u/Major-Tumbleweed7751

This is a great book. Published in 1990, available to read on the Internet Archive. As an adult learner this offers a wonderful framing for the itch to learn to play music, and many sound answers to the inner critic or doubts or judgements that can hold us back.

Hope others may enjoy this too. 🎶

Link: How to practice and master music with minimal frustration

Obviously it is not *only* a physical skill, but I think often learning music is treated as mostly an intellectual skill. As an adult learner of the harp, a lot of the comments in this article really resonated with me, particularly this:

>
Bright quick-minded people frequently have little patience for the amount of repetition required in learning a musical instrument. They feel limited by the rate that their body learns. They get frustrated, like they're stuck tutoring someone who just doesn't get it. Though they've indeed acquired a perfect understanding of what they're trying to accomplish, they mistakenly believe that their understanding should produce mastery over a new physical skill: a new song, scale, arpeggio, or strum. Often they persist in such wishful thinking, and they do so despite witnessing for themselves that understanding alone fails to produce refined and reliable control over complex physical skills.

>If a student becomes discouraged about the pace and repetition naturally required, they usually wish they could somehow get their body to learn faster. They want to learn faster, and get a feeling of accomplishment.

>If you have this type of impatience you probably need to learn to accept the pace and rhythm of your body. The steps are simple, but they require a sense of inner calm, and the willingness to submit to more repetition, making sure that it's nourishing repetition.