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It's great to have fun while playing. Actually, performing should be mostly fun. However, playing an instrument is a skills and needs to be learned. To find the right way to practice is one of the most important things but also the one that takes very long to figure out. I've met top players who told me about their recent struggles to make their practice more efficient. In this article, I'd like to share three of my key observations on the subject.
Regularity:
Most important and often neglected. Ideally, anyone who aspires to be a good player, practices every day. Especially with string instruments, one day of missed practice means two days of catching up. Of course, once you've reached a certain level, you'll be able to perform so-so if you miss out one day, but don't expect to make a lot of progress if you don't get the habit of practicing regularly. Generally speaking, it's much more useful to play half an hour every day than three and a half hours once a week.
Slow tempo:
Right, we all like showing off. Even when we're on our own! The thrill of just taking the instrument and playing something fast to prove to ourselves we can make it, is very tempting. But we need to resist that temptation. Playing fast doesn't teach us to play right. It's good to learn to, well, play fast, but everything needs to be practiced at slow tempos, so that we can concentrate on not only playing the right notes, but also usage of bow, quality of sound, intonation etc. You will see after a while that it does make a difference.
Be analytical:
One of the reasons, why we are meant to sit down on our own and play music, is that we need to analyze possible difficulties we have, improve the quality of our performance and find ways to achieve a better performance in general. For that, we need to be able to not only spot mistakes or areas for improvement, but also to be able to isolate them and practice them as seperate technical problems. (Although our practice doesn't always necessarily need to be meant to improve our technical abilities)
Take position exchanges on the cello. To be able to learn a tasteful and smooth octave exchange on one string, it is necessary to take the lower and higher note and practice them to and fro unless we're quite happy with the the exchange. This also goes for much less difficult parts, like a simple phrase, that we just wish to play better. It can be very tiring but it's very efficient.
There is a lot you can do to improve the effectivness of practice. For me, it has always been useful to consistently seperate the practice and the performance 'mode'. In the performance mode, you shouldn't be too worried about technical or intonation issues, in the practice mode, these things are to be dealt with. Therefore, practicing slowly helps you being analytical and regularity enables our muscles to remember what we're pracitcing.
