Improve Your Students’ Practice and Performance Session 6 Problem Solving and Technic Building Famous Musicians

Increase Student Success with Research-Based Practical Tips

Improve Your Students’ Practice and Technic-Building is a 6-session series of short, information-packed presentations focused on building essential skills for robust learning, productive practice, and confident performance.

Each session will highlight research-based practice strategies. But we won’t stop there.
We’ll work together on a range of different exercises and approaches proven to improve student practice habits. You’ll experience a variety of practice methods that aren’t limited to technic-building but also shape expressive interpretation. We'll discuss their application to real-life student performance. You’ll understand how to assimilate them into daily practice.

Session 6 Problem Solving and Technic Building Famous Musicians
We’ll uncover how famous teachers and performers over the last 200 years use “practice devices” to build technic:

Chopin’s deep interest in effective fingering
Liszt’s scale practice secrets
Slow practice pros and cons: the experts opine
Rudolph Ganz’s Mirror Exercises
Vladimir Horowitz’s Opposite Practice
Practicing in rhythms, its many variations, and Adele Marcus’s preference for a different approach
Erna Gulabyan’s doubled pairs practice
Scott McBride Smith’s balance and voicing exercises
Frank Merrick and Delayed Continuity practice