Everyone says practice makes perfect, but not all practice is created equal.
Simply playing for hours without focus won’t yield the best results, and practicing incorrectly or ineffectively could actually set bad habits in place and create frustration along the way.
In order to get the most out of your practice sessions and make them more enjoyable overall, we put together a few key strategies and tips:
1. Set Clear Goals
Before you start, decide what you want to accomplish short term and long term. Whether it's mastering a difficult passage in the next week, improving your timing overall, or learning a new technique, having a clear goal in mind for each session or batch of practice sessions helps keep you focused and improves effectiveness with each session.
2. Warm Up Properly
Just like athletes stretch before a workout, musicians need to warm up too! Simple exercises, scales, or breathing techniques will prepare your fingers, hands, and mind for an effective session. Don't jump right into a difficult piece of music without giving yourself a little time to warm up and practice more familiar techniques.
3. Use Focused, Short Sessions
Instead of practicing for hours with low concentration, break your sessions into shorter, more focused segments (think 25-45 minutes). Take short breaks to stay fresh and prevent burnout. If you need to practice for hours at a time, make sure that you give yourself a few minutes to step away every hour, so you can jump back in feeling refreshed and ready to keep practicing during those longer stretches. We all know they are necessary every once and a while, especially before a bigger performance!
4. Slow Down and Be Precise
Rushing through difficult sections leads to mistakes. It just makes sense! Play at a slower tempo, tackling those difficult measures (or entire pieces) slowly but surely. Once you play it accurately at a slower pace, gradually increasing your speed until it feels natural. Muscle memory works best when built correctly from the start.
5. Isolate Problem Areas
Instead of playing a song from beginning to end repeatedly, identify challenging sections and work on them individually, over and over and over again. Once mastered, integrate them back into the full piece and pat yourself on the back for tackling the trickiest part!
6. Record Yourself
It might feel uncomfortable at first, but we are our own best critics! Listening to recordings of your playing can reveal mistakes you might not notice in the moment. It’s a great way to track progress and refine your performance, and adds a great before and after sense of accomplishment.
7. Stay Engaged and Have Fun
While discipline is the key to successfully mastering an instrument, sometimes a little variation is helpful. Incorporate new material, improvisation, or different styles of music to keep things interesting - never be afraid to try something new! Who knows it could lead to a great musical breakthrough.
8. End on a High Note
Wrap up your session by playing something you enjoy or reviewing what you’ve improved on. This reinforces a sense of accomplishment and makes you look forward to the next practice.
Tips for Practicing Woodwinds
- Long Tone Exercises – Focus on producing a clear, steady sound by focusing on long tones. This helps with breath control and embouchure stability.
- Overtone Practice – Improve your tone and flexibility by working on overtone exercises, especially for saxophones and clarinets.
- Articulation Work – Experiment with different tonguing techniques (light staccato, legato tonguing) to improve clarity and precision.
- Breath Support Drills – Use breath exercises to build stamina and control, especially for sustaining long phrases.
Tips for Horn Players
- Lip Slurs – Brass players benefit greatly from lip slurs to develop flexibility and control between partials.
- Buzzing Exercises – Practicing on the mouthpiece alone helps refine pitch accuracy and airflow control. Plus, you can do this on the go, hands free!
- Dynamic Control – Work on soft playing as much as loud playing to develop a full range of expressive capabilities. This is often overlooked but is essential for capturing the intention of every piece of music.
- Tuning Awareness – Horns require careful attention to tuning adjustments using hand position and embouchure. Make sure your trumpet is in tune before every practice session to avoid frustration, and to improve your own tone identification skills!
We hope that these practice strategies are helpful! By applying these methods, your practice sessions will become more efficient and rewarding, helping you grow as a musician faster and with greater confidence. Here's to making music!
