You Too Can Play Music!
10 Essential Principles of Music That Most Teachers Don't Teach, For Amateur and Beginning Musicians
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You Too Can Play Music! The Ten Principles of Learning Music That Most Teachers Don't Teach
This course will teach you how to learn to play music the natural, easy and fun way!
Music is a language! Therefore we should learn music in the same way that we learned our first language.
Music is actually quite easy to learn with this method. Yet this method is rarely taught.
I meet many smart passionate people who love music and want to learn how and start playing, yet they think it is too difficult or they don't have the "talent". I meet many people who have tried to learn to play an instrument, sometimes several times, yet have not succeeded because they or their teachers did not understand the Ten Principles. I also see far too many kids and music students whose great inner love for music is gradually killed by mainstream music education. I want to help these people. That's why I made this course.
Is This Course For You?
This course can help almost everyone who wants to get better at music.
- Music lovers who want to participate in the world of music. The Ten Principles is perfect for total beginners who want to start playing right away.
- Music students who are looking for ways to speed up their learning, get ahead of the competition, expand their musical abilities, and have fun learning. The Ten Principles teaches things that are rarely taught in musical schools.
- Former musicians who tried and failed in the past. The Ten Principles will help you succeed!
- Amateur musicians who feel stuck at their current ability level and wish to break through to a higher level. The Ten Principles are a great way to smash through plateaus and get a lot better..
- Music teachers who wish to find new ways to teach and motivate their students that are more engaging and fun, creative and effective. The Ten Principles are a great foundation for fun and effective classroom instruction.
- Parents and families with kids who wish to learn music. The Ten Principles will help parents understand how to best teach their kids.
- Professional musicians who want to break through plateaus and rediscover their love for music. The Ten principles can help pros breathe new life into their musicianship, self expression and relationship with music.
What You Will Learn- Fundamental Musical Skills!
The Ten Principles are fundamental skills for all musicians which will enable us all to more effectively follow our own musical paths.
In this course you will learn many very useful and fun musical skills. This will create a strong foundation which you can then build on for life. These skills include:
- The ability to better understand and see your true musical motivations and goals. (Principle 1)
- The ability to get together with other musicians and "jam" with them. (Principle 7)
- Skills to feel, understand, and fit in with other musicians rhythmically. (Principle 6)
- The ability to listen to music and understand what is happening and how everything fits together. (Principle 2)
- The ability to join in and participate in music with other musicians the right way. (Principles 4 and 8)
- The ability to feel musical emotion deeply and play music that feels right. (Principle 5)
- The skills to improvise music and play "by ear". (Principles 3 and 7)
- The ability to express yourself in a more honest, deep and confident way in music and in life. (Principles 1-10)
- Skills to learn songs, and instrumental and musical techniques easily and completely. (Principles 2, 5, 7 and 9)
- The ability to express your musical ideas and feeling with singing and dancing. (Principle 9 and 10)
Requirements of the Student:
While this course is appropriate for many people in many walks of life, there are certain requirements of the student if this course is to be effective. Will this course work for you? It will if you have:
Desire: You have to want to learn to play and live in the world of music to succeed in this course. Not your parents, teachers, friends, etc, but you alone must have the desire to play music and express yourself.
Patience and Diligence: Music is easy and fun to learn but it takes time and effort to develop musical skills. This course is a long-term and permanent change that take patience and diligence to implement.
Open mindedness and willingness to try new things: This course will introduce you to new ideas, and some of them may be different than what you have heard before. For the course to succeed, you have to be open minded enough to try these new ideas. If you think you already know everything then this course is not for you.
About the Course- Methodology and Format:
The course is divided up into 10 modules as well as introductory and concluding modules. Each module contains a video summary of the principle in question and several exercises to integrate the principle in question. The exercises are the heart of the course. Music is learned by doing.
The course revolves around the idea that music is a language, with the main goal of communication and self-expression. Almost all children learn their native language easily and quickly. In this course we examine the way that children learn their first language and apply those principles to music.
When we examine how people fail in music we can easy see obvious and major violations of the 10 Principles.
Typical Reasons for Failures In Music and Relevant Principles:
- Lack of motivation: Principle 1
- Don't like to practice: Principle 7, 8
- Fear of mistakes: Principle 1, 3
- Trouble playing with others: Principle 4, 6, 7
- Difficulty expressing self musically: Principle 2, 9, 10
- Technical problems with instrument: Principle 5, 10
- Musical problems with stiffness and emotionless playing: Principle 5, 9, 10
- Lack of joy when playing: Principle 1, 3, 9, 10
- Slow progress: Principle 3, 7
- Bad rhythm: Principle 4, 10
- Inability to improvise: Principle 3, 7
The principles in this course have solutions to these and many other difficulties that we encounter on the road to learning music. These solutions are easy and even fun to employ, yet they are not taught in traditional music education.
Your Instructor
My name is Joshua MacCluer, and I am a musician, coach and philosopher. I have been playing music for almost my entire life (35 years) and coaching for over 20 years. My main "career" has been as an orchestra musician, and currently I serve as the Principal Trumpet of the Kong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. My daily musical life today is unbelievably rich, filled with many experiences in music. I play the great masterpieces of classical music with the Philharmonic and I play jazz and other improvised music in many other bands. I play bass, piano, percussion, sing and produce music. I am also the Director of Peak Performance Coaching with TransVolve and it is through that role that I have developed this course.
My music career has been filled with many successes and many failures, many struggles and many triumphs. I play jazz and other improvised music well now but for struggled for many years to learn how to improvise before I finally "got it". I failed to learn the piano three times before I finally succeeded easily on the fourth try. I failed to learn how to the bass once and then later I learned how to play the bass almost effortlessly. I failed to learn the guitar despite trying hard for a year and still cannot play it. I sing and play percussion with great enjoyment and minimum effort. I also put thousands of hours in trial and error learning to produce music and now am quite good at it. I have also succeed and failed at learning several foreign languages. I have succeeded at learning English, Spanish, French, Italian and Bulgarian and have (so far) failed at learning Chinese, Russian and Czech.
When I look at my life history of failures and successes in music and other languages, I see undeniable patters emerge. I asked myself, "Why did I fail here and succeed there?" and over time I saw the it as the results of following or not following basic principles of learning. This gave me the understanding I needed to begin to discover and teach these Ten Principles.
For much more on me and a lot of my work please visit my personal website www.joshuamaccluer.com.
Course Curriculum
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PreviewPrinciple 1: Begin with the "Why?" (3:45)
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StartPrinciple 2 Part 1: Music is a language (5:54)
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StartPrinciple 2 Part 2: Music is a language (3:40)
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StartPrinciple 3: At the beginning there are no mistakes or rules, just have fun and learn how to express yourself (2:27)
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PreviewPrinciple 4: Find and feel the groove before you play (3:38)
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StartPrinciple 5 Part 1: Focus on the feel and emotion instead of the notes or technique (3:26)
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StartPrinciple 5 Part 2: Focus on the feel and emotion instead of the notes or technique (4:33)
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StartPrinciple 6: Listening is at least as important as playing (5:00)
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StartPrinciple 7: Don't practice, just jam (6:06)
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StartPrinciple 8: Play with music as much as possible (3:44)
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StartPrinciple 9: Sing to discover your true musical self (3:46)
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StartPrinciple 10: Learn to move, dance and express music with your body (3:14)