Inspiration Based Learning

My name is JP Cormier and I have been playing for 42 years. I've been teaching other people how to play for almost as long. I took my first students on when I was around 17 and never really stopped teaching. Whether it was private students, workshops, bigger schools and camps, I have been in the professor's chair in front of hundreds of people. In all that time I have discovered a very important issue. Of all the methods available to learn how to play a stringed instrument, almost all lack an incredibly important component. They teach people how to "play" but don't teach people how to LEARN. There is a huge difference.

You can definitely learn to play from almost any private teacher, DVD, or online service, but if you don't learn WHY things work the way they do, learn the subtle tactile and auditory signals that exist on your instrument, learn to question every possibility for each note played, learn how to watch and listen to other players in such a way that you see all the key points of their style and technique immediately, you're not really learning. Anything outside this method is just committing to memory a bunch of jumbled facts and theories that can enable you to mimic playing.

I'm talking about getting deep inside the craft of playing and discovering that you can actually perform, create, and enjoy learning because you not only retaining information better, but you understand ALL the mechanics of what you're doing.

The greatest players I've ever seen all had the same history. They were basically self taught and unlocked the secrets to interpreting what better players and their heroes were doing. This happened early in their lives, often as children. They unlocked a secret door they could look through to see exactly how to do something they heard or saw firsthand and make it part of their own musical vocabulary.