Silent Practice. It can be challenging to squeeze in enough practice time on your instrument. But we have a practice ‘hack’ for you! Try ‘silent practice’. This article suggests that merely thinking about your music can have similar effects to physically practicing it. Many instrumentalists take advantage of this by practicing short finger patterns off their instrument, using a table or other surface. If you’re a bit short on time this week, try some silent practice!
Listen more! One of the easiest ways to get motivated is to find inspiration from a recording artist. Listening to your favourite instrumentalist performing the type of music you’d like to play can easily inspire you to pick up the instrument and get a bit closer to your musical goals. Knowing the “sound” of the music you’re learning can help you to learn it faster, too. In this age of the Internet we have all these resources at our fingertips, so why not google someone playing the song you’re learning and compare notes! (pardon the pun!)
A practice session doesn’t have to be very long at all. Sometimes we find it hard to motivate ourselves to have a practice. In those situations, try agreeing to do something ultra short, like just 2 notes, or just one minute. Most of the time you’ll find that spills over into a useful little session, but if it doesn’t, it probably wouldn’t have been worth forcing a practice anyway.
If you can sing it, you can play it. Sometimes we struggle to achieve the perfect expression, rhythm or dynamics in our music. So it can help to practice it using an instrument we’ve been using since birth – the voice. This removes all of the practical challenges of playing an instrument (fingers, co-ordination, posture etc) and allows us to focus on getting the bare-bones of the music correct before adding the complication of an instrument.
Shake up your warm up routine. Always doing the same thing makes us pretty reliant on having completed a certain process to play well. So try different things! Sight-reading, long notes, short notes, interval practice, loud notes and soft notes are just some suggestions. Your warmup should last at least a few minutes depending on your instrument.
Plan your ‘down’ time. We all need a break from our instrument now and again, so we recommend giving yourself permission not to practice for a short time (a day? A few days? A week?) and then getting straight back into it once you’ve recharged. There’s no point feeling guilty about it, so make a plan and feel positive about your approach to your pactice.
