While good teachers will teach important concepts to you, great teachers will teach you how to teach important concepts to yourself. A great teacher will prepare you for continued success outside of their tutorage.  There should never be a point where you become too satisfied with your own craft; you should always be looking to improve and learn new tricks.

I am also a firm believer in the ten thousand hour rule.   No amount of short term study or tutorial watching can make you great at anything.  To succeed in such a difficult field, you need to really get in the trenches and become saturated.  You need to consistently study just to keep up with what you are forgetting, and you need to be purely obsessed to make any sort of progress.

I first started composing in college and was a fully self taught composition student.  Going to a liberal arts school, we didn’t have a dedicated composition teacher, so the maestro of the university symphony orchestra invited me to sit at every orchestra rehearsal with a score in hand.  It was here I first learned how the architecture of the orchestra works.  When I found something amazing or something I couldn’t quite figure out, I went to the library with my score and did a piano reduction of the passage.  It is in the spirit of the “teach your own-self how to learn” that I’ve been writing a series of educational tutorials aimed at composers looking to further their abilities through classical music study.

What I’ve been sharing is basically my own experience in my own studies.  It is full of tips and tricks and concepts that I hope are useful to the inquisitive mind.