The following excerpt provides some valuable tips on making your individual music practice time efficient and productive.

 

 

Music teachers are very important for anybody who is trying to become a better musician, but teachers cannot make you a better musician; they can only tell you how to improve. The actual improvement, you have to do yourself, and mostly on your own time.

 

Your lesson time is when you show your teacher how you are doing at the moment, and the teacher will tell you what you need to work on next, and how to work on it. You don't really have time to practice or improve during your lesson, only to get the insight into how to improve. Your group rehearsal times (band, orchestra, choir) are mainly for the improvement of the group and for practicing playing together. Performances are for letting everyone enjoy the progress you have made. You should enjoy them, too, and not have to be worried about the technical details of the music. Even if you show up for every lesson, rehearsal and performance, you will have no time to improve! Individual music practice is absolutely necessary if you want to become a better musician.

 

It is important not just to practice, but to practice well. You can practice daily and still make very slow progress if you are not practicing well. The following is a brief section from Schmidt-Jones' article on "working on the hard stuff and improving as fast as possible". 

 

 

Don't practice it wrong! Don't play wrong notes, leave notes out, or play the wrong rhythms, This just teaches you to play it wrong. If it's too difficult to play right, slow it down enough that you can play all the notes in rhythm, correctly, no matter how slow this is. When you can play it correctly slowly, being to speed it up, but never practice it at a speed that you can't handle.

 

Don't just play through your music. Skip the easy parts; they're easy! Find the hard parts, slow them down, and practice them until you can play them right at the right tempo.

 

If there is something you just can't play at all (a high note, for example), make it part of your warm-up. Find an exercise that makes it easier to get to that note and do it every day the easy way until it really is.....easy!