The piano is a unique instrument. It is unique in the sense that it lays out all of the different notes you can play, literally, right in front of you. No special skills needed, no training to make it work, just the music notes laid out for your exploration. This characteristic makes it a great way to help someone learn to read music. Having skills in reading music will also give you the ability to learn songs faster. Now this isn’t to say that piano is any easier or harder than singing or playing any other instrument, it’s just different. Piano is a great place to start when it comes to learning music and complements other instruments really well.

First of all, why do we practice? The simple answer would be to get better at a particular action or skill. In this case let’s use singing. So we practice in order to get better at singing. We practice to improve our technique so we can sing higher, louder and with greater ease. Okay, but then why do we sing? Singing is a basic means of human expression. We sing to express ourselves through song, tell stories and connect with others in a meaningful way.

“Breathe in, breathe out.” You certainly don’t need me to remind you to do this as breathing is involuntary and an automatic process. That being said there is something very interesting that happens when we bring our awareness to our breath. If we are experiencing stress then our body goes into “fight or flight” mode and the sympathetic nervous system is activated. This causes our heart rate to elevate, a spike in adrenaline and our breathing to quicken.

What does this statement mean? Well, simply put it means that whatever we practice we are reinforcing. Our brain is composed of billions of tiny neurons. These are the basic cellular building blocks that communicate and connect with each other through axons to form a Neural pathway inside our brains.