'Motivation' - We hear this word quite often. And when he hear it, the first image that comes to our mind is a hidden force that helps us to achieve our objective. And it is. It is providing an incentive to ourselves or to others so that an outcome is achieved.
Like any other thing, music requires a lot of motivation as well. Music sounds fun, but people start getting bored after a while. Because aside from the fun factor, you need to improve as well. Many give up because they are not able to go further from a certain intermediate level. Sometimes there comes a time when you even start losing passion from what you're playing. This is the time to motivate yourself. And how do you do that? By giving yourself some incentives, so that a desire is play and improve is escalated.
But motivate yourself to do what? To just go and play? That doesn't require any motivation. You just take out your instrument, play some notes, and then keep it once you get bored. So the incentive is required for you to not get bored, or play and practice even you're getting bored. The objective is to improve. Improvement brings the passion anyway, if it's lost.
Enough with the talk. Let's get down to business. Here are some things that you can do in order to keep yourself motivated.
1. Keep the instrument at your sight. When you see your instrument again and again, you feel an urge to play. This is just a way to make you play your instrument constantly. What you do inside your "playing time" will actually determine how much you'll improve. One way to organise your practice time is to dichotomously divide your time into "technique building" and "fun time".
Many might think that this will further demotivate them as they'll think "He/she is so good while I am at a mere beginner level. I won't be able to reach that level." The thinking is justified, because you could not master some technique/riff/beat/lick that your idol was playing. However, you need to realise that once you've failed, you're one failure less to achieve your objective. Try and try and try, then look at your idol, then try again. You'll surely achieve it someday.
3. Before practice, think for a while about what you'll do or what you'll make out of that practice session. Will you focus on a specific technique, or will you focus on scales and arpeggios? Or will you just simply play anything and compose something? Although sometimes on the spur of the moment compositions are the best ones, but they come at infrequent times. And you could always make an improvisational plan to your composition during practice. Just like a day can be more satisfactory if it goes according to the way you've visualised it in the morning, a session can be much more productive if you earlier decide what you're going to do. This also helps in keeping you on track, and provides a platform to figure out where you're weak, and then gives an incentive to work on it.
4. End on an interesting point. Don't end a practice session when you've had too much of playing. Instead, end it when it is going very interesting, in an abrupt manner. This makes you keep on thinking about what you were doing, and eventually you'll land up with your instrument very soon. But keep in mind not to leave when you're just about to master a technique - you might as well have to work all over it again which can be frustrating.
5. Look for lessons to master new things. Sometimes you might feel that you're not going anywhere, and just simply playing what you already know. However, you need to understand that a musician is like a cosmonaut - a cosmonaut is a 'sailor among the universe' and a musician is a 'sailor among music'. The universe is infinite, and so is music. There will always be something new to learn. YouTube and music related articles have made things easier. You can just search and you'll find an endless amount of new things that you didn't know. And the more you know and learn, the more you realise that you know nothing. So go over there, search some new lessons and get on with the music.
6. Cover every once in a while. Covering is another great way to learn new things that can be there in music. You get to know about varied positioning and also ways to use the notes. Don't aim for hard songs - cover simply what you love to hear. That will make playing more interesting. And since we're discussing on incentives, covering is a very good incentive to play as it challenges you in a frolicsome manner. Although hard songs can be covered for technique or timing improvement, but don't do it just for the sake of it. You need to feel a connection with the song that you're covering to make your cover worth it. However, don't cover too much of the same artist. Your music style might go very similar to that artist's, and you will end up as a copycat.
There is a well seen gap between pros and amateurs. It is because of the effort that each group puts into music. So let's try our best to build a bridge and move, steadily and with merriment, from the valley of the amateurs to the hills of the professionals.
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