audiot

i had one of those when i was a child and loved it dearly until i smashed it into 1000 pieces… and then another one, a little larger, where one could fill water in – that made for a pretty cool instrument. i’m not sure if those water-ocarinas even are called like that. maybe i’ll try to find me one of those again because being so completely ocarinaless suddenly kind of disturbs me…
so check out this guy instead. and of course it’s one more addition to the mario-theme-played-by-weird-instruments-series. enjoy

finally i’m back online, the provider solved the problem without (and now the funny part) even knowing what the actual problem was and (even better) how they solved it, yay. anyhoo, as long as it’s working again, i give a rat’s a$$ about how they did it…

well, i was thinking a lot about teaching and learning lately – as you can read here for instance – so i’m gonna give some learning tips that might be useful to you (at least i hope so…). please remember 1. that not everything works for everyone of course and 2. that you need to try it before you can say it does or doesn’t work. this is not about music exclusively, so check it out on other things you want to learn as well… i’m only giving one tip at a time to give you the chance of thinking about each one and checking it out. there’s plenty of ’20-tips-on-how-to-entries’ in the blogs out there but i usually feel overwhelmed with them and just read them through instead of really working with what’s said there. and by the way, this one-tip-at-a-time-strategy is the first tip i’m giving you:

no.1 – the larch :-) anyone remembering that one?

seriously, the first basic tip is – whatever it is you want to learn, break it down into very small steps and do one at a time. if it’s about a guitar solo for example, depending on how complicated it is, you could even go down to single notes. most of the time, tough, it’s most useful to have small phrases of maybe one or two measures. once you’re able to do the first piece, learn the second one and then combine them with a focus on the crossover-section. for singers it’s usually lines (not what you think!), but also words or single notes are possible. don’t panic! you will get pretty good at this quickly, so the pieces become a bit larger, which saves you time. but no matter how good you become, the breaking-it-down-technique remains.

now, why does this work? it’s quite easy, because our brain likes things it can manage. if you overload it with a whole mass of input, it loses track of it and needs time and energy to sort things out first, to find a pattern, to make sense of it. learning things that don’t make sense to us is almost impossible, we might be able to repeat it so many times that we can recite it, but we’ll forget it again soon or just won’t be able to put it to use (instead of just blindly reciting). so if we don’t understand what we’re trying to learn, it’s only wasted time and effort. but to make sense of it, it needs to be divided into small pieces of input, so our brain has the chance to figure it out. as soon as you know/understand what it’s really about, it’s just mechanics from there.

don’t confuse this with getting the big picture, which i will talk about in the next entry…