Music Practice Tips

In keeping up with finding what other people are doing, I noticed in Brandon’s blog that he’s keeping track of the amount of time practiced. He calculates each day, noting the longest and shortest session of the week, the average amount practiced and other such things. While keeping a journal is a great idea, there’s plenty of ways that we can do it.

The Cumulative Journal

This is basically Brandon’s journal. It is just used to tally up the total amount of time practiced each day. This is a great journal for those just starting off. It’s very important when you’re starting out to get into the habit of practicing, to allow your body to get used to the work. For this reason, it can also be used if you’re planning on increasing the amount of practice that you want to do. For example, if I was normally doing 3 hours of practice a day, and I wanted to boost it up to around 4 hours, I might use a Cumulative journal in order to track the amount of practice I’m doing each day. In this situation however, it would be in addition to a Goal Journal.

Goal Journal

Goal Journals have been talked about in plenty of situations, and their benefit has been well documented. Without a clearly defined goal in your music practice, you just float, not really progressing anywhere. However, if you can define your goals, you have something to work towards, and it keeps you focussed.

Work Backwards

In setting your goals, you need to aim for one or two big things, and then work back to where you are today. For an example, I’m going to share my goal journal. I have Long, Medium, Short, This Week, Today and Next Week goals. For me, Long term goals are 5-10 years. Medium is 1-3 years, Short is 2-15 weeks. This week, today and next week are obvious. However, you might not be in a situation where you want to plan 5-10 years ahead. There are different models - You might like a rolling 1, 2 and 3 year plan, or perhaps for you One Year might be long term enough. I decided to use the model I am using because I want to be more focussed on my career.

My Long Term Goal is “To Gain a seat in a professional Orchestra.” Some people that know me would say upon reading that something like “You’ll never get there” or “Why not aim for that sooner?” The reason I’m aiming for 5 to 10 years is because I recognise that I’m not ready for a seat at the moment but hopefully in 5-10 years I should be at the level in which I can achieve this goal. If it happens before 5 years, then that’s great, but I don’t want to aim for next year when it’s unlikely to happen and I’d only just get dissappointed when I don’t achieve it.

Once I’d decided upon that, it was time to start working backwards. As you work closer to today, you’ll notice that my goals increase in number, but they also decrease in difficulty, in a sense. So my Medium Term Goals have 4 things that I would like to achieve in the next 1-5 years:

• Get Casual performing gigs with WASO (my local professional symphony orchestra)
• Gain extensive knowledge of orchestral excerpts
• Learn one of the following concerti: Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Sibelius, Weiniawski or Brahms
• Develop a solid repertoire base in both solo and chamber music.

If You’ve ever given any though to an orchestral career, you’ll be able to see that these are probably very important steps in preperation for an audition. Orchestral excerpts are important as they’re always asked for. The concerti that I’ve outlined are some of the most commonly asked for in Auditions. Having a solid repertoire base aids me in all number of ways. and obviously, professional experience, even if only casually, will be helpful.

Onto my Short term goals, which are to be done in the next 2-15 weeks. Here I’ve got things like Prepare my Mozart concerto from memory for exams and concerto competition, be more confident in my double stopping intonation, learn common orchestral excerpts, and audition for an orchestral summer school. In this time period, it allows me to focus on the areas that are more pressing, while still keeping an eye towards the future. For example, my exams and the concerto competition don’t really appear in the longer term goals, however learning excerpts and auditioning for an orchestral summer school would be helpful.

My weekly goals include the small tasks I hope to achieve each week. These would be things that I get from my lesson, and also other tasks that I set for myself. Then each day, I would ask myself “What can I achieve today in order to progress towards that goal?”

Fancy…

The goal journal doesn’t have to be fancy. I keep mine as a word document on my laptop, which I take with me everywhere anyway. But it could just be a ring binder, or a piece of paper kept in your case. Whatever works for you does it. And of course, it doesn’t have to be in the models I’ve presented here. If you do something different, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.