Practice with strategies!!!

    Music is a performing art and it needs discipline practice to ensure the quality of the performances. It will be an endless beginning of a long session of practice, if you chosen to become a professional musician in the future. People spend most of their time to practice their instrument, but the time you spend on the instrument will not guarantee the result that you expected. So what we need to do is get the right strategy that works perfectly on you and have more productive practices.

    We run a little survey among the schoolmate and listed out the 3 most effective strategies for practicing. This is the 3 I get in my list: plan/organize your practice, do fundamental practice and be patient during practice. I noticed that all of them didn’t mention anything regards to technique or even musicality. This reflects that there is no direct way to achieve good technique and musicality, it have to keep practicing and it will come slowly.

    The most effective strategy out of 3 of them is plan/organize your practice; it’s 27.8% from the total, more then a quarter. Actually this is quite true that planning your practice session is something very essential and important. The benefit from this is you save up a lot of time and it allowed you to work more pieces in one practice session. Draft out what you need to practice and what you want to practice and organize the time accordingly.  Set a target for every practice to make sure you can focus on one thing and drill on it. This method allowed you to tackle down what you want achieve in a day and it’s also a good time management practice as well.

     Following that is work on the fundamentals; it stands 16.7% out of the total. When we talk about fundamentals, it refers to long tone, scales and arpeggios. We should know that the tallest building in the world built on the strongest fundamental of the world. This applied to the music playing as well. Stronger basics will bring you further in your playing. 99% of the music in the world is created from scales and arpeggios, work more on the basic is a one stone two birds strategy.

    Finally is being patient when you practice, which are 11% of them. Mastery of your temper is one of the most important things to succeed in your life. Being patient is the only key to achieve perfection in your playing.  Just like you plan a seed into the soil, and you need to take care of the seed and make sure it will grow healthily. You may never know when the flower going to blossom and when will the harvest season arrive, things for sure is if you wait it will happen. Don’t stop practicing when you meet an obstacle, find out the problem and practice patiently is the best solution.

    To conclude myself, there is no shortcut to the success. We have to work hard and smart in the same time. Give a try to any positive advice on practice and some of them may works on you. Be a smart musician and make your practice session easier!