Our Method.

Overview

One of the questions we have heard (and asked!) most often is "what am I supposed to practice?" This is one of the hardest things for self-taught musicians to answer. It is even sometimes hard for teachers to know what exercises to give to their students that will provide the most value. Figuring out what to practice is a combination of understanding the usefulness and interrelations between multiple musical concepts, what your current skill level and understanding is across all of these concepts, and figuring out what is interesting enough to you personally to keep your attention and keep you at the instrument.

Learning music is not a straight path with well-defined steps, one after another. There are countless things to learn about music, some build on others, most concepts are related, and all concepts are important. It all depends on what you want to learn. Most learning systems (books, video series, online classes) all revolve around a linear, step-by-step program to learning how to be a better musician. We don't believe this is the most effective way to learn and can actually be stifling to anyone that does not find interest in every single step that is in the program.

Exercises that we think are focused on a single musical concept, more often than not, are helping us learn more than just that one concept. For example, just playing a simple major scale is not only helping us learn our [scales](/concepts/scales-and-melody); it is helping us learn [rhythm](/concepts/rhythm-and-accompaniment) by playing in time, [technique](/concepts/technique-and-phrasing) in playing the notes hard vs soft or staccato vs legato. One of our main goals in our collection of exercises is to show as many of the different concepts that we can figure out an exercise is actually helping you learn, and then helping make sure you have active exercises that cover all the key musical concepts. As our catalog grows, there will be more and more exercises that can cover the same concepts, so you should always be able to find something to keep your interest across every concept we cover.

Do I still need a private music teacher?

We highly recommend you get a private music teacher. We understand that sometimes they can be expensive and hard to budget for, but the insight and direction they can provide is invaluable. We do our best to guide you through exercises that are at your level and will help you improve in a wholistic way (and we think we do a pretty great job!) but nothing can beat an expert sitting with you, watching you play, and guiding you through things that we cannot see through the computer.

In fact, we believe in teachers so much that we provide a teacher portal that allows a teacher to assign exercises in musicwend and track progress between lessons to give them extra tools to help you even more! (We actually provide discounts to members that are students of a teacher that utilizes musicwend in their lessons, so if you have a teacher and you want them to use us, tell them to reach out to us!)

What about free YouTube content or books or online courses?

We have collectively spent countless hours browsing for and watching YouTube videos with exercises and trying the exercises only to realize after days that either the exercise was not helpful for what I wanted to achieve, was too far past my level of understanding so I wasn't actually retaining what I was learning, or just wasn't interested enough in the exercise to even know if I was learning anything. A lot of the videos are super helpful and well explained (and we actually have some YouTube links in some of our exercises!), it's just a matter of finding the ones that you need for your stage in your personal music journey.

We have bought many lesson books, and spent months going through pages, and while we learned and were improving (these books are written by teachers with decades of experience, so they definitely have good content), they are written in way to be usable by as many people as possible, which limits their ability to target your personal, specific needs. I have also yet to find one that explains all the different reasons for learning what they are teaching you and explains when you can consider "turning the page" to continue.

As for paid online lessons or classes, these are usually the best of the general purpose lessons since they are higher production quality, are setup to have all the lessons in order so you know which lesson to go to next, and are generally focused on an area of music that you are personally interested in, they still have a few drawbacks. Depending on where you are in your musical journey, most of these start at the absolute beginning, so you'll be paying for many lessons that you don't actually want or need. Even though these lessons are better than the free-for-all of YouTube or the static books without visualizations, they still usually suffer with a "singular path" problem. If you don't like one of the lessons/exercises, there aren't other options to satisfy that level.

We provide a curated collection of exercises for all levels of learners across multiple musical concepts and with many options every step of the way to make sure you stay interested. Everyone learns differently and we want to help guide you down your own personal musical path.

What do we do different?

There is no narrow, single path to learning music.

In general music is complex and interconnected and many different concepts and paths.

For individuals it's even more complicated because we may be experts in one concept, but beginners in another part of the musical journey.

We have done our best to boil musical concepts and paths down to a management set of concepts and levels. We have a growing, curated catalog of exercises that we have found from our countless hours of digging through YouTube, taking private lessons from too many teachers to count on the path to finding the right ones, and recommended by other instructors and users.

We then categorize each exercise across all concepts and levels, and explain how it helps, and when you should move on to something slightly more challenging.

Finally, we do our best to figure out what level your personal journey is in each of these concepts to be able to recommend exercises that will help you grow in each of the concepts. There are exercises that are to be done with your instrument, and some exercises that are more theoretical that can be done when you are not near your instrument like when you are traveling.

We want to help make your personal musical journey as effective and enjoyable as possible and hope you will join us.

Our musical concept breakdown

• Scales & Melody Turn scale patterns into powerful melodies.
• Harmony & Chords Understand the building blocks of music.
• Rhythm & Accompaniment Master the musical foundations.
• Songs & Structure Build the foundation and flow of music.
• Technique & Phrasing Express music like a language.
• Improv & Composition Craft spontaneous and thoughtful music.