Let’s get cracking!

2 weeks ago I laid out ideas about how warm up periods are about more than just warming one’s muscles up. In fact, this time that many think of as “pre-practice” time IS practice time, a zone to develop and refine our musicianship. If you’re just joining us, here’s an idea:

Imagine “warming up” as your first block of practice time during a day, with the goals of

1. Linking your ears to your hands
2. Developing a nuanced sense of sound and touch
3. Increasing your physical and mental musculature
4. Directing your attention to significant challenges in the music you are learning

The musical material tends to be simple, so it’s a perfect time to hone our mental representations, the multi-disciplinary ranges of possibilities for sonic, physical and visual music making. Mental representations are the best way improve our learning: the more we hone our concepts of what something could be like, the more likely we are to be able to produce more varied, accurate, and precise renditions of what we want something to sound like. Thus, they should be the primary goal of our practicing.

But, we can’t just warm up all day (although that would be nice…) I’m all about efficiency in practicing—I’d rather be baking—so I want to know how we can structure our time for maximum confluence between the stages of learning a piece:

1. Preparation/study/research
2. Ingestion
3. Refinement
4. Incubation
5. Reflection

That is a topic for another time…

So, if we want to spend the LEAST amount of time in a practice room, how do we structure that precious, annoying, or cathartic practice time?

💡Wither my flow chart:

Caveat 1: In the chart, I articulate what to DO when practicing, not necessarily the reason behind or the impact of those choices. I’ll try to add some of the why below, knowing that it’s a topic for a longer format.

Caveat 2: This works for me, but it might not for everyone. Let me know what you do!

Next time, I’ll dig in deeper, but for now, a short description

Pre-Practice: Analysis/score study/framing

• Get to know the music you’ll be learning, contextualizing it historically and stylistically while analyzing and characterizing significant moments in the music. You want to be sure that I’m practicing with a musical goal in mind rather than wandering note-by-note through a score.
• Then, prepare everything you need to make sure that your time practicing is 100% practicing. Score printing, part preparation, page turn planning, binder making, whatever.

Getting Going: warm up, scales, technical development

Like standing in an immersive James Turrell work, our minds and hands need a little bit of time to acclimate to practicing.

• Warm your muscles by playing conscientiously and curiously, analyzing technical issues by tinkering, hypothesizing about their origin and experimenting to see what changes make the most impactful sonic results.
• Create and play exercises that address these issues. I like to, like Law and Order, rip them from the ‘headlines’ of my repertoire.
• Do SOMETHING to measure and record your progress: journal.

Note Learning/Ingestion

I say ingestion here because it’s more specific than learning. Anyone can learn something, but it takes effort to digest information, keep it inside of oneself ready to use at a moment’s notice.

Here, use your mental representation of the piece at hand to pinpoint mistakes and make changes quickly and aggressively.

Refining

The same, but with both longer spans of music and more refined or detailed sense of what to address. Record yourself and get feedback from peers to make sure your senses are calibrated to your sound.

Refreshing/Longer Runs/Incubation

This period occupies the LONGEST part of our practice time. Start piecing together the music, section by section, paragraph by paragraph. You will make different and surprising and delightful new mistakes, so continue the processes from before. Let the music age like a Brunello (although maybe not for as long).

Reflection

Learning = Experience + Reflection. So………… reflect! What worked, what didn’t? Be creative and resilient.

Timing

Except for the incubation, which could take years, this routine takes an hour or less—one Law and Order episode. Now you have time to bake!

Other Styles

I noted some other ‘species’ of practicing in the Australia position of the chart. I’ll cover those next time.

See you then!

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