Mental Approach to Practice

There is a common cliché when people talk about practise – ‘it’s the quality that’s important, not the quantity’, but how can you go about achieving a high quality of practice?

I believe that the style of practice that you employ should not be the same every time you enter the practice room and you should avoid elaborate routines where you bash through the same sequence of work day after day without engaging your mind and actively thinking about how to improve your playing.  Speaking from my own experience, there are days when my mind is on other things and I am not feeling particularly creative, so I might choose to find some technical studies that require little musical thought, but can improve areas of my technique that I might be struggling with.  By doing this, I can still achieve something from a day’s practice even though I am not necessarily in the ideal mental state.

The next day, I might be feeling inspired, having listened to some music I love, or been part of a particularly productive rehearsal but maybe I am less than 100% physically after spending so long on yesterday's technical studies.  In this situation, I could choose to take some simple tuneful melodies, for example a hymn tune or something similar, and spend some of my practice time working on musical phrasing and expression.  Despite feeling tired after a hard days practising yesterday, I have still managed to work around this problem and achieve something significant with my time in the practise room.

If I had chosen to swap the contents of these two days worth of practice, on the first day my mind would have been wandering and there would have been little chance of me managing to create a convincing musical line which would have left me very frustrated and on the second day, I would have potentially lost my musical inspiration and been left disinterested in my instrument leading to me being less interested in practising the next day.

The most important thing about practice is to take one aspect of your playing and improve it and I believe that one of the key decisions that can lead to a high quality of practice is choosing which aspect of our playing we attempt to improve.  Making a sensible decision about what you are capable of practising effectively on a particular day will not only lead to more effective practising, but is also likely to lead to more enjoyable practice and a better relationship with your instrument.