"You need to practice your lessons if you ever expect to be able to play well."  How many times have you heard that said?  For most aspiring musicians it's the reality of our existence that we must spend long hours every day of every week of every month for years on end to develop the skill to play or sing the music we love the way we hear it in our heads.

That brings us to Let's Practice Music.  This is a website being developed to help aspiring musicians develop the skills they need to make the best possible music that they can.  It doesn't matter how old you are, if you're a beginner or a seasoned professional, if you play by ear or are able to read music, or if you want to play country, jazz, pop, classical, or hip-hop, we hope you will find information that will help you achieve your musical ambitions on this site.  Whether your instrument is the guitar, trumpet, voice, piano, drums, flute, didgeridoo, or any other instrument there should be something you will find useful for making your practices more effective and lead you down the path to becoming the best musician you can be.

Given the ambitious statements made in the previous paragraph, this is a very new site currently being designed and maintained by a single individual.  As such it will take some time to reach a point where it begins to fulfill the aspirations of its creator so please don't expect it to be the one stop answer to all your practice needs.  Therefore a little background on the reasoning for developing the site and the vision of the creator is in order.

My name is Greg Shoemaker and I have wanted to create music for over fifty years.  I've pursued this passion in a roundabout way throughout my entire life but only recently felt I might be able to realize my goals.  That journey is briefly described in my biographical summary.  My purpose here is multi-fold.  I want to share those ideas and practices that have helped me improve my playing.  I want to create a place where aspiring musicians can learn things that will help them improve their playing and unleash their creativity.  I want to create a community of like minded musicians who also seek a forum to share their experiences with other musicians.  I want to provide links to other information I've found useful regarding anything about making music. I want to have a place to organize and post the information I learn about music as I continue to pursue my study of the subject.  Finally, I want to do what I can with my music to help make the world a better place for all of us to live.

Over the next three months I will be putting in place the logical structure of this site and making enhancements to it to have it better reflect these objectives.  I have started posting information that relates to my own philosophy of music on my personal site gregshoemaker.net and will continue to use that site for things that may be related to some of the content posted here but that are specific to my personal music production goals.  I have also started posting videos on my YouTube channel Greg Shoemaker - Music and will also continue to use that channel or others to enhance the content of this site.  I am also planning on starting a live streaming show this coming June which will also serve to enhance and complement this site and the YouTube channel.  Finally, I hope to have this structure in place and working smoothly by the time classes resume in August.

Rome wasn't built in a day.  Beginning this fall I will be pursuing a degree in music education and composition at the University of Georgia's Hugh Hodgson School of Music and will use the structure of that program to inform me as to what additional content I will be posting on this site and the related sites as well as any feedback I may receive from my readers and visitors.  Also, since Rome wasn't built by a single individual I will be welcoming others who would like to contribute to this project.  Additional information on how you can do that will be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks.  Until then, you can read my article on Work Habits and Chasing Rabbits to get an idea about why this is taking me so long to finish.