Secrets to Get Your Students to Really Practice & Listen

Are you struggling with students that aren't really progressing, or that seem to never practice? Do you feel like everything you say is going in one ear and out the other?

If you're feeling this way, join us this week for my episode featuring Andrew Higgins of MatchMySound to talk about getting your students into their best habits so they can progress further than ever before!

You can check out MatchMySound here: https://matchmysound.com/

Enjoy This Week’s Transcript!

Carly
In today's interview, I'm chatting with Andrew Higgins. Andrew is a composer, teacher and music educator who's worked with major music publishers around the world. Part of his work has included giving lectures and workshops, often with the theme of developing musicality in students at the earliest ages. These workshops have taken him all over the world, including the UK, Ireland, Vienna, Singapore, Iceland, Malaysia, Vietnam and more. I'm sure he's been to many, many places. In our call today we're actually talking about an incredible technology that he's become involved with called MatchMySound, which helps the teacher assign music for the student to practice with during the week using sound comparison technology. I love our discussion today. It's all about creating lessons where the student feels encouraged and motivated to practice in a way that allows them to self-assess and really learn how to be an active listener as they're learning music, instead of just reading what's on the page.
It's a really fun discussion around teaching, technology, all things modern, which is of course what I love on this podcast. And as a bonus, Andrew also shares some amazing insights into how teachers can introduce improvisation and composition to students at any age. Okay, let's dive into this discussion. I think you're going to love it.

Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Andrew
My pleasure.

Carly
It's great to have you. I'm just thrilled to introduce our teachers to MatchMySound, the amazing technology that it is and the amazing tool that it provides studio owners. So we have a lot of listeners that have never heard of MatchMySound. Can you give us a little bit of a rundown of what it is and what it provides the studio owner?

Andrew
So MatchMySound is an assessment technology first and foremost. There are other elements to it as well. But one of the biggest problems that you have as a teacher, any teacher, but a piano teacher particularly, is what happens between one lesson and the next. You can do a really good lesson, the student has absolutely understood everything you've said, then they walk out the door. And they come back the next week and lo and behold, you have to give the same lesson again because they didn't retain any of it, because they didn't practice at all. So that's really frustrating for the teacher, but it's also frustrating for the student as well. So what MatchMySound allows you to do is it allows you to engage with the students between the lessons in a kind of default way. So you set it up during the lesson - you set up some exercises, you work with the student on setting up these exercises so they know what to expect and they know what to do. And then they've got a week to actually do these exercises, and then they can submit them to you.
And they only need to submit them when they've reached a certain level. So that means they're encouraged to reach that level before they submit. Well, that in itself will encourage them to practice more. So that's the good thing for the teacher. And then when they come back, for their next lesson, you can go through it together. You can actually work through the process together. So for a teacher - often the argument is that the teacher has to spend an awful lot of time in the week looking at whether they've submitted and that kind of thing - well, you don't really have to do that if you just park everything into each lesson and do it that way. It seems to work out quite well. It helps students to practice more efficiently. We call it guided practice, and it allows them to minimize the amount of time they practice because they're not just randomly going from the beginning of a piece to the end of a piece.
There are some other things that you can do with it. You can isolate certain passages, which is really, really useful, so they only practice those passages. One of the pieces that I've taught so many times - Für Elise, for instance, the most difficult part of that piece is the middle section. By the time the student has learnt that middle section they are so bored of the rest of the piece that they never play it well. So I always get them to start on that middle section and don't share the rest of the piece with them until they've secured that middle section and then the rest of the piece is relatively easy. So little tricks like that you can actually do using MatchMySound more effectively. So yeah, that's the kind of thing it does.

Carly
And the way that it's done is through this amazing technology where it can take a recording - whether from the teacher, or a recording that they bring in, or something that is pre-existing in the program - and it takes that piece of music and compares it to what the student plays. The student hits record and they’re practicing, they play it and then the teacher can set up how rigorous the assessment is - whether it's assessing them at a high level or a beginner level - and then it will basically give them a score. Is that kind of right? It tells the student how they're doing, but then it will also quickly tell the teacher how they're doing on that section.

Andrew
Exactly. It does exactly all of those things that you said. And the way it does it is really clever. One of the big misnomers that I found when I talk to teachers is that they think that it works off a Midi file, so it's very strict in its notation. But it doesn't work like that. You can use an audio file, and the best way I use it, is I get the student to play their own audio file. So if they're working on a short passage, we do it in the lesson until they get it reasonably comfortable and that becomes their model. They have to be able to retain that model. That's one way you can do it. The other way you can use it is that you yourself can play the piece the way you would like the student to play it. I don't like to do that too often, but I will do that and that allows them to imitate, they can use that as a model. And the technology analyzes every 1/43 of a second. So that means if you put into your performance a certain amount of vibrato, a certain amount of texture, the technology will pick that up.
It's not a right or wrong, it's much more flexible than that. So I found that you can use it in that way. You can use the Midi file if you want to. So maybe you're having trouble with some particular passage of rhythm then perhaps the Midi file is the appropriate thing to use. But I try to always use the audio and it provides the better example. But it works really well also with students who don't read music. And I've had a few students who don't read music, and it's a real blessing for them because I've taught them some amazing pieces, grade eight, level ten pieces that really work. They can play because I've been able to break them down into these sections, and we've been able to learn them just by using this sectional approach and using the audio. And it's amazing what they've achieved. So it has real benefits for different styles of learning, and that's a really good thing for a teacher to be able to do, because notation on its own can sometimes be a bit of a prison, I think.

Carly
Have you found that teachers - I'm kind of thinking from a teacher perspective - are struggling with getting a student to use it every day, or at least a couple of times a week, introducing them to it, how does that go? And how have you been able to, I guess, onboard somebody into the program with success? Because we all know students have a hard enough time just opening their method books. Does it make them excited? Are they more encouraged to get it out?

Andrew
I think it's different for them because one of the biggest problems with students is they don't listen. They play with their eyes, not with their ears. So when you introduce this technology and they record themselves, because I encourage them to do that, I've always encouraged students to record themselves. This actually demands that you record yourself because you're always testing yourself. So the real advantage of this is the fact that they get used to this idea of testing themselves and they get excited by it. They really like to test themselves. And also in our culture, which is an exam-led culture, this idea of having to perform at a certain level over a certain period is a real advantage that they get used to it. They're used to the stress. And I just introduced it at a lesson, and we work through it. And sometimes we don't do it with every piece. We might just do it with one of the pieces, and then we'll introduce the others, and then it just becomes a normal, ordinary thing to do. And they're very comfortable with it, for sure.

Carly
So I can imagine since the pandemic, we're now two and a half years into it, that MatchMySound has really become so helpful and beneficial for distance learning. What was the growth you kind of saw with it, or at least the application for teachers as they transitioned their studios online instead of being with student in person?

Andrew
Well, the pandemic really moved technology on in leaps and bounds because suddenly you didn't really have a choice, and it was a challenge. My immediate thing was to jump onto Zoom and try and figure out a way to do lessons through Zoom. And it was fine with existing students, it was fine with older students, because the level of discourse that you have with them is such that they can understand what you're talking about. But beginners, it's quite a challenge for beginners. So once you've got over those basics, the MatchMySound can be used as a bit of a fun tool. There's the gamification in it. You can test them on it. There's a little app in there for ear training and things like that. So there's all kinds of little things that they can have fun with, which are fun things which encourage them to actually practice and to play. But the whole thing, the explosion of technology through the pandemic has been incredible, really. And it certainly caught a lot of teachers out. It moved them towards something they probably would never have considered in any other circumstance. So in that respect, it has been really useful.
But I think it's a great thing to be able to have that flexibility to teach in different ways. When I have students who are close to taking recitals or exams, I can really increase the amount of times they practice and they contact me. And I'll allow them to do that so they can send me videos of pieces that they recorded. And I can listen to them and just give them some little words of advice so I know that they're in the best shape when they come to take these entrance exams and things like that. And those are real advantages, I think, of the technology as well.

Carly
There are still teachers out there who are teaching some in person, some online. They're still hesitant to incorporate new tech. A lot of them, they use FaceTime with their phones or they use Zoom still. Zoom isn't terrible, but there just are other tools. What words of encouragement would you give them or ideas to maybe start incorporating some technology? I've kind of made that my mission, to help them realize as they modernize their studio, there is a learning curve, but the result is amazing in so many ways. Do you have anything for those teachers that are listening going, yeah, that sounds nice, but maybe that's not for me?

Andrew
I think there's a resistance from some musicians to the idea that technology, which you equate with science, has got anything to do with musical expression. And we don't really say that at MatchMySound. We say that what it tests is pitch and rhythm. That's basically what it tests. So it tests the length of notes, the quality of the rhythm and the pitch. But if you're a creative teacher, you can actually use it for more than that. You can actually use it to do lots of other things. They will send feedback and recordings to you, and within those recordings, you can actually get to the musical details as well. But also, the nature of the technology and the fact that it will work off an audio file as well as a Midi file, means that if you use the audio, you're not getting just a static beat-by-beat-by-beat piece of music, you're getting more flexibility. So it is more musical. And I've always believed that music is half science, half feeling. You know, there is that sense that an awful lot of music is maths. You know, it really is, it's just numbers.
And when you think of it like that, a good technique for a musician is the ability to - Bach being the obvious example - is this ability to create music out of numbers, really. And it's an amazing thing to do that. So I think technology is working off that basis. It will test things and it will test them fairly accurately, but ultimately the teacher is the true test of the musicianship. And so teachers should use the technology to support the learning, to encourage the student to practice more effectively, more efficiently, to record themselves, to be used to listening back to themselves. But ultimately it's the teacher who actually decides on the musicality of a piece of music.

Carly
We're not replacing a teacher with any of the tech that is introduced.

Andrew
I hope not.

Carly
We need our teachers. And I always encourage teachers to bring in their personality, bring in what they're passionate about, bring in what mentors have given them that get them excited about music. There's nothing wrong with how we all learned - in the traditional method, where we went to someone's house and studied with them for an hour a week - and that worked for us as musicians. And I think recognizing the tools that are being introduced to us are not replacing us, they're just allowing us to be more musical with students and also getting students excited about learning because they learn differently, I think, than we used to learn.

Andrew
I think what's interesting also when I started my career, I was really working with bands in rock music and pop music and things like that. And a lot of these people are self taught. They have taught themselves music and I work with many of them and they were brilliant musicians, they had great ears, they could listen to a record once and just have it down. And they didn't need sheet music, it wasn't a necessary tool for them. And I learned that skill with them as well. I acquired that. So I had this ability to never be prejudiced against a musician who was self-taught and who couldn't read music. Reading music is just one element of how you perform music. But the main thing is the ability to understand how music works. And you don't have to read music to do that. It helps enormously, but you don't have to be able to do that. So I'm very comfortable working with students who don't read music, and I think the technology helps me do that because they can use the audio file, I can upload it for them and they still get a test, they still get a result from it. So it allows all my students to get engaged in the process. And I really like that idea that I can teach very high level pieces to students that are capable but don't read music. And sometimes that has been a barrier in the past. So yeah, the technology absolutely helps with that for sure.

Carly
As teachers explore MatchMySound a little bit, they will likely be introduced to RealTimeAudio as well. Can you tell us how a little bit about RealTimeAudio? Because I know teachers would love to hear about it and how it works with MatchMySound.

Andrew
RealTimeAudio is a separate technology. It's a sister company. And what RealTimeAudio does is allows musicians broadly allows musicians to play in real time from different locations in an ideal world. But its context within MatchMySound is slightly different - within the actual program of MatchMySound, it just provides a better sound quality for the lesson. So Zoom is restrictive because it's designed for voice. With MatchMySound, and using the RealTimeAudio and the Live Lesson feature, you can actually adjust the sound parameters specifically for music. So that creates a better quality sound of the lesson. So that helps. If you want to play with another musician in a different location, then you need a different piece of technology as well on top of that. And then that allows you to rehearse and to play duets and all those kind of things in very real time. The closer you are, the closer the real time. But even if you're a thousand miles away, it's milliseconds and you're almost in time and it's indetectable and it's an amazing technology that will one day revolutionize rehearsals and music making and all those kind of things. Its place in MatchMySound is for Live Lessons, so you can actually enjoy the quality of sound with a student. And that's how it works in MatchMySound.

Carly
Yes, and that's something I definitely am looking forward to introducing to our audience as it becomes more available. The tech that allows that simultaneous play with people up to 1,000 miles apart. But currently the RealTimeAudio is a feature within MatchMySound for hosting the Live Lessons. So it's for hosting the virtual lessons for teachers?

Andrew
Yes. So you don't need to Zoom, effectively. You can use MatchMySound as a Zoom in itself for doing exactly what we're doing now. So it's a very useful additional tool for the teacher as well as all the other benefits for the music.

Carly
Well, this has been so fun. I've had a couple of questions in my mind more about you and your career because I feel like you have this amazing history. There are so many wonderful things you've done and MatchMySound is maybe the more recent years. But I would just love to hear, since we have you here, the question in my mind is - there's a lot of teachers who are musicians, they are teachers, and maybe on the back end they would love to compose someday or one day, or maybe in the future. And you seem to be able to really blend them all together, and you have a very well-rounded, wonderful, fulfilling life as a musician, teacher, and composer - what words would you have for teachers who are thinking that they'd love to compose someday, or start writing? What can they do to kind of start so that they can have that fulfillment as musicians? Because I think there's so much goodness that can come from creating, even if it's not with the intent of having, you know, these worldwide published books, but even if it's just for creating for their own students

Andrew
I think the first thing you must do is understand how music works. And going back to these guitarists - they were so often guitarists - but guitarists who taught themselves how to play. They would often say, I don't know anything about music theory. And that just wasn't the case. They knew which chords went together. They knew what the keys were. They knew the shapes on the guitar, which were the chords. They knew them and they knew how they worked and how they blended. And I was able to look at the notation and put it to one side and say, I'm going to do what they do. I'm going to listen, and I'm going to work out which chords fit with which keys and how keys are structured. And I'm going to just be able to play them one after the other without actually thinking about music. And that's the first step. The first step is you must be able to put some chords together very simply and be able to just move from one chord to another in a quite a smooth fashion. I used to say to my students, if you're playing a set of chords in a key, almost any note you play in that key in the right hand will make a melody and you will learn which notes are right and which notes are wrong.
And when they're wrong, just move to the next note quickly, and then it's a suspension. And I used to give my students all these little tips, and I said, sometimes if you play a wrong note, make it louder so it becomes an accented, passing note, those kinds of things. I said, don't worry about them. Make them work. And one of the other things I used to do with my students is I used to create hierarchies of chords as well. So I'll try and describe this, but if you have a major key you've essentially got six chords, 123456, you don't really use seven. So you've got those six chords, and you can put the major ones at the top, the minor ones at the bottom, and then you have your substitutions, and you can simply work through them and just play with them. And I used to do that in every key that they learned. So they learn all these chords and they just developed this ability to be able to play a few chords. And that's the starting point. For melodies. I used to tell them, think of a phrase, just think of any phrase, five, six words, and say it, and it would give them a rhythm.
So then just play a scale in that rhythm and then maybe miss a few notes out. And suddenly they began to understand that music is a kind of language. And once you have a kind of language, you can speak in that language. And I would urge teachers and students to spend 20 minutes of their lesson, of their practice session just messing about at the piano. And my teacher used to say to me, I remember he did this once at school. He used to have a lesson in the school, and I used to practice in the back room, the little music room at the back. And he listened to me once, and I just spent the whole of the time playing around on the piano. And I came out and he said, you have just wasted 40 minutes of very good practice time. But what he didn't realize is I was learning all the way through that. And my teacher was quite a strict, old fashioned teacher, and he hadn't really noticed that what I'd been doing in that time was exploring all the possibilities. And it was a good thing that I'd been doing, not a bad thing.
And once you realize that wasting your time at the piano is actually creative - and tell students it's okay to do that, to allocate ten minutes of your time to be creative, to relax - then it's a good thing. And that's kind of how I arrived where I arrived, and then the rest was just about notation and things like that. So it was a fun journey, for sure.

Carly
Thank you so much. That's so fun to hear. I always love hearing how teachers incorporate that into their lessons, into their own study. Because I think so many - I know a lot of the teachers that I work with have been and are so traditional - and they have this urge or this like, desire to get into jazz a little bit more, to get into improv, to get into composition themselves, because they want to introduce it to students. And I love how you explained it. It's something we can explore with them. You don't have to get to any level before you bring students in.

Andrew
The hardest thing is the blank piece of paper. And I think that's where they struggle to write something. It's the blank piece of paper. Where do you start? And I think if I give them a starting point, okay, let's start in E♭, that's the starting point. Play the chords in E♭ until you stumble across something that you like. There's your starting point. It's the blank sheet that is the problem. And a lot of people say "oh, you just sit at the piano and play how you feel". That's just not going to work. It's not going to work. It works later, but it doesn't work earlier. And I think I tried to give them a platform from which they can be expressive. And that's, I think, the key.

Carly
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your overview of this great technology and sharing some insight with us. And for teachers listening, I will link all of the links to MatchMySound so that they can check out how to use it. They can test it out with their students. Is there anything else you want to share with teachers about the MatchMySound technology or what they have to look forward to with it?

Andrew
Well, I would say don't be afraid of the technology. It's your friend. And I would also say that there are other amazing benefits with it. You can organize your students with it. If you have lessons that have worked for one student, you can share them across a whole range of other students. You can actually share materials between students. You can also invite the parents to get involved and they can see the progress of the student. It's all those things that they can use the technology for as well. And it really is bargain prices as well.

Carly
Awesome. Well, thank you so much Andrew.

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