Practice Methods

27/10/2010 - 10:40 by Mike Saville

Total Sensory Immersion

Using All the Senses Practice MethodWe want to help you practice better. Our newsfeed will keep you up to date with regular advice. Free personal help is available in our practice clinic and new news and offers can be found in our newsletter.

Are we all blind, unfeeling and without emotion?

Of course not!

Why then do a lot of musicians only use their hearing sense when practising? Yes, listening properly is VERY important. Make use of the other senses as well and you can make your music come alive, have more fun and learn things more quickly.

Sight

What can you see? Do you have music? What does it look like? In a performance take time to notice your surroundings.

Touch

Playing your instrument is NOT a purely mechanical process. What does your instrument feel like? Can you touch it in different ways? Where do you experience most pressure? Where is your touch the lightest? Is you instrument hot? Cold? Sticky? Soft?  Read more . . .

28/09/2010 - 17:23 by Mike Saville

Level Best

Music Volume Levels Practice MethodWe want to help you practice better. Our newsfeed will keep you up to date with regular advice. Free personal help is available in our practice clinic and new news and offers can be found in our newsletter.

Having a good range of dynamics can make your performances much more interesting for the listener. There's nothing duller than listening to music that is the same volume or intensity all the way through. Use this method to improve the range of dynamics in your pieces.

Follow these steps to improve the dynamics in a section or piece of music:  Read more . . .

  1. Work out what the middle dynamic is in your piece - it's quite often around mf (or medium loud)
31/08/2010 - 11:54 by Mike Saville

Unfamiliar Scales

How To Practice Unfamiliar Scales Practice MethodWe want to help you practice better. Our newsfeed will keep you up to date with regular advice. Free personal help is available in our practice clinic and new news and offers can be found in our newsletter.

Does it take you a long time to learn a new scale or pattern of notes? Use this method and you will know them in no time at all!

There are 7 steps you need to complete:

1. Sing the scale

Use a good full voice and sing all the notes of your scale. Do this until you can really hear the notes inside your head before you sing them. Aim to sing the precise notes. It can be useful to use a piano to get you started with this.

2. Sing and name the intervals

Having got all the notes into your ears this next step will help make you aware of the gaps between the notes. For each step in your scale sing the two notes and then name the step between them. It could be a major or minor second or a whole or half tone if you prefer. Do this until you are confident of all the intervals up and down your scale.  Read more . . .

11/08/2010 - 08:45 by Mike Saville

Pareto Practice

Using the 80 20 rule in your music practice PracticeWe want to help you practice better. Click here to receive regular advice or here for help on your current problems.

The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) argues that 80% of the rewards come from 20% of the efforts.

Think about this for a moment in terms of your music practice. This means that 80% of your time could effectively be wasted. Awareness of this fact is the first part of the cure for practising musicians.

For this practice method you are going to ensure that not only do you use all of your time as well as you can, but you also use the most productive time to work at the weakest things.

Firstly you are going to split your weaknesses down into 5 easy chunks. Have a think about what the 5 weakest areas of your playing are. Is it scales? Tone? Fingering? Reading? Embouchure? Write these 5 things down in order of weakness.  Read more . . .

03/08/2010 - 09:36 by Mike Saville

A Change of Emphasis

It's often difficult to find new ways of playing a piece, especially if it's a very well known piece of music.

Consider this well known piece of Piano music by Mozart:
Changing Emphasis in a Musical Phrase

This has been played milllions of times by pianists all over the world. How then do you take this, or any other piece of music, and give it your own interpretation?

Here's where the emphasis method comes in. When played with a standard interpretation the emphasis will fall on the red note as follows:
Changing Emphasis in a Musical Phrase  Read more . . .

02/08/2010 - 08:59 by Mike Saville

Artistic Learning

Once you have learned the notes to a piece it's time to make music and to express your own musicality.

Consider the 3 drawings below:

Musical Note Shapes

Each of these is a note. How do you think each note will sound?

Here is another shape:

Drawing of a musical phrase

What do you think this music might sound like?<1--break-->

This shape has yet more differences. Try to imagine in detail the sounds this might make:  Read more . . .

08/06/2010 - 06:13 by Mike Saville

Waiting Game

Don't you just hate waiting for things?
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No matter how organised you are you'll find yourself waiting for things most days.

Waiting for the bus.
Waiting for your tea.
Waiting for school to start.
Waiting for your favourite programme to come on TV.
Waiting for the kettle to boil.
Waiting for other people.
Waiting in a queue.
Waiting for the phone to ring.

Yup, there's an awful lot of waiting going on.  Read more . . .

05/04/2010 - 19:12 by Mike Saville

Active Listening

You learn far more when you listen than you do when you talk.

Effective listening is a core requirement for better practice. This method will help you develop your listening skills.

Firstly choose three contrasting pieces of music. In order to get the most benefit from this method try to choose music that you would not normally listen to, that is outside of your usual style or comfort zone. As well as developing your listening skills this will also broaden your general musical knowledge.

Having chosen your three pieces you need to listen to them several times each.

On the first run through listen as you would normally to get a general feel of the music.  Read more . . .

30/03/2010 - 11:09 by Mike Saville

Different Perspectives

Just as there is no single correct way to play a piece, there is also no one right way to practice.

You need options.

If your usual practice methods don't seem to be giving the results you want, try looking at your music from different perspectives.

Pick several of the options below and practice your music in that way.

Notes

Focus purely on playing the right notes. Forget about speed technique and everything - just get the notes perfect.

  Read more . . .

Technique

08/03/2010 - 11:57 by Mike Saville

Silence


Photo courtesy of Pardesi

"Silence?"

"A practice method?"

"You must be mad!"

Well actually no. Unfortunately there are not enough thoughtful silences in the practice room. Just because you are making noise does not mean you are getting better!  Read more . . .