Practicing is a very personal thing. Everyone at
some point has to take time to reflect on how they learn and what rituals, materials,
and situations work best for oneself. So I’m not going to tell you how to
practice. I’m going to tell you how I practice and what my thoughts are on
the process and purpose of practicing. Take what you will from it.
Like most adults, I have little time to practice. This used to bother me a lot;
now it only makes me a wee bit annoyed. When I was in junior high and high school,
I would put in two or three consecutive hours of practicing. I thought that was
how you were supposed to do it. When I got to college, I had less time to practice
and more demands on me. I marveled at the performance majors (I was a music education
major) who could log in six or more straight hours of practicing. How did they
do it? I couldn’t last that long mentally, let alone physically. Long after
I finished my undergraduate studies, I came to the realization that there are
many ways to practice that will yield good results, without necessarily having
to spend six or more hours in a row practicing. Having said that, I do believe
that to be a "major player," (I don’t consider myself quite at
that level) you have to spend a at least a few years (3-5) of putting in 4 to
8 hours a day of practice.
The biggest practicing revelation came to me around age 24: you do not have to
have marathon practice sessions; you can get as much, if not more, work done when
you break it up. An hour here, ten minutes there can streamline your practicing
efforts and make for some very efficient work. There are two components to learning
to play music, a physical one and a mental one. I find that most of the frustration
in practicing comes when your brain gets it, but your fingers do not. This is
usually the point where people will play and play and play until they get it right,
darn it!! I know a few people for whom this way of practicing is effective (one
of whom does now have an associate principal chair in a major international orchestra).
I had to come to terms with the fact that this does not work for me. If I get
frustrated or angry, I have to stop. And that’s okay. It used to bother me,
but I realized that wasn’t a very useful reaction. There are times where
stamina is an issue. If you are doing a demanding recital, which means about an
hour’s worth of tough music, you want to know that you can make it through
without your sound and technique going bad. This means that you are going to have
to spend some part of your practicing building stamina, playing for long periods
of time. In my own experience, I have found that with the little practicing I
do (half-hour to two hours per day, at least five days per week, I can still play
for about two and a half to three hours before my body starts to get very angry,
which I do a few times per week in the subway. If you do play for extended amounts
of time, take ten seconds every fifteen minutes or so to stretch, or your body
will be really angry.
My undergraduate flute teacher, Joanne Tanner, used to say all the time, "Many
small make a great." It drove me up the wall. Even more so, because I knew
she was right, but I didn’t know how to apply it. While I think she had me
wrongly pegged as intelligent-but-lazy (I have my moments, but overall I’m
not so lazy), she could see that I have a lot of energy, I like things fast paced,
and I desperately needed to learn to be patient. The trick was figuring out a
way to accomplish what I needed to accomplish but still feel like things were
moving along. I figured out, again long after my undergraduate days were behind
me, that the many small make a great method was the way to go. Do a little bit
of a lot of things on a consistent basis, and the work will get done. You don’t
have to spend an hour on double-tonguing, for example; just keep hacking away
at it and it will get better. The progress may seem slow at first, but it will
happen.
You should be able to verbally explain in explicit detail what you physically
need to do to get the sound that you want. There are many people who do manage
to learn by osmosis – they absorb by listening and watching, which is great.
But even if you never want to teach, having the verbal resource will help you
approach your practicing with some sense. If words fail you completely, then draw
pictures or do an interpretive dance. Practicing effectively requires developing
an acute awareness of what you do, so that you can make sure you are doing what
you need to and ceasing to do what you don’t need to do. Then once you’ve
figured out what needs to be done, you have to repeat it enough times for your
muscles to feel comfortable with it. Clear, verbal descriptions of what you do
will help you gain the awareness you need.
I used to think I had nothing in common with jocks. While my small-motor skills
are rather good, my large-motor skills are rather bad. In other words, I’m
an uncoordinated klutz who isn’t very good at sports, but I’m very good
with my hands. My lack of sporty talent made me a big geek in the eyes of the
school jocks, of course, and I bought into that persona for a long time. But practicing
an instrument is quite a bit like training for a game or a marathon. You can’t
just run a marathon tomorrow if you’ve never prepared for it. Actually, the
first guy who did that – the messenger who ran from Marathon to Athens (?)
to tell the people the Spartans had been defeated – dropped dead after delivering
his message. People don’t drop dead after marathons anymore because they
practice, in a many-small-make-a-great way. Learning to play a sport involves
not just learning the rules of the game, but also putting your body through a
lot of repetitive, routine movements, so that when you are in the heat of the
game, your muscles will know what to do. When you practice long tones, scales,
chords, and snippets of repertoire over and over and over again, you are basically
doing what an athlete does. It takes a lot of repetition for your muscles to remember
what your brain is telling them is their job. People who have "talent"
seem to assimilate information faster, but even the talented have to do this kind
of work. It’s not always the most fun aspect of practicing, but it does enable
you to make whatever kind of music you want to. When you don’t have to think
so hard about your muscles, you can concentrate on making music.
I am at a point in my musical life where I actually enjoy doing the grunt work.
I like practicing scales and patterns and gradually getting them to be faster
and more fluent. If you don’t have the patience for this now, then only do
a little bit at a time. There are other things to work on.
Three things that I am working on now that I didn’t as a student are memorizing,
transposition, and improvisation. You can never start too early on any of these.
For some reason, it is understood that violinists and pianists perform regularly
from memory. This is not really expected of any other instrument. I don’t
know why. I am finding that even just attempting to memorize a piece increases
my understanding of it and my ability to read it more accurately. For transposition,
I am slowly working my way through Robert Ottman’s Music for Sight-Singing,
transposing each little tune into all twelve keys. The nice thing about this book
is that it’s arranged by harmonic content, so that you start off with relatively
simple melodies and work your way towards more difficult ones. They are short
enough to memorize in one sitting (at least for me; it might be harder if you’ve
only been playing for a year, or your short term memory isn’t so great, but
no matter…), so you can play the in the other keys by ear or by reading in
different clefs, according to your experience.
Improvisation is a slightly different beast, and I have two other pages dedicated
to this topic. Both of these are from a jazz standpoint, but I’m working
on gaining the ability to improvise outside of (or within?) any particular style
considerations. I love jazz and I think a jazz education is a sound one, but for
those of us who don’t come from that background, improvising can be really
intimidating. It shouldn’t be, but it often is. I suspect, too, that many
people who are, say, accomplished classical musicians, feel like they are starting
over when they try to learn jazz improvisation. I usually don’t mind that
feeling, but many people do. I think it’s possible to use what you already
know to get at what you don’t know. Why not learn to improvise Mozartean
cadenzas, for example? I find that I can imagine a classical cadenza or one of
those wacky short adagios you find in Baroque sonatas rather clearly in my head
and I am often able to sing it, as well. The problem, for me, is making that connection
between what I can hear in my head to my instrument. I’m hoping that working
on the above mentioned transposition exercises will help. There’s also nothing
wrong with singing out loud and then figuring out how to play it, flubs and all.
Since my strength is hearing things in my head and writing them down directly
to paper, I actually avoid doing that, other than when I am composing. I already
know that I can transcribe well and can sight-read well; these skills are good
and useful, but they overwhelm the ability to directly play what I hear in my
head. The basic idea here is: learn to improvise in the musical language you are
comfortable with, then branching into new languages will not seem so much like
starting over.
I’m working on a improvisation primer of sorts, that doesn’t rely on
notation or styles. I’m sure someone else has done this before, though I
haven’t seen it. The advice I’ve always been given has been "just
do it!" This is truly great advice – I’m not being sarcastic –
but it’s easy to be afraid to go for it when you just don’t know where
to start. Some of us like structure, some of us like to be told what to do, some
of us like to feel like we’re "right." I think it takes some of
the worry out of improvising (so many choices! eeeek!) so you can concentrate
on making music. Start simple, find something you’re comfortable with and
keep pushing yourself into new situations. You will gradually find it easier and
easier to "just do it."
Those are three basic, but large-scale musicianship skills. In order for those
to effective for you, you have to work on the basic mechanics of your playing
technique. In many ways they are reciprocal: technique will improve your memorizing,
transposing, and improving, and those "big three" will improve your
technique. At the core of your technique is your sound. Again, be able to explain
what you need to do physically to get that sound – even on piano, the color
of your sound requires different ways of pressing the keys and pedaling. If you
can’t do this, talk to people whose sound you like. Ask them to explain what
they do. Keep asking until you get an explanation you can work with; i.e., you
try it out yourself and it works. I say this repeatedly and urgently because I
went through a long period (say, my first 17 years of playing) of not knowing
how to get my best possible sound, not having anyone to explain it to me, and
being penalized for it in many ego-crushing ways (my personal favorite was being
told that I didn’t have my priorities straight). Holy frustration, it was
awful! When I did find a teacher who could explain these things in plain language,
and who was patient, giving me gentle reminders as I figured things out, it changed
everything about my playing. Suddenly, all the musical ideas that I knew I had
(although I was told by another teacher that, alas, I wasn’t naturally musical…),
were coming out, full force. Once I had control over my sound, I could reproduce
with my instrument how I thought the music should sound.
When you practice (just suggesting, of course), whether you have two hours or
ten minutes to work with, you should spend most of your time doing the most difficult
things. This is what creates progress if you are in the learning stages and what
keeps your chops in shape if you’re already fairly accomplished. Make a list
of things to do. This will help you use your practice time wisely. I usually change
my practice routine every four to six months or so, to keep things interesting.
Now I am working on a huge, long-term project that will take a long time (forever?)
to get through, so I’ve tried to set it up to have a lot of variation, something
I value highly as an antidote to boredom. I will elaborate on the nature of this
project shortly. Your list should be comprised of basic technical things. For
example, my present list (as a flutist; lists will certainly vary with other instruments)
is as follows:
•diminuendo/crescendo
•single tonguing
•double tonguing
•triple tonguing
•super quiet
•whistle tones
•large leaps
•flutter tonguing
•circular breathing
•multiphonics
These are all things that require muscle-work and training and they are the types
of skills that go away if you don’t visit them regularly. In conjunction
with these physical techniques there are musical things you need to work on, patterns
(scales and arpeggios/chords), intonation, and tone color (including vibrato).
The physical techniques work very well with the patterns; you can accomplish two
things at once! For my big "I’m going to work on my basics and learn
new scales" project, I put together a huge list of scales, another huge list
of patterns (culled from method books, pieces, and my own little head), and my
list of techniques. You can look at the .pdf file. I
just do a few of them every day. For example, I’ll work on techniques 1-4,
using a major scale applied to patterns 18-21. The next day I would work on techniques
5-8 and patterns 19-22. When I do them all with the major scale, I’ll move
on to a new scale.
Because of their special nature, I have different exercises for circular breathing
and multiphonics. I can run through my transposing, memorizing, scale/technique
work, and circular breathing in about an hour (without spacing out…). I can
also easily break it up, since it’s simple to keep track of my regimen.
While I haven’t done this in a while, I do have a regimen for practicing
intonation. I had to figure this one out myself. Again, I’m sure someone
else has written down suggestions for intonation practice, but I never found it
in a normal instrumental method book. Actually, I was rather influenced by W.
A. Mathieu’s writings in The Listening Book and Harmonic Experience,
so someone has written something down. None of my teachers, strangely enough,
ever relayed to me a method for working on intonation, other than "work with
a tuner."
This is what I’ve come up with: Get yourself a tuner that drones any pitch
you like. An A-440 is useful, but you’ll need more. When you tune, you are
listening for difference tones: when two (or more) different pitches occur at
the same time, their waves interact and create other waves (that’s an attempt
at keeping the explanation simple). For unisons and octaves you’re listening
for the absence of difference tones (more likely to be perceived as beats or pulses
than an actual pitch), and for any other interval you use the difference tone
as the indicator for whether you are in tune or not. Difference tones are easier
to hear between like instruments, for example they’ll be easier to hear with
two flutes than with a flute and clarinet. I have heard people complain that the
sound emitted by an electronic tuner with droning capabilities is awful, but I
have found that it makes great difference tones with the flute, perhaps because
the flute is as close to a sine-wave as you’ll get with any pitched instrument
(save whistling, apparently). You can also get together with someone who plays
your instrument and who can keep their sound very even (this can be an issue with
winds, of course). Bowed strings can use an open string as a drone, too.
Set your drone source to any note within the range of your instrument and start
by practicing long unisons. Work to eliminate any beating. If you can’t hear
any beating ever, either you are always amazingly in tune (unlikely), or you are
experiencing one of the following: you are not playing at the same dynamic level
as your drone, or you just aren’t sensitized to it yet. To sensitize your
ears to beating, slowly make your pitch higher or lower as much as you can. Listen
for that ugly-yet-intriguing wah-wah or buzz in your ears. You may even feel it
in your head, more than you seem hear it. As you get closer to matching the drone,
the beats will slow down, as you move further away, the beats will speed up, even
to a buzz. Practice being in and out of tune; this will build up sensitivity and
flexibility. Alvin Lucier has some fantastic
pieces based on being in and out of tune with a unison drone. I highly recommend
them. Once you are able to match a unison throughout the range of your instrument,
then move on to octaves, again working to eliminate beats.
The next interval you should work on is the perfect fifth.
This merits a short discussion. Fifths on the piano are not in tune; in fact the
whole piano is "out of tune." Some people prefer piano-tuning (called
equal temperament) over natural tuning (called just temperament) in all "classical"
music. Some cultures and composers prefer other tunings. I’m a big fan of
using anything you can wrap your ears around. Practically speaking, in terms of
"classical" music, it is very possible to combine both equal and just
temperaments. I think just temperaments are easier to hear because the difference
tones tune very well; you can (learn to) easily hear them lock into place. Intonation
is not about being right; it’s about being sensitive and flexible. Anyone
who’s played with someone (other than a pianist, organist, or percussionist)
who insists that they are the only one "in tune" and they are not going
to budge, knows how frustrating that can be. By learning just intonation with
drones and equal temperament by playing with pianists on a regular basis, you
will become duly sensitive and flexible, indeed.
Back to our regularly scheduled program: When you play a perfect fifth above a
drone, listen for the difference tone sounding an octave below the drone. For
example, if the drone is an A and you play the E above that, you can hear a difference
tone an octave below the A. Bend your note and listen for the difference note
moving in and out of tune with the drone. Keep working on this until you can hear
it and control it.
Next: major thirds. The difference tone will sound two octaves below the drone.
Note that if, for example, you play a major third below the drone, the difference
tone will be two octaves below you. Major thirds on the piano are sharper than
in just intonation.
Minor thirds: the difference tone will sound a major third plus two octaves below
the drone, forming a major triad with you and the drone. Minor thirds on the piano
are much flatter than in just intonation.
Perfect fourths: the difference tone will sound two octaves below your pitch.
Minor sixths: the difference tone will sound a major sixth below, creating a major
triad in second inversion with you and the drone.
Major sixths: the difference tone will sound a perfect fifth below the drone,
creating a major triad with you and the drone.
The consonant intervals are much easier to tune in just intonation than the dissonant
intervals. Just intonation is derived from ratios within the harmonic series.
In the harmonic series there are a few choices for dissonant intervals, where
as for the above intervals there’s only one. Below are the difference tones
based on ratios within the harmonic series. If this sounds like gobbledy-gook,
that’s okay. I’m not going to explain the whole thing here because there
are lots of books, websites, and people that can tell you all about it. (If you’d
like me to recommend any, email me.)
Major seconds: the difference tone will sound three octaves below the drone. This
is a toughy to hear in general and impossible to hear below E3/F#3. Side note:
The Mathieu book mentioned above has exercises that can help you to hear the difference
between a 9/8 major second and a 8/7 major second. The latter is significantly
wider than an equal tempered major second.
Minor seconds: the difference tone sounds a perfect fifth plus four octaves below
the drone. Obviously, here it’s completely impractical to use difference
tones for the purpose of tuning. Just minor seconds are ever so slightly lower
than equal tempered minor seconds.
Minor sevenths: the difference tone will sound a major third below the drone.
Major sevenths: the difference tone will sound something like a major second (with
a ratio of 8/7) below the drone.
The tritone: this is probably the most difficult. An equal tempered tritone has
an approximate ratio of 37:22, creating a difference tone that sounds roughly
a tritone below the drone. Just intonation differentiates between augmented fourths
and diminished fifths and offers several options:
• 11:8 produces a difference tone approx. perfect fourth plus an octave below
the drone.
• 25:18 produces a difference tone a (flat) major third plus an octave
below the drone.
• 7:5 produces a difference tone a major third plus an octave below the
drone.
• 45:32 produces a difference tone a (sharp) major third plus an octave
below the drone.
• 64:45 produces a difference tone a (sharp) minor third plus an octave
below the drone.
Learning to hear the difference between these
is a major project, but it will help you be flexible and sensitive. If you have
limited time, just concentrate on the perfect and consonant intervals. If you
have lots of time, you can move on to intervals larger than an octave.
The next step is to practice scales over a drone and scales along with a pianist.
Now that I know what to listen for, I don’t practice intonation specifically
as much as I used to.
*****
As far as practicing repertoire is concerned,
I don’t have a particular method. Each piece has its own demands. There
are three basic rules: spend some time practicing to fix mistakes, spend some
time practicing getting through the piece no matter what happens, and have an
idea of what you want the piece to sound like and work towards that idea.
"Fixing mistakes" involves a lot of repetition, whether you are concentrating
on fingering, embouchure, bowing, intonation or whatever the technical issue
is. If you play something wrong nine times, correct on the tenth time, and then
stop, your body will think that the wrong way is the right way. The only way
they’ll know the difference is because your brain will make your body do
the procedure more times right than wrong. If you keep making mistakes during
your repetitions, then chances are you’re going too fast. The metronome
is your friend; use it to gradually progress from slow to fast. I recommend
getting the kind that increases one beat per minute at a time, instead of the
ones that skip, for example, from 152 to 160. Also remember that just because
you played it right 100 times yesterday doesn’t mean that you will today
and certainly is no indication of how you’ll play it next week. Small increments
of progress every day are more beneficial than trying to cover a lot of material
in one day and then not practicing for a few days. But you knew that.
Getting through the piece no matter what happens is probably one of the most
overlooked aspects of practicing. We get so caught up in fixing things that
every time something goes wrong, we stop. Because this is a repeated behavior,
it becomes the normal reaction to every glitch. The antidote is to practice
not letting your mistakes get to you. Even when you know the piece really well,
accidents can happen.
You should have an idea of the emotional road map of the piece and come up with
ways to bring that out using articulation, dynamics, tone color, and intonation.
Experiment and exaggerate during practice; this will help you figure out what
works and what doesn’t. Singing and moving are also recommended. If you
are at a loss for ideas, make something up and then turn to recordings. I think
recordings are more helpful when you can compare them to what you are doing.
Too often they serve as a point of imitation and the student performer never
gets a chance to work on their own original ideas. Yet, I do think that imitation
can be useful with musical and emotional analysis. Jazz students will often
transcribe and learn solos of great improvisers. One can learn something from
close imitation as long as it’s coupled with reflection. Imitation is not
a substitute for developing one’s own style and sound.
Lastly, it is possible and recommended to do some practicing away from the instrument.
Being able to hear pitches clearly in your head is a big bonus here, but if
you’re not at that level yet, be able to at least hear rhythms clearly
in your head. You can practice rhythms, fingerings, articulation, bowing, notes,
and expression — all away from your instrument (I include voice as an instrument!).
This is particularly helpful when you have limited practice time or for long
trips where you can’t take out your instrument, but you have a lot of time
on your hands. Even if you’re driving, you can work on singing your piece
from memory out loud or in your head.
There is no magical substitute for practicing. If you don't feel like practicing,
don't; you probably won't get much good work done, anyway. If not-practicing
turns into a habit, then you have some soul-searching to do. I think the number
one reason for not practicing, other than lack of time (you can squeeze it in,
you can!), is that no one likes to hear themselves sound like crap. Admit it
now and you'll save yourself much grief. The second admission you'll have to
make is that sometimes you will sound like crap, especially when you are practicing.
Get over it as quickly as you can! I know this is easier said than done. Often,
you will sound like crap for a long time, even when you are working your hardest
over and over again, day after day. It can be awfully discouraging, to put it
lightly. It takes time for your muscles to adjust to new things. Make sure you
know very clearly what to look for (use a mirror — again, work on not being
so self-conscious) and what to listen for. Keep working in little snippets of
time on a regular basis (at least four days per week, but more is preferable!).
Eventually, things will fall into place. If not, then go back and make sure
you know what you are doing. If you are practicing on a regular basis, but things
aren't working, then perhaps you and your teacher are not communicating properly.
Tread lightly so as not to make enemies, and see if you can finagle the information
you need out of your present teacher or a different teacher. Be patient.
If you ever feel you have run out of things to practice, you are gravely fooling yourself.
cheers.