Life Skills
Up the ante – plan your practice!
One of my students recently asked me how he could get the most out of his practice sessions. My last two posts dealt with this to some extent: honestly evaluate your practicing, and make sure you put in enough correct repetitions to outweigh the mistakes. I've also written about scheduling everything to make sure that you have a plan for when you're going to practice (and do everything else). Now you can really up the ante on all this by coming into each practice session with a plan. Most of...
How we learn
In my last post, I addressed how honestly evaluating your practice gets you to the goal of being able to play your piece faster than just trying to play your piece at tempo. Understanding how we learn works hand in hand with this honest self-evaluation. Whenever we do anything (play a phrase, brush our teeth, walk from one spot to the other), it creates a groove in the brain. When we repeat that action, it solidifies that groove. If we don’t repeat that action, the groove fades away. So if...
Counting your Practice Calories
If you’ve ever been down the road of counting calories to manage your weight, you may have learned a valuable lesson about practicing. Colin and I both had a similar experience early on in our calorie counting journeys. We were using an app (MyFitnessPal) to log everything we ate. And then the temptation arose just to eat a bite or two of something small, and because it was small, why bother going through all the trouble of logging it? We very quickly rejected that temptation and laughed at...
Learning to adult
New experiences are hard. Transitions are hard. Probably the hardest transition I experienced was the transition from being a student to not being a student anymore. After elementary school, middle school, high school, undergraduate school, and graduate school, I had spent the majority of my life in school. Even though each stage was slightly different, I was very comfortable with how to be in school. Teachers set deadlines on assignments. Recitals came with a series of...
Going paperless
Although I am a lover of organization, I do tend to find myself going through cycles with paper. Paper is hard to keep organized and being so thin, the mess sneaks up on you. “Oh, it’s just one piece of paper, I don’t want to deal with it right now” turns into a stack of papers so quickly! Those stacks tend to accumulate in regular places: the piano, the coffee table, the kitchen counter, the den counter, my desk, Luke’s table. In addition to the 15-20 minutes I...
Vacationing as a freelancer
The need to unplug is real. Overwork is real. I have always been a proponent of the work hard, play hard theory. But as previously mentioned, I am a serial over-committer, so I’m probably overdoing it (on both sides!). In the last post, I talked about adjusting goals as a way to deal with burnout. During the school year, I tend to work up to the point where 12 hour days become normal. Then when the semester ends, I tend to flip to the complete opposite end of the spectrum where I seek...
Stay flexible with your goals
Have you ever had trouble meeting a goal? Near the end of the UofL spring semester this year, I got an email from a competition. I thought, why not? I spent a couple of days picking out repertoire and then once the semester was over, I launched into practicing. My teaching load was still fairly heavy, but I was able to work in 2-4 hours of practicing/day. I got a few more emails from other competitions for which I could use the same program. Excellent! Then I got...
How to avoid losing your voice
While most instrumentalists fear overuse and the muscle pain associated with it, vocalists see overuse manifest itself in them losing their voices. Again, the best defense is good technique, but illness or overuse will compromise even the best technique. My favorite tactics to avoid losing my voice (and/or recover quickly from losing my voice) are: 1- Drink water Keep those folds lubricated! Your body needs an obscene amount of water just to function anyway, so just keep drinking...
How to recover from overuse
I’ve written several articles about practicing now. As you increase the number of hours spent at your instrument, you increase your risk of injury. The number 1 defense against this is good technique, yet even if you have great technique, you can still find yourself the victim of an overuse injury (the most common injury among musicians!). While I wish this on no one, if this has happened to you, the list below is my go-to recovery guide. Having said that, I also...
The importance of processes
So in my last 2 posts, I shared the processes that I have developed for score study, practicing piano, and practicing singing. These are very specific processes that are only applicable to musicians. But developing processes in general is a very important tactic that anyone can utilize to optimize their time. For example, I have a couple of post-its up in my bathroom. They have been up so long they lost their sticky long ago, but they are attached by a magnet to the bottom right corner of...