Practicing is like baking a cake. It is a skill in itself. You can't rush it, you can't do it when your tired and the more you do it the better you will get at it.
In the lesson we go through a new piece in stages, slowly building a picture of what the music sounds like and how it works. We first work out the notes, then the rhythm and then try and put the two together. We will work in small sections slowly building the piece and hopefully by the end of the lesson you will have a good idea how the piece goes.
This is the easy bit, because the teacher is there beside you to tell you what to do next, to tell you what the next stage of the process is. This is like writing down the recipe.
Assuming you paid attention during the lesson you should be able to go home and the next day, the ideal time for a first practice, should see you laying out all the ingredients and reviewing the recipe. You won't manage to 'bake the cake', or perfect the piece in this practice session but you will review what we did in the lesson- but crucially without the teacher there to help you. By the end of this session you should have a good idea of what work needs doing- where the difficult parts of the piece. Back to our cake analogy, you have written out the recipe and prepared all your ingredients. Now you are ready to bake.
The second time you practice you will spend the first few minutes reviewing, and then you can get stuck in to working, section by section at improving the piece. You will weigh out the ingredients, mix them according to the recipe and pour the batter into the tin ready to go into the oven. By the end of this practice session the music should be starting to flow and it should be getting less effortful to get every note out. The piece is not yet ready to perform but it is definitely improving.
Practice session 3 is when you take the cake out the oven and get ready to decorate. You are now perfecting the piece and getting to the point of fluency. Now is when you should try and play the piece all the way through, so that you can see which sections still need work. Then you can go back and work on any tricky parts to bring them up to speed.
The fourth and final practice session is the cherry on top. Can you manage without it? Yes! Is it even better with it? Absolutely! This fourth and final practice of the week should help you really get the music under your skin so that when you play it in your next lesson you are really relaxed and confident about the music. You should be able to walk into the lesson, excited to show your teacher what you have achieved!
Obviously this is a very idealistic version of how practice works. Sometimes you will have a really easy piece and it won't take that long to master. Sometimes you will have a real challenge and you won't finish a piece in a week. But this theory, linking one lesson to the next, helping you to make the most of your practice time, to have realistic expectations of what stage each practice session should bring you to, and to understand WHY you need to practice on multiple days is the point of the blog.
I hope this helps you to feel motivated and I look forward to hearing your new piece next week!
