Music Practice Tips

Hi and Welcome to MusicPracticeTips.com

This site will feature daily tips on practice methods that you can try out to improve your practice sessions. So often, a teacher will tell you to go and practice, but they might not tell you how to practice. The great thing about music is that there are so many different ways to practice, that not every one of these tips will help you. However, hopefully you can find some of the ones on here and give them a try to help improve your practice sessions, and learn music more efficiently. Hopefully, it will also make it more fun and not so much of a chore to practice anymore.

And what do I know about practice? Not much. I’m still searching out and trying methods all the time. I’m in my final year at the WA Conservatorium of Music, studying Violin. From my 14 years of playing the violin, I’ve picked up some good techniques, and some not so good ones. I’ll try just to share the good ones with you, and I’ll also get some guest bloggers in from time to time to give their favourite techniques.

Anyway, to start us off, Here’s the first tip.

Split your practice sessions up.

The adult mind can only really concentrate for about 30 minutes to 45 minutes at a time. If you are practicing for longer than 45 minutes in one session, there’s going to be times when you’re not concentrating. If you’re not concentrating, then your practice isn’t going to be effective and you’ll be practicing the wrong things. By splitting your practice sessions up into more manageable chunks, you will end up doing more things at a higher level because your mind is focussed on the work that you’re doing.

How much is too much?

Unfortunately, there is no single answer to this. Each person has differing attention spans, and you just need to be aware of yours. If you (or your child) is between the ages of 6 and 8, then more than likely the attention span will be about 5 to 10 minutes. In this case, it’s probably a great idea to get them to practice for about 8 minutes, and then do something completely different for 2 minutes. Play a game, go for a run, something away from the instrument. This will allow them to switch their minds off, and then come back to the instrument fresh and ready to do more effective practice.
As you get slightly older, the attention span will increase, and you can go longer between the breaks. However, in my experience, as you increase the total number of minutes practiced in a day, your sessions need to be shorter.
For example, I can easily do 3 sessions of 45 minutes back to back, and get some good practice in there. However, after the third session, my mind says to itself “Nope, that’s enough. No more practice for Ben today.” and even if I try to force myself to practice a fourth session, my mind isn’t focussed, and my practice becomes uneventful, lazy and unproductive. However, if I reduce my practice sessions to 30 minutes, with a 15 minute break, I can go much longer back to back and still be fresh.

Backing from the Masters

Being a violinist, I’ve read teaching manuals from the great teachers such as Flesch and Galamian. Both of these great teachers recommended practice sessions of 30-45 minutes. But Flesch was careful to point out that if you do 45 minutes and take a 15 minute break, that’s still only 45 minutes of practice. So if you are to get 3 hours of practice done, you’ll actually need to do 4 sessions. However, those 4 sessions will be highly effective and you’ll get much more done than if you did 3 hours straight.

Managing more practice sessions

If you start breaking your practice sessions up, you’ll find that there’s more things that you can do. We’ll take two examples here.

Billy has been asked by his teacher to practice one hour a day. He’s found that he can only really keep his attention on the violin for 15 minutes at a time. After that, he starts mucking around and not really practicing. He decides to break his practice session up into 4 15 minutes sessions. He does two sessions in the morning, separated by a 15 minute break, and then one when he gets home from school, before watching TV, and then another one after dinner while his parents are watching the news. After doing this for a week, his teacher is mightily impressed by his progress.

Mary is studying at University, and is wanting to do about 4 hours practice a day. She’s discovered that she works best in the morning, and that she can focus for about 40 minutes at a time. She decided to break her sessions up in the following way: 4 sessions in the morning, each of 40 minutes length and separated by a 20 minute break, and then 2 sessions in the evenings, also 40 minutes with a 20 minute break.

There are plenty of other ways to break up practice sessions to make them more effective. Do you break up your practice sessions? What works best for you? I’d love to hear your comments.