Practice Tip: What Does a Practice Session look like?
Expert tip from our Faculty
March 7th, 2020
Editor: Erin Cano, Violin and Viola
A good practice session is like a delicious meal. Imagine when you practice that you are sitting down to a fancy dinner. You might have an appetizer, a soup course, a salad course, a main dish with a few sides, and a dessert. A meal like this is planned out very carefully, to make sure that there’s room for everything.
When we’re practicing, our “courses” are warm-ups, scales, etudes, review, new music, and sight reading. Your teacher can help you come up with which courses are right for you. For a treat, as your dessert try improvising or seeing if you can pick out the melody to a song you love. Just like a great chef plans their meals carefully, you can decide how much time you want to spend each day on each of those sections. Maybe you want to do five minutes of warm ups, five minutes of scales, ten minutes of review, and ten minutes on your new piece. Or maybe you’re practicing four hours a day and you want to spend forty five minutes on each course!
Enjoy your practicing the way you enjoy your delicious meal–savor each bite, and watch how many things you can learn at once with just a little bit of work each day!