Violin Practice Fundamentals, part 5: Wood shedding

Let the Wood Shedding Begin

It wasn’t until I was well into my first year of college when the weekly assignments of scales, etudes, sonatas…grew to what seemed like unmanageable amounts. There weren’t enough hours in the day to practice everything. One of the most important skills I learned was how to woodshed. The concept was pretty simple: practice a very small chunk of music over and over until you get it right. In a word: repetition. It wasn’t until graduate school however, that I realized mere repetition was just not sufficient to exact the kind of progress I wanted to see happen. I had to refine the good old-fashioned wood shedding technique by infusing it with heightened awareness and mindfulness.

Violin Practice Fundamentals, part 4: Mental Bookmarking

Practicing in many ways is an opportunity for self-care. As our own compassionate audience member, we are forgiving, yet exacting. Non-judgmental, yet objectively critical. In this next stage of practice, we pull back from the hyper-focused roll of team coach and take a seat on the bleachers. As we watch the game we assess the bigger picture. What is the overall score and where do we need to concentrate our efforts? Now we assess the weaker links of the team to be later subjected to the rigors of wood-shedding.

Violin Practice Fundamentals, part 3: Thoughtful Anticipation

It's still not time to speed it up yet! The previous step was the input process, where we fired thoughts in succession, giving our arms and fingers necessary information to "know" what to do. However, knowing what to do and being able to do it are two different things. Now we start honing the ability to think ahead. This is the stage I refer to as "thoughtful anticipation" where we are able to think the next action before we get there and can prepare our technique to refine execution.

Violin Practice Fundamentals, part 2: How Slow Can You Go?

Everyone knows that slow practice is critical to learning difficult passages in a piece of music. The problem is that slow practice becomes tedious and boring very quickly, so we perfunctorily slow down for a spell then move on. But before long, we find that we're not improving at the rate we would like to, so we revisit the notion of "slowing down".

For the violinist, any passage of music usually involves a myriad techniques occurring at the same time, and there is no way to pay attention to everything at once.
For me, slowing a difficult spot down to crawling tempi allows ample time for mentation and execution.

I call the the first step of slow practice the "identification" step, where we give ourselves the time to input each tiny piece of data required to play a particular passage well.





Techniques:
String Crossings
Interval Relationships
Intonation
Bow Distribution
Articulation
etc.....

Violin Practice Fundamentals, part 1: Find Your Comfort Quotient Number

Prologue:

It has taken a good many years for me to hone good practice techniques, and even still I have much to learn. My earliest memories of practicing were “playing through” my Suzuki songs, one by one, with my mom accompanying me on the piano. My childhood practice methods didn’t extend to any degree of critical listening or reflection, much less thoughtful repetition.

My great “AHA” moment came when I was in middle school. It was the day before our studio recital and I had the stark realization that I couldn’t play through my recital piece without stumbles and hesitations. It was then, out of sheer desperation, that I finally did what I’m sure my teacher had been professing for years: I practiced. I actually remember dividing the piece into sections repeating each one many times until I got it right. EUREKA! It worked! My teacher said the next day after the recital, “I’m surprised you played it that well. You must have really practiced.” I assumed she meant I must have practiced hours and hours. In reality it was a relatively short session, (about an hour and a half, maybe), just a very focused one! Now had that experience truly become the pivotal moment where all the tried and true methods of efficient practice had become an institution of daily life, I would be a far better player than I am now. Sadly, it took a good many more years to rehabilitate old, ineffective habits.

Fast -forward about 30 years. As a teacher I’ve come to realize the importance of guiding a student through the practice process. I frequently "practice" with them in the lesson. We call those days " boot camp". It's kind of like the old adage: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. The following blog entries cover what I feel to be the basic principles of good practice habits.

Part 1: Ratings System: the Comfort Quotient Number

You’ve found a piece you would like to play. It’s a little beyond your present abilities. You could start at the beginning working your way through the snags as they appear. But as an intelligent person you already know it’s more efficient to find the biggest tangles first and proportion much of your time on them. The problem is that there usually are many tricky places. In the following videos I share my little system to determine those places of highest priority.

Step 1: Find Your CQ 10



Step 2: Ranking for Highest Priority