Good Advice on Practice:
One of the responsibilities of being a member of a musical organization is preparing your part outside of rehearsal. In orchestra, the expectation is that you practice every day for at least 15 minutes (the extreme bare minimum). Of course you are encouraged to practice more than that! Your practice time doesn’t have to happen all at once either! Just like you wouldn’t brush your teeth for 720 minutes the night before the dentist, or even 30 minutes on Sunday night, you wouldn’t cram all of your practicing into one session.
The average child in the United States spent over 1,400 minutes watching television each week in 2013. The average smartphone user spends just over 400 minutes every week actively talking, texting, or surfing the internet. Surely you can spare 15 here and there for the sake of music!?
I have outlined below a basic structure of a good, productive practice session.
- Tune your instrument – being productive starts with having an instrument that is in tune. There are a multitude of free tuning apps, or you could just as easily tune to a piano, keyboard, or online tuner. Take as much time as you need to get your instrument totally in tune. The more that you practice, the easier it will be!
- Warm-up with Scales – Practice 1-octave and 2-octave scales every day. Play scales slowly sometimes, holding each note out for 4 counts. Other times, work for speed. Put a metronome on and play eighth notes. (Again, free apps are readily available!) You should spend no fewer than 5-10 minutes playing scales. This serves two purposes: It trains your ear to recognize correct intonation and warms up your muscles to prepare them for your practice session. 5+ minutes
- Reinforce Concepts learned in class or private lessons – whether it’s shifting, new time signatures, extensions, or low-2…go to your method book and practice the exercises that we’ve worked on. Go back and overlap a few of the ones you already feel you’ve totally mastered…just to make sure that they’re still learned. Then push forward to a few you feel a little less confident about. Spend about 10-15 minutes doing this. The more time spent reinforcing concepts outside of class, the less time we have to spend reviewing. 5+ minutes
- Go to difficult passage in your piece – Skip the part that you love! Skip the part that you really know well! Go straight to a section that you marked with your pencil. You can maximize your productivity with this strategy. If it doesn’t sound bad, you’re working on the wrong spot. If it all sounds bad and you’re overwhelmed, break it down into manageable chunks and be willing to go slowly. “Ok. I’m going to only work on measure 10-16 until I feel confident.” If you feel stuck, take a short break. Go get a glass of juice or something. This isn’t an opportunity to get distracted by your phone…only break for the time it takes to eat a small snack. Come back to practicing and think about your problem logically. What is it that I am struggling with? (All of it is NOT an acceptable answer!) If I’m missing notes, I could take the whole thing at a slower tempo. If I’m struggling with bow control, I could play scales with long tones and a metronome. Don’t just dive back into the plateau–think about a solution for a second! This should be the bulk of your practice! If you only get to one difficult spot, but you fix it, that’s fine! If you fix it and feel ready to fix something else, tackle another spot! 15+ minutes
- Cool-down with something fun – Maybe there’s a particular passage that you love to play…maybe it’s a Suzuki example you can’t get enough of…maybe it’s a fiddle tune you find yourself automatically playing every time your instrument touches your hands. Whatever it is, let that be your reward for accomplishing something! Invite your parents to come hear what you’ve been working on and cap off the concert with this! 5+ minutes
Yackley. "Orchestra Practice Records - NMS Performing Arts." NMS Performing Arts. Fulton County Schools, n.d. Web. 24 Aug. 2014. <http://nmsperforms.org/orchestra/orchestra-practice-records/>.