I'm about to reveal some serious secrets on becoming a spectacular musician. If you're a serious musician then practicing is essential for improvement, you need to develop your strengths in order to accomplish tough feats. Some musicians are gifted enough to improve on some aspects of their musicianship without any sort of formal practice, but in the end, in order to fix bad habits, improve your technique, and strengthen your musical mind practicing is essential. Not only that, but practicing will help you improve that much faster. I've created an infamous "top 10 list" on ways you can make your practice time more effective.
1. Set goals for the amount of time you need to practice - I'm not going to say that there is a set amount of time every musician must practice. When you're starting out, maybe a 1/2 hour a day, 3-4 days a week is all you can handle mentally and physically. As a professional musician, my ideal goal is to practice at least 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. Sometimes, life gets in the way and that doesn't always happen, but that's what I personally strive for. You should at least give yourself enough time to warm-up, focus on a few aspects of your playing, and maybe a time to reflect on what to work on for your next session.
2. Prepare a written schedule - I know that I work best when things are either physically written out or typed up in a document or spreadsheet. It helps me maintain focus on my goals because life can sometimes be distracting. I create a matrix that consists of every day of the week and what I want to focus on that day and how much time to spend on it. For example, on Monday, I may choose to warm up for 15 minutes, work on alternate picking for 1/2 hour, work on minor 7th chord inversions for another 1/2 hour, and 45 minutes learning that difficult Paul Gilbert song that just came out. And so on...
3. Practice consistently - This is one aspect of practicing that I try to instill in all of my students. So many times I have a student come in and say "I didn't do much practicing this week but I did get 2 hours in on Saturday." Bad bad bad! Practicing a lot only one or two days a week is not very effective. In the academic world, this is known as "cramming". No, it's much better to practice 30 minutes a days for 5 days in a row than it is to practice 2.5 hours in one day and wait a week to practice again. It keeps ideas fresh in your mind and also helps your muscles get used to working.
4. Play with a metronome - I always use a metronome when I practice. It's going almost constantly. This has helped me develop exceptional time, and because I play in a lot of bands, timing is essential because I need to sync with other musicians. Not only does a metronome help you keep time but it helps you better understand beat subdivisions. Believe it or not, a lot of musicians cannot smoothly transition between 16th notes, triplets, and eighth notes. Forget about more obscure polyrhythms like quintuplets and septuplets. Technique-wise, a metronome has helped me master speed and other techniques much faster. If a metronome drives you crazy, consider investing in a drum machine instead. You can also utilize online metronomes such as http://www.metronomeonline.com
5. Practice slowly - Regarding the metronome, if you're having trouble with certain sections of a piece, slow it down and gradually build it up. Those slower tempos are going to be the most crucial because that's the range where you're learning how to mentally handle those difficult passages. As you move the tempo up, the mental focus turns more into physical focus. I believe that this is the most efficient method for learning difficult passages effectively. When I was a kid, I would spend hours learning those rapid George Lynch 16th note triplet guitar fragments. Now, with the use of my metronome and slowing things down, I can learn those type of things in 1/2 hour! I use a wonderful piece of software called Guitar Pro that has this nifty speed trainer feature where I can select the percentage of the actual speed to play a notation file back at.
6. Have a method to your madness - All of the previous points allude to this idea. Don't just go into a practice session blindly. Know how you're going to conquer what you're trying to learn. Whether is using the slow down method, repeating something many times, etc, come up with a way that works. One method I that I learned from Steve Vai to lay down 5 pennies somewhere at your practice space. When you play the passage you're working on perfectly, you can eliminate one penny. If you make a mistake, you have to put all of the pennies back. Repeat until all of the pennies have been eliminated. Then you can consider yourself a master of that passage. Another method I use to learn overall difficult pieces is to spend a day or two learning only one measure at a time. The next day I'll learn two measures at a time. Then 4, then 8, and so on.
7. Work on your weaknesses - Isn't that what practicing is all about anyways? When I was younger and not as wise, I used to practice a lot of things that I already knew because it was more fun and it made me feel more confident. But that isn't very effective. You should practice the things you struggle with. My motto is "If you don't have a headache when you're done with a session, you're not doing it right." Practice should sometimes be frustrating because you should be challenging yourself.
8. Isolate difficult sections - Say you're learning the latest Beethoven piece (let's use Fur Elise as our example) and you're grooving along just fine on the exposition (the introduction for us laymen) which everybody who touches the piano eventually learns. You hit the key change to F major and everything is fine, but then all of a sudden, you get to those 32nd notes and you're thinking "This is it. This is too difficult. I'm through." Well, maybe instead of working on the introduction, which you already know life the back of your hand, it's time to spend some time on the 32nd note section. You can use the methods I mentioned above to pinpoint and improve on your weaknesses that stop you from moving past this section.
9. Practice progressively - In college, when I was taking Euphonium lessons from the accomplished Richard Frazier, I was introduced to the "Arban's Complete Method for Trumpet". What an awesome book! It's the bible of brass technique. Since buying the book, I've applied it to my guitar, bass, piano, chapman stick, etc playing. Despite being written for the trumpet, it seems to work for every instrument. It's a book that sections off various techniques and give you hundreds of exercises for each of those techniques. Each section starts off easy and gets progressively more difficult. By the time you've hit the last exercise of the section, you're pretty much a master of that technique. This is what I mean by practicing progressively.
10. Read a book - Practicing doesn't always have to be physical. Music is just as much a mental activity as it is physical. Of course, you should read books about music. Read about theory, composers, history, and more. I've just finished a book called "Jazz Theory" by Mark Levine. Now that I'm done with this excellent book, I will apply the ideas to my own playing. Reading will help you gain ideas and insight into your own playing. You just practiced without touching an instrument!
