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Do you ever wonder if you are doing the correct amount of practice? Do you hear of people who are doing much more than you ever would have thought of doing? How often have you assumed that because someone does more practice than you that they are a better player than you?
Fear not! Whilst you do need to practise to get better at your instrument, too much practise is not neccesarily a good thing. As applies to so much in the world; the rule is "quality, not quantity".
All too often, students sit down to practise and end up simply playing through the piece they are learning from start to finish. This achieves nothing apart from certain boredom! In your practice, try to isolate any particular problems that arise when you are playing the piece and tackle them head on. Do not skip over these areas as they will not simply iron themselves out. In a way, we should all strive to be our own teacher - I am still working at this! Pretend your teacher is sitting in the corner listening to your practise and you are aiming to pick up on any problems before he or she gets a chance to! At the end of the day, we are all still learning and never stop learning, so if you do encounter any problems that you don't know how to solve, ask your teacher and they will be impressed that it is you asking them the questions.
To finish, I once heard a famous violinist saying that he believed practice and happiness go hand in hand; that is to say that if you do good quality practice then this makes you happy, which then encourages you to practise more which makes you more happy. This obviously works the other way, in that if you do bad practise then you do not feel satisfied, which then causes you to be unhappy and less likely to want to practise. All in all, I believe that good quality practice provides good results, and if we spent half of the normal time practising that we do but did concentrated quality practice, then the results would be startling.
