Ask „What“ before „How“! The clearer the goal, the easier the way!
Mindful practising starts with asking yourself what you want to achieve. What is your goal for the practice session and what do you want to achieve in general on your instrument in the next months or years?
Ask yourself: What do I want to practice and learn today before you start?
And after practicing: What have I achieved today?
If we set ourselves realistic, controllable, fulfillable goals with a time plan, we do not only become more disciplined, but we end our practice session with the feeling of having used our time properly and with a feeling of accomplishment. In addition to it, good planning automatically turns on our inner progress and success control, which can increase our motivation and make practising a more rewarding task.
The more precise those plans and goals are, the smaller and better defined the steps towards them the easier it is to reach them.It is therefore not only necessary to ask ourselves „How shall I practice?“ but maybe even before that „What shall I practice?“
“If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.”
(Seneca, Roman Philosopher and Statesman, 4 BC – 65 AC)
In the score one will only find the pitch and a rough length of a note, with a basic instruction of loudness and articulation. Everything else you will have to find for yourself.
For Example: The precise pitch (major 3rd or pure 4th?), tone length, loudness, tempo, sound colour, what noises (yes, they are part of music, just think of the beginning sounds of an accented note or a light staccato), articulation and the variation of everything above (also vibrato) are not clearly defined in our notation system and you as an interpreter are asked to concretize them.
All of this happens in music at the same time, but can hardly be practised all at once.
As there are many different problems that might arise, and since everybody learns differently, there are many possible ways to practice and one will not need a one-suits-all solution but a huge arsenal of practising techniques.
But first it is necessary to define the stepping stones that make a perfectly played piece and set them as separate tasks in our practice session. So you have to decide, whether you want to
-prepare a part (learn the notes, fingerings, articulations)
-cultivate your basic technical patterns (scales, intervals, tonging, trills,….)
-cultivate sound and embouchure
-intonation
-rhythm
-phrasing
-train fluency
-define phrasing
-analyse the body movement (shoulders, hands, fingers,….)
-revise everything, and more…
In the beginning it is necessary to have a good teacher who can help you with all these parameters, listen to many recordings of the pieces you are playing and your Instrument and it is also fine to try to copy players you like. This is against some criticism not limiting in artistic expression, since we all learned walking, our language and many other skills just by copying our surrounding. Nobody will ever say that we are not able to express ourselves, just because we were starting to speak by repeating all the words we heard. (The technique of Neuro-linguistic Programming even knows the idea of extreme modeling) Over the years it will get easier. One of the most exciting things about practicing for me is to dive into the music and trying to find out how I would want to hear the piece I am working on to be played.
The better I know, how far the sounds I produce differ from what I want to hear, the clearer I can describe this difference, the easier it is then for me to find the right things and ways to practice and to bridge this gap.
With experience this gets easier; in the first years of learning an Instrument listening to the instructions and descriptions of sound of your tutor and especially listening to many recordings of accomplished players of the instrument and of the pieces you are playing is very important to get a clearer idea of how the piece you are to play should sound. – and so a clearer idea of what to practice.
In the next post I will share more about how you can set the right goals for yourself.