3 - Attitude -- how it affects your learning

You love jazz. You want to play it to enjoy it further. You will be eager to know things. That way you'll learn faster. If you have people who is interested to see you progress, you'd like to show your progress to them. Consequently you'll learn thigns faster.

At first, I simply wished to play on time. That is to go along with rhythm without any stress at all. Which requires hard training on figners. It took me an hour to go to my teacher. I have devised a few tricks that can be done while I am on the train.

One was to spread fingers. You make fist and spread it as powerful as possible. In doing so, you try to extend your little finger.

You'll see that repeating it several times build your fore muscle a bit. You can accumulate your forearm muscle this way, as a matter of fact. Don't over do it. Several times at once. Do this training in the morning, afternoon and before you go to bed.

If you do this practice too much, your muscle become stiff. Stiffness doesn't fit to play piano. Your muscle has to be flexible. Otherwise your finger doesn't move fast.

Since you are not child, you can measure how fast your finger can move, right? As the simple yardstick, you can use your watch, but with a second hand. One beat a seond is rather slow. If you can strike your desk top using little finger four times while a second hand count up to next second, you got enough speed.

So start hitting your desk top 2 times a second with your little finger, you'll feel that you have enough finger speed to play tunes with tempo specified as medium fast.

The truth of the matter is that you invent some way as you get more motivated in learning things. And if your attitude gets to that level, it's not that far to reach your objective.