A Few Thoughts on Daily Practice

An awesome yoga teacher once told me: “Practice is a dance between structure and spontaneity.”

Practice should be consistent for us to see results, yet free and exploratory enough for us to switch it up and find something new every day. In learning to balance these ideas of structure and wander, we develop our own unique practice routine and relationship with our instrument.

Many students struggle with how to practice. ‘Playing’ a piece is so different than ‘practicing’ a piece. I often say to my students that good practice is “chopping up your music into a different stir fry each day”...

• On your 1st time ‘playing’ through the piece, LISTEN! Where are the mistakes? Where are the hesitations? ‘Mistakes’ are merely data points, telling me where to zoom in and problem-solve.

• Find the small spot that needs fixing… this could be as small as the transition or movement between two chords, a measure of difficulty, or a tricky phrase or passage that needs to be broken down.

• Apply your practice step – refer to my previous article on Practice Strategies for how I most frequently problem-solve in my practicing…

• Drill it! Once I am ready to play the small spot as written again, I aim to play it as written in the score as slow as humanly possible… slow enough to guarantee that it will be absolutely correct. Once that correct attempt has happened, it becomes much easier to drill it. Then I try the same spot at a slightly faster tempo, and then slightly faster than that. If I’m feeling a more intense practice session, I would do 5 correct and consecutive attempts, rather than just 3.

• After visiting each troublesome spot in my music with this mindset, I try to take longer sections, ‘glue’ together a phase or more, and eventually work up to ‘playing’ through the piece again.

How do YOU practice?