Before I start, in case you were worried, Mackenzie (my dog) is doing much better! She came home Monday evening and was still a bit swollen in the face, but by last night most of that swelling was down.
Onto the topic of this post, which occurred to me AS I was practicing.
There are always articles being written on practicing. How to practice, how best to practice, practice mistakes to avoid, how not to practice, and more. We are told to practice with a purpose, to have a plan, to have accomplishments and objectives. I posted an article on facebook just yesterday about how to “optimize your practicing.”
Lately, however, I’ve just been making violin practice a thing that I do during the day before I teach. I pull out music I’m trying to learn, music I’d like to learn, etudes to sight-read, music I’m teaching, and I just start practicing. Sometimes I’ll play a piece I hear on the radio, sometimes I’ll spend a hour on scales. I just do what I feel like and make sure that if there’s a piece I definitely need to work on, that I get to that one enough.
I have made decisions over the past few years to include practice time into my daily schedule. I don’t practice every day, and I take weeks off over vacations, but I no longer overschedule myself with work to the point where weeks go by without proper practice. Once you know how it feels to be playing well, you don’t want to lose it, and in fact, you want to continue to improve.
I’ve been thinking practicing quite a bit. Many of my students don’t practice often enough. And the fact of it is this: it’s generally not that they practice inefficiently, or wrong, or badly. It’s that they simply do not practice regularly. A student who practices regularly will be better than one that does not.
And that’s the attitude I started taking to my own practice in the last year or two. Oh, and did you see what I called it? My own practice. I read a friend’s Facebook status once referring to “his violin practice” and I thought of it just like people refer to their yoga practice. It’s not about goals or accomplishments. It’s about the process. The process of getting out the violin, tuning, and then beginning to play. And doing so regularly.
Here’s my general advice: if you are struggling to get into a practice routine, don’t worry about doing it right or wrong. Simply do it. Start. There is no wrong way to practice, except NOT to practice at all.
Sure, starting at the beginning of your piece and playing through to the end, up to speed, totally ignoring mistakes…might not be the most efficient use of your time. Unless you have the issues of making mistakes and stopping all the time. For every list I read of how not to practice, I can often think of a reason to ask a student to practice that way! (I’m a contrarian, and I detest people giving expert advice which is actually just advice from their personal experience.) So go, get your violin out, and practice.
Or whatever it is. If you want to create a habit: running, eating healthy, being kind to strangers, don’t worry about the best way. Just start doing it regularly. The rest will fall into place.
