Transform Your Practice: Keeping a Practice Journal

Yes, it's true: An unprepossessing 3x5 inch notebook can become the most important tool in your musical arsenal.

It’s called a practice journal, and if you use it thoughtfully, it can increase the effectiveness, efficiency, and joyfulness of your practice!

A practice journal serves multiple functions:  It keeps you accountable, tracks your progress, and helps you chart your course.  It can also evolve into a resource you can refer back to later for ideas and inspiration.

The physical form of the practice journal can vary. I use a small notebook- easy to open, carry, and modify.  I’m not picky about the cover, but if you’re a visual person, having a beautiful object might increase your chances of using it.  You could also use a word doc or note-taking software as a journal.  There’s even an app- though I find it to be more limiting than free-form journaling.

Whatever it looks like, a successful practice journal allows you to tracks several things:

• Time:  When did you practice?  For how long?  I typically jot down my start and end times.  Why track your time?  It's not meant to be punitive or shaming.  Rather, tracking is one of the best ways to motivate yourself.  It's also yields valuable information.  Try jotting a few notes about how you felt prior to and during practice.  You may discover patterns in your practice: perhaps you practice with more energy after dinner, for example, as opposed to before you've eaten.
• Target: What’s your goal?  Writing down what you’re trying to work on, whether it be for the task, hour, week, month, or year, helps you focus your energies and harness your attention. Some goals I’ve set recently include improving my clef reading and brushing up on RV 443. 
• Task: What did you practice?  Ideally, your tasks should relate closely to your targets.  I might make a note that I practiced reading tenor cleft excerpts for 10 minutes, e.g., or that I spent 5 minutes practicing the tricky bit in the Vivaldi at half time.
• Thoughts:  How did go? What did you learn?  If I discover something in the course of my practice that will be helpful to remember, things I tried that I want to avoid or amplify, I jot them down.  Reflecting on my practice helps me refine it.  It also helps my build on each day's practice moving forward.
• Tomorrow: At the end of each session’s entry, I make a note of what I want to accomplish the following day (or week, or month).  I might read a longer excerpt, or tick up my metronome marking, or make a note to listen with my score to a piece for an upcoming concert.
• Odds and Ends: This is optional, butI tend to use my journal as a place to jot down things I want to remember.  It might be a sonata want to play, or a recording I want to listen to, or something somebody said that was extremely helpful.  I star these kinds of entries so that I can flip back through my journal and quickly locate ideas, inspiration, and advice. 

Happy Journaling!

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Better Playing in Five Minutes! No, really!

One of the joys -and frustrations- of learning any musical instrument is that it takes time. Improving your playing is a journey requiring sustained energy, effort, and attention.  It’s a wonderful, and lifelong, process.

But what if you only have five minutes?  On some days and in some seasons of life, that’s all we have. Can you still improve?

The answer is a resounding yes!  Try one of these five ways to improve your playing… in less time than it takes to read this article.

Check your posture.  The way you stand or sit has an enormous impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of your breathing.  It also affects your range of motion, the angle of your ai rstream, your resonance, the degree of tension in your hands and throat- even your mood.  Use a mirror to help guide you, and aim to stack your shoulders over your hips.  Your head should feel as if it is suspended by a string attached to its crown, and your chin should tip neither up nor down.  Your recorder should tilt at approximately a 45 degree angle from vertical.

Vibrate.  Play a note, concentrating on the points of contact between your instrument and your fingertips.  Can you feel vibration? If you can’t, you’re probably gripping the instrument with more force than you need.  Optimize the ease of your motion by keeping your fingers loose.

Begin.  Even if you don’t have time to finish a piece, you have time to start it. Practice putting your best foot (finger?) forward by being purposeful about your inhalation.  You want a loose, efficient inhale with a relaxed chest and throat.  You also want to make sure you’re breathing in time with the piece you’re about to start, as if you were cuing yourself.  Practicing this skill will help you to implement it automatically when you need it- like in performance.

Listen.  Listening to other recorder players can jumpstart your practicing, show you new possibilities, and introduce you to new repertoire. Pick something you’re working on or try something you’ve never heard before.  Listen deliberately, with your full attention, and the score in front of you if possible.   Take notes.  What do you like?  What don’t you like?  What would you like to emulate?  Youtube has a wealth of good (and bad!) recorder music.  If you’re a member of Early Music America, the Naxos Music Library is free to stream on EMA’s webpage.

Journal.  Keeping a practice journal can transform your practice.  It helps you track your progress, set goals, stay accountable, and keep track of things you’ve learned and things want to learn.  Any small notebook or other method of recording will do.  If you’ve got five minutes today, spend them purchasing or re-purposing a practice journal or practice journal app.  Then write your first entry: Today- bought a practice journal!

Grow your recorder playing: Blog RSS