Music Practice Tips

No, I’m not talking about Real Estate. Where you start practicing from is a very important part of your practice, and you need to give some consideration to where you’re going to start each session from.

The Beginning…

This seems like the most obvious place to start from, however it can be one of the most detrimental. What ends up happening is that you start off great, but then you get to a certain point, and things start going down hill. More than likely, you’ll make a mistake, stop, and then go back to the beginning. By the time you get to that mistake again, you’ll have forgotten about it, and you’ll make that mistake again.

The Middle, and the End

The obvious way to break this habit is to start from the Middle, or the End of the piece. While it is true that this will break the habit of starting off really well, and then getting to a point and then failing, you need to be careful not to turn this into the opposite, where the start is terrible, but the middle or the end of the piece is fantastic. So how can we avoid this?

Multiple Start Points

The trick to avoiding having one section stronger than the others is to divide your piece up into sections, and change the place you start from regularly. Some pieces make it easy by having practice markings to divide up sections. Others are simple enough that every 16 bars is an appropriate place to start from. And for some you might need to go through and mark the sections yourself. Once you’ve figured out your start points, you can then start practicing from them. But this might not be enough. Take for example, a Brahms Sonata I’m studying at the moment.

This piece has rehearsal marks for me, and the first movement contains 14 of them. Obviously, I’m not wanting to start from the beginning all the time, and likewise, it won’t be much use if I start from Figure 1 and go towards the end. Instead, what I need to do is practice sections. So, I might actually start off with Figure 14 through to the End, and then Figure 13 to 14, and then 12 to 13, and then I might practice 12 to the End, so I get the transitions. Then I might head into the middle, to 7 to 8, 8 to 9, and 9 to 10, then 7 to 10. I’ll pick and choose like this, taking small bites, and working on them to get them up to scratch, and then combining them with other bites to make larger chunks, and then later adding these chunks together until I am working through the whole piece. Of course, when I am working through the whole piece, I’ll still be working on the small bites when it comes down to a spot that needs work.

Look for small sections to work on, to improve them as small bites, but don’t forget to add them together to make larger chunks eventually spanning the whole work.

Do you practice like this? Do you like to make your own sections, even if there are rehearsal marks put in?