Many years ago I lived in major city and chose to buy a house in one of the outer suburbs in a lovely new estate. People were planting lots of trees and making nice gardens which made it a nice place to live. There was just one problem. The road connecting the suburb to the city was narrow, with only two lanes, making it very difficult to get almost anywhere else. As more and more people moved in, the roads became more congested.

Over the next few years, work began on all the road intersections and junctions that led to our suburb. I recall thinking that was pretty silly and wondered why they didn’t just widen the road and build them with at least four lanes.

Eventually all the intersections and junctions were completed. They were big and wide, some with traffic lights and some with roundabouts. I recall thinking that this was all very well, but we couldn’t get between the intersections and the road junctions, so it was all pretty much a waste of time.

Then, work started on creating new, wide, four and six lane roads which connected all the intersections and junctions. The speed at which that all happened amazed me!

They had firstly done all the difficult work and now the easy work was proceeding incredibly fast. We were getting around much faster and in times that we would not believed possible. We completely forgot the slow, laborious, tedious work and survived!

The same philosophy works really well when working with young musicians.

If you focus on fixing all the difficult bits; the couple of bars here and there that you need to address in a repetitive manner, making sure every rhythm is correct, every interval is achievable, the harmony is understood and balanced, every piece of counterpoint fits together as it should and so on, all the rest of it – the easy bit – will come together really fast and the members of the group will get really excited about it because, not only can every member play it ALL, it really sounds good too!

Try it, it might work for you.