The biggest time-waster in the practice room is whipping out our instrument and proceeding to play through repertoire over..and over…again. Often repeating mistakes. Often getting annoyed at those same mistakes with no idea of how to solve them. Six hours of practice later, we pat ourselves on the back for a “busy” day with our instrument. The next day, of course, all the same problems come up in the repertoire. Or worse – we have gotten SO burnt out the previous day that we spend the rest of the week not practicing at all. The lack of purpose and direction has led to overwhelm and lack of progress.
Much more effective is to have a clear plan and idea of what and how to practice. It’s far better to target something concrete in a focused 2-hour practice day than to panic through a 6-hour one. This is especially important when there is a lot of music to learn and not enough time in the day. Often, achieving one specific task will give valuable information on how to improve other parts of our playing, whether it’s related to something technical or a decision on interpreting a piece.
Here are 3 simple (but not necessarily easy) steps to practice with better intention.
If you prefer a VIDEO version of this, here it is.
Acknowledge where you are right now.
Not where you were last year. Not where you plan to be in a month. But right now. Identify strengths and weaknesses (this may or may not be piece-specific). For example, you can ask yourself some of the following questions: What do you think about your sound? Is that one shift still bothering you? Are certain bow strokes tricky? Generally, how comfortable are you in your body when you play your instrument? Do you tend to clench your jaw or furrow your eyebrows in intense fortissimo passages? How do you incorporate your breath? What do you already know about your instrument or a certain piece? What are you still unsure about? What can you already do decently well? Do you tend to gravitate toward doing something a certain way, and if so, is it helpful? Are there trends in your overall playing that need to be addressed?
Make a decision.
This is primarily the what, the how, and the when (the last one is tricky in some situations). What will be practiced and why? For example, if you already know the notes or have memorized a piece, most likely, you shouldn’t spend the next hour practicing the notes “just to be sure” you still know them. Choose the next best step. Sometimes this is super obvious and you can make a simple list of measure numbers to target on a post-it note. Here is what a sample practice list of orchestral excerpts might look like:
Brahms 4 mvt 4: mm. 57-63, subdivisions and rests.
Mozart 39 mvt 1: mm. 26-51, phrasing and bow distribution.
Tchaikovsky Nutcracker Overture: mm. 158-162, intonation.
If you’re not sure what to prioritize in practice, a great teacher can help guide you. Once you have made your list, choose your practice strategies. Will you use a tuner or metronome? If so, how can you use them wisely without having to rely on them as a crutch in the long run? How many “good reps” is it fair to aim for before moving on? Can this be recorded for instant analysis? (Hint: if you have a smartphone, unless you are doing mental practice, the answer is YES.) Will each item on the list first be worked on as a focused “blocked practice”, and then shuffled into “random practice” in order to increase the rate of retention? By the way, if you’re confused by what I mean in this last sentence, here’s a quick and interesting article by Noa Kageyama on different types of practice and their effectiveness: https://bulletproofmusician.com/a-test-of-three-practice-schedules-and-the-one-that-works-best-especially-for-older-learners/
Listen Carefully.
This is the most important part! After all, we are practicing music. The instrument itself is not music – just a medium through which one expresses it. Let’s take intonation as an example. We cannot work on playing in tune consistently without incorporating audiation skills or calling accurate judgment of whether or not something was sharp, flat, or in tune.
In some cases, we can instantly tell if a note is out of tune and figure out how to correct it. In other cases, it’s more tricky and we can use a tuner or self-recording as tools to help us. Sometimes the problem can be solved just by using a drone or by slowing down a recording to identify which note is causing the entire phrase to sound off. The quick solutions can (and should) be done in a matter of minutes – not hours. This is because in the next practice session, we will intend to use our active and intentional listening for something else – perhaps for phrasing or accurate subdivisions.
Once a problem has been identified, sometimes the solution is not as obvious and we must question if the technique (fingering or bowing) is reliable. Sometimes at this point, the key is to bring awareness to unnecessary tension somewhere in the body, a non-ideal distribution or balance among the fingers, or angle of the bow to the strings that isn’t working for a certain bow stroke. This is the point in which we create a feedback loop that can help us arrive to a possible solution. Our audiation, physical sense in the body, sense of vibration from our instrument, and ideas all come together.
A very powerful tool that I personally love to use in deliberate practice is self-coaching, often while utilizing self-recording. I talk all about it in this video HERE.