In my last post, I shared fun and creative ways to enhance the quality of your musical presentation and gave some challenges for you to implement those ideas in your sessions right away.

How’d it go?

Remember, our musical presentation is so important in music therapy.

Music is the tool we are using to bring about therapeutic change.

Thus, we want our presentation to be high quality and engaging. This means we need to have strong musical skills on a variety of instruments AND be able to create musical accompaniments that are interesting.

Today I have a few more ideas to share.

3. Change up your guitar strums –

Branch out from the good ol’ “down down up up down up” that we learned in Guitar 101, and add some groovy guitar strums to your music therapy sessions.

Watch Groovy Guitar Strums 1 here and Groovy Guitar Strums 2 here to get ideas for new finger styles and strum patterns to use (including ones that were specifically created for movement activities!)

Try It Out Challenge – choose one new finger style pattern or guitar strum and use it in your next session.

4. Keyboard auto accompaniments

I looooooove auto accompaniments on keyboard.

They are such a fun and easy way to bring out the style of music, such as samba, reggae, or rock.

Watch this video to see exactly how to use your keyboard auto accompaniment to enhance your musical presentation, thus increasing engagement and interest, and encouraging your clients to work toward achieving their therapeutic goals.

Try It Out Challenge – learn how the auto accompaniment works on your keyboard, and use it to accompany one song in your sessions this week.

Not only will these ideas increase engagement, I’ve found they also make me more excited to come into my sessions!

If you’re looking for more ways to increase engagement and interest in your clients (especially those tweens and teens!), I’d love for your to check out Elevate.

Elevate is pre-approved by CBMT for 10 CMTE (continuing ed) credits, and there are three packages available.