When you are practicing, have you ever just lost track of what part of a piece you are practicing? Do you ever just start practicing a section of the piece and just trail off and play the piece until you get to the end of it? This is very common, especially for me! I have always found these tips helpful whenever I practice! I'm not going to say that they are my own because I'm very sure that other people have come up with these ideas way before me!
1. Set a goal: Let's say you usually practice for 30 or up to an hour (or maybe more!). Let's say you are practicing something as difficult as maybe Bach's Concerto in A minor. It is impossible to master that piece in a day! At least that is how it is for me! This goes for all pieces that are the same level of difficulty, or maybe even harder.
My friend told me that you just can't say to yourself, "today, I want to learn to play all of this!"
You have to set a goal!
I have to learn Bloch's Meditation for viola because I have to record it so I can be in this certain awesome ensemble group. Being that the person that wants the recording wants it ASAP, I thought to myself, "hmmm, well spring break goes from March 29th to April 8th. I bet I could learn the piece in at least 5 days if I focus! I could count how many measures there are in the piece and then I could divide that number by five! That's perfect! I will make a checklist of what to learn each day! Sounds like a plan to me!"
This plan is helpful for any work you are studying because it allows you to focus on certain part of the work and master it!
Another thing I do is I make a this-week's-practice-priorities checklist for both violin and viola. This helps me know what I need to focus on throughout the week.
Also, make sure these goals are attainable. I go to high school, I have homework too, so my parents only let me practice for half an hour after I come home from school, so I only get 15 minutes of practice on each instrument! That is so little! I tell myself, okay what can I do in 15 minutes? For violin, I will usually practice my scales for 5 minutes, then for 10 minutes, I will practice a small section of a piece I am working on. Same goes for viola.
2. Make a checklist out of your peice: This does not fall into the same category as tip #1 because it's making a checklist out of your piece! I do this to a lot of my pieces! Observe the picture:
Do you see on the side next to each clef, a little box, some with a little check inside of them? Those are where the check boxes are supposed to go! What I find so cool about this idea is depending on how much you want to learn each day (let's say you want to learn 3 lines a day), there are two ways of mastering this! You can go through the piece in an orderly fashion from top to bottom of the page. Another way you can use the checklist is you can do random lines without worrying about the order. I usually do this randomly because I usually want to master a piece in at least two week's time, and I want to master the hard parts of the piece first before I master the really easy parts. I sometimes go through a piece and go "WHOA! That line looks really hard! Must master it!" I usually get it.
Before checking off each line, I ask myself 3 questions:
"Did I get the fingerings down?"
"Is my bowing correct?"
"If Sarah Chang (AH! MY IDOL!) was listening to this, would she be impressed, would she find this boring, or would she not want to listen to it at all?"
Then I check it off!
3. The power of a piece of paper: A piece of paper can have a printed piece on it, you can do your homework on it, you can read it, you can make a checklist out of it! What else could you do? Use a piece of paper to cover other pieces of paper, of course!
Before I came up with this idea (I'm very sure someone has come up with it way before I did!), I would always be playing a certain part of a piece and instead of focusing on mastering those certain couple of measures, two things could happen to me. I would either be like, "WHATEVER! I'll ask my private teacher for help on this & everything will be fine! NEXT MEASURE!" or I would just play until I got to the end of the piece! This is wrong!
One day, I decided that I wasn't getting anything done and that enough was enough! I thought to myself, "I have to stay focused on this certain part or I will never master it!" I looked around my room and noticed my gigantic stack of loose-leaf paper. I grabbed a piece. I covered the whole music piece with that piece of paper. What I do is I have one line of music shown and the rest of the piece is covered with the sheet of paper. This allows me to focus on one line of music and not trail off! When I think I have mastered the line, again I ask myself the three questions:
"Did I get the fingerings down?"
"Is my bowing correct?"
"If I had to audition and play this certain line, would the judges be impressed? Or would they just be like 'uuhhh....YOU CAN GO NOW!'?"
Practice tip #3 is usually a tip you could use if you really need to stay focused and practice tip #2 just doesn't work at all!
I hope this helped! Happy practicing!
