Eight ways to Practice Smarter

Sure, as musicians, we all need to practice.  But, how do we get the most out of our rehearsal time?  Use these eight tips to find a way to make your practice time more efficient and effective.

1.     1. Listen to the recording. Find a recording to the piece you are practicing.  With the advent of the Internet, this is easier than ever.  Often a good recording is just a simple Youtube search away. When you listen to a recording, have your part out and follow your line.  Can you sing along with the recording?  Even better.  Once the technique is there you may even want to play along.  First time through a recording, I listen with no score.  Then, I listen with my score out and be sure I can follow everything that's going on.  Then, I listen one more time, singing parts along and marking what looks like it will be scary.  When I'm rehearsing an individual part, I try to mark cues for entrances (oh!  Trumpets come in at Bar 18, and I enter in 20!) That's easier than counting endless bars of rests, lets you find places to jump back on if you're lost and also lets you see how your part fits in with others.  Also good to note- are unisons or choirs:  I see, the clarinets oboes and flutes have a nice trio at letter D.  Oh, it's just piccolo and tuba at four after L.  Mark these in your parts and you'll be armed with much more than letters and numbers to navigate.  It's kind of like using Google Maps street view rather than someone telling you that their house is located at Longitude 42.5 degrees West and 24.6 degrees North.  Sure, perhaps you can find that spot, but it won't be easy!  Giving yourself landmarks is vital.

2. Break it up!  Everyone encounters a nasty run of notes at some point.  Maybe they are eights or sixteenths or sixty-forth notes.  And they probably have the worst possible fingerings in a sequence you can imagine.  You think, I'll never be able to play that like Belinda does!  She's an experienced kazoo player with decades of experience in professional groups!  Woe is me!  Well, you can.  Break it into smaller groups.  For example, let’s say that you have a run of notes such as G F# E D C B A.  They come at you fast, and can be tricky.  First, I would practice them G-F, rest, E-D, rest, CBA.  Then smile that you've done it right, and do it again.  Then perhaps play GFE, rest, EDC rest BA.  Smile and repeat.  Then GF, rest, EDCBA.  Etc.  Try varying combinations of notes 2 or 3 at a time (and later 4 or 5).  Then put them back together.  Eventually it's G F# E D C B A.  For long 15-bar solos, do a bar or two at a time.  Then link them into 3 or 4 bar groups, and then do it all together after the parts are solid.

3. Play under tempo.  If a passage is hard, find a tempo you can play it at.  Sure, we may be going quarter=356 in rehearsal and the place you can play it comfortably is quarter = 10 because it's really hard.  That's fine.  Play it at quarter = 10 once.  Then do it six more times.  If you make a mistake, add three more.  (Yes, this one is tedious, but it works!) Once you can play it several times at that tempo and it's comfortable, smile, give yourself a treat, congratulate yourself, etc. and kick up the tempo slightly.  Do it again.  Six times at this tempo and you're good.  If you make a mistake more than twice in a repetition, go back to the previous tempo to make sure that one is solid.  Repeat until at tempo.  But wait-- won't that take about 300 times through for some of these bars?  It might.  But if it's just one bar then that should only take about four or five minutes.  Yes, this is time consuming and can be tedious.  Only use this one for your most difficult runs and passages, unless you have nothing else to do and lots of patience.  But do use it for the toughest bits.  (Music students often call this wood-shedding and will spend lots of hours with this technique over their careers-- or they should be.)  A word of encouragement with this one: Any bar that you do this properly with, you will be able to play. Period.  Your muscle memory will develop so well that your body will do it for you eventually and you will delight at how smoothly that bar went in rehearsal and probably ten years from now would be able to perform the same passage with only a glance at the page even if you haven't touched it in forever. 

4. Play things you enjoy.  Start off each time you practice or warm up, and even more importantly-- finish your playing sessions with something you enjoy playing and that you feel comfortable doing so.  Believe it or not, on viola that's Frere Jaques or Ode to Joy for me. Every time.  Thankfully, however, I’m a woodwind guy, and not a violist.  You always want to remind yourself of what you do well, and be sure to have some fun while practicing, even when the rest of your practice sessions may be really hard or not have gone as well as you liked.

5. Practice time.  If you have 15 minutes to practice 5 days a week, that's great!  Try to do so.  We all have very busy lives-- but it is a proven fact that playing 15 minutes a day will have a much greater impact than 3 hours all at once.  If you have 30 minutes a day, great.  If your free time is in blocks-- that is okay too.  Mine is.  Practice 2-3 times a week for however long you can.  But don't do it just once and then put your instrument away for the week.  Your body needs to remember your practice as much as your mind, and your body's memory is often going to take more reinforcement for things than your brilliant brain.

6. Practice Smart.  If you have 30 minutes for rehearsal/practice time, don't play the easy stuff for 25 minutes and then look briefly at the scary stuff that you don't want to think about.  Instead, warm up for a few minutes, play something you worked on last time to review, and then spend about 15 minutes on something really challenging. Spend 3 minutes on something new, sight-reading, or something you haven't played in a while.  Spend 4 minutes on something fun.  (If you don't get distracted in between, you probably have a few minutes extra.  Play something else fun!) 

7. Practice Happy.  Don't feel like practicing today?  Don't!  But it's been three days and I feel guilty?  Still don't.  When you force yourself to practice you won't get anything done.  Take the day off, do something else you enjoy.  Do remind yourself the next day to practice, and perhaps at your next session add more of something fun or something you enjoy.  Or, just take out your instrument and play through your favorite easy selections or sight-read a little.  If you never feel like playing, then think about why you play the instrument you do and what you like about it. What pieces excite you?  When you do feel like practicing, however, be sure to make the time to do it and reward yourself for doing so with music that you like as well as work hard and the parts you don't.

8. Practice without your instrument.  Put the recordings of the music on your ipod, Zune, or burn a CD.  Listen to them while you do the dishes, relax in the bathtub, or drive/commute to work.  On a 25 minute train ride?  Whip out your scores and sing through your parts in your head.  Bored at the bank while waiting in line?  Pick a piece from our rep and see if you can mentally sing through it all the way and remember all of it beginning to end.  Have some free time in front of a computer?  Google/Wikipedia Brahms or Dvorak.   Sitting in rehearsal for five minutes while I work with that pesky kazoo section again on that darned soli?  Follow along in your part as rehearsal fixes for them might apply somewhere else in the piece for you, or try to figure out what your notes would be if we were playing the piece in C# major, or whatever your favorite key is.

            Music is kind of like Amtrak or Greyhound, or the NYC Subway.  It is a journey, and we're all heading different places and started from different places, but we're together for this leg of the trip and enjoying our time together on it.  We may have different skills, abilities, interests, and passion, but we're all here for the music and the friendship.  We're here because we like playing our instrument, want to make friends, or want to learn something new.  Some of us want to experience new repertory or to keep our minds active.  Some of us want to network or to get new resources. your goals or motivation, you're here.  Make the best of it by practicing as effectively as you can.