates the revolution by at least 40 years. My colleagues and I had a wonderful time spending our first evening here walking around and exploring (and even getting in a photo walk – pictures here soon).

One of the things I love about coming to conferences like this is that I get re-energized to teach. It is such a great opportunity to see great educators and outstanding students at work. It is wonderful to sit in a session and hear great teachers sharing great ideas. While listening to some truly outstanding high school and middle school ensembles over the last few days I thought, “I am so lucky to have a job where I get to do something I love every day – make music with students!” It was so exciting for me to watch these young people perform music at such a high level and to realize the time and effort that they and their teachers and families have put in to get them to that point. All of these things motivate me to want to do better in my own position back at my school.

Reconnecting with old friends and meeting some new people has also been tremendous. It is great to meet up with them and share stories and laughs. It is also very comforting to know that we all face the same type of challenges in our programs It is great to get input from other perspectives and to have fresh ideas to approach these challenges.

Admittedly, I haven’t been to a music educators conference for a few years, due to a number of factors. This year, I had a student make it into one of the ensembles (which I am very proud of) and so I was able to go. I am so happy that I had the opportunity, and I feel like I don’t ever want to miss another one!

The conference has been tremendous – a truly exciting and reaffirming experience! If you were able to make it to your local state conference this year, I’d love to hear your thoughts and reflections as well!

I will be attending this year’s Annual PMEA In-Service Conference in Lancaster, PA. If you are unable to attend, you can check out the CoverItLive below to follow the official hashtag, #pmea12.

What follows is a list of thoughts that I came up with in an effort to prepare a lecture/seminar that I am going to give my senior high and junior high students tomorrow. It ended up being quite the narrative, and I hope that I can get through it all in one class period! Feel free to use any of the listed thoughts and ideas, and please share if you have anything to add! Exciting side note – first post this school year!! Woohoo! Enjoy!

Thoughts On Practicing

Follow the 3 Golden Rules
- Go Slow!! You should never make a mistake when you are practicing! Why? Because you should go slow enough. If you don’t, then you are practicing mistakes and thus wasting valuable practice time. This means start working under tempo NO MATTER HOW SLOW IT IS! Then you can gradually speed up. This will save a lot of time in the long run.
- Work small sections. Isolate where your problems are. (This also requires you to be a good listener while you are playing). Where is the trouble? Between 2 specific notes, or between 3? Is it just two beats of a measure that you’re having trouble with? Just work on that part! You do not need to practice stuff you can already play! For example, in a long run of notes that is difficult, start with 2 only, then when you feel comfortable with that, add one more note, etc.
- Related to the above – REPEAT, REPEAT, REPEAT! You must repeat these slow, small sections until you know them as second nature! This is how we train our brains/muscle memory to play the passage correctly.

A good minimum practice time goal should be at least 1 hour EVERY day if you want to see real results, but…….quality of practice time is far more important than quantity…it’s what you do with your time that’s important! The most important part is that you spend time with the instrument EVERY DAY (outside the band rehearsal). Remember, our job during rehearsal is to take what you have worked on in the practice room and put it together with everyone else. With that in mind, set a goal for each session, based on the amount of time available to you. Maybe your goal is to simply get better at one phrase if your time is short. Remember, even if you just make one thing better during your practice time, you are still getting better!

GET A METRONOME!! This serves many purposes, but two of the most important – you begin to develop great time & it keeps you from increasing the tempos you are practicing at too quickly. When we GRADUALLY speed up tempos that we are working on, we then give our brain/muscles time to learn. When we speed up too quickly, we don’t learn correctly (and are probably practicing mistakes).

WHEN YOU PRACTICE, IT SHOULD BE PERFECT…NO MISTAKES!! Why? Because we should go slow enough to make sure there are no mistakes.

These techniques seem counter-intiutive. It seems like this will make it take longer to learn a given passage or piece. BUT, in the long run you will actually learn the piece/passage much more quickly! This is because you are practicing perfectly, without mistakes. The purpose of practice is to train our brains and muscles to work together at specific times when music is read or heard.

For any performance, you want whatever you are playing to become second-nature. You must be 110% prepared, because you lose 10% just to nerves.

Individual practice is what will set you apart from other musicians your age.

Many times, practicing your instrument does not provide immediate results. Such are all good things in life! But, dedication to it and your instrument will pay HUGE dividends over time. If you follow the methods above, you will be surprised how much more quickly you will improve.

Do not allow yourself to get frustrated. It happens to the best of us when we are practicing! If you find yourself getting frustrated while working on a particular passage, simply put the instrument down for a minute or two and walk away. Go get a drink, or take a lap around the building and come back to it a few minutes later. You will come back fresh, having given your mind and spirit a short break from your hard work!

Practicing your instrument should also include fundamentals. I begin EVERY practice session with a tonal warm-up to get my mind and instrument ready to play. I then continue by playing my major & minor scales with a metronome. For me, this is a routine that I have established over many years…clearly, I had to learn those warm-ups and scales first. Practice cannot just be about working on your repertoire. Granted, that is a large part of the practice time, but you also just need to get better at playing your instrument in general…this is done through practicing fundamentals that are specific to your instrument, although ALL instrumentalists should know their major and minor scales AT LEAST 2 octaves.

Go take lessons! Individual time with a teacher on your instrument will be very helpful in helping to direct your practice and individual learning.

LISTEN TO GREAT MUSIC (AND GREAT MUSICIANS ON YOUR INSTRUMENT)! How else will you know what your instrument is supposed to sound like? You need to have a “picture in your ear” of what you should sound like. The internet is a great resource for finding recordings, but a word of caution here – not everything on the internet is good. See Mr. Butchy if you are looking for suggestions of who to look for on your instrument. Also, listen to recordings of your band pieces. Mr. Butchy makes them available to you on the web. You should be listening to these recordings A LOT!!

All of this information is based directly on my own experience (and struggles) with learning how to practice. I guarantee that if you follow these suggestions, you will improve by leaps and bounds!

Last week, I had the absolute pleasure of attending my first-ever International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference in Philadelphia. Since I was a newbie, I attempted to gather as much information before arrival as possible. I read up on all the advice the “veterans” had posted on the Conference Ning and the ISTE Young Educators Network Ning, and the awesome Newbie Lounge put together by @BethStill. As I was gathering all of this information, I thought, “Hey, here is a good opportunity for me to really use Evernote!” I had been wanting to use it for some time, but had never really found myself in a situation where I needed to keep all kinds of information in one spot. So I started clipping and bookmarking all of the online resources I found and put them in Evernote. I added websites for information on social gatherings, Google Docs that people were sharing, websites for landmarks that we wanted to see, tweets from others going to the conference, my own packing list, and maps of places I wanted to see. Then, while at the conference, I used Evernote to take notes in sessions, add websites from presenters, add photos of things I liked, and keep everything in one place. It was pretty awesome, not to mention that it synched flawlessly between my iPhone and iPad, no matter which device I used.

As for the conference, I was amazed at just how large it was and how many people were there. I knew it was going to be big from what I’d read, but I was truly amazed by the size of the conference center, including the vendor exhibits. I did attend some sessions, and I was careful to make sure that I didn’t over-plan my days, as was suggested by many. I did make a mistake though. While I did see some excellent presentations, I wish that I had attended more sessions that were out of my “comfort zone.” I found that many of the presentations that I went to did not offer me any new insight or really that many new ideas (although I got some great ones from @DoReMiGirl and @michellek107), mainly because they were about things I already knew. Next time, I will attend sessions that include topics that I don’t really know anything about.

My really big takeaway from the conference was getting to meet so many great people face-to-face. Some of these folks I had literally been waiting years to meet, and it was awesome! Social media (and Twitter in particular) has been a huge life-changer for me in that it has allowed me to become far less shy than I used to be. I wrote about this some time back here. In years past at a conference like this, I probably would have kept to myself and not talked to many people, but at #iste11, I was more than eager to walk up to anyone that I recognized and say hello! The absolute best part of the conference for me was getting to meet these people and the great conversations that we engaged in. There were even many folks who recognized me!  This was totally unexpected, and I am completely flattered that anyone would even remember seeing little old me on twitter. There is something truly special about meeting people in person that you have only ever known virtually. I don’t think I can eloquently put it into words. I even got to meet many people for the first time that I did not know before! It was an awesome experience, and I even felt a little sad at the end of the conference, knowing that I probably wouldn’t see many of those folks again in at least a year, or maybe even more! But, what’s great is that we are able to continue those conversations through our favorite social media outlets after the conference is over.

It was an awesome conference and I highly recommend it to anyone, if you are able to go! I hope to see many of you again at the next one!

If you can’t make it to the PMEA Conference in person this year (like me), you are in luck!  Undergraduate students from Grove City College will be live-blogging many of the sessions presented at the  Conference next week. The students will be using Twitter and Cover It Live among other sources to live blog the event. Check out Joe Pisano’s post over at MusTech.net for all of the details!! A big thanks to Joe for doing this!

A Very Web 2.0 PMEA Music Conference At Hershey