17 Practice tips that skyrocket progress and instantly save you time.

Written by Michael O'Gieblyn
Published: March 14, 2014 at 11:04 PM [UTC]

I'm sorry to be interrupting your practicing. But I recently finished making a video on YouTube that I think you will find helpful. Plus I had a lot of fun making it.

This video covers 17 practice tips and tools that will diagnose and fix problems in a fraction of the time compared to basic repetition. This is because they force your brain and fingers to work so much harder than they need to, or want to.

If you start practicing with these tools, you will definitely boost your productivity, clean up messy passages, play more musically, and have so much free time to waste on Facebook (Or whatever your guilty pleasure is).

You can watch the video right here:

Be well and practice well.

Michael O'Gieblyn
www.ViolinExcerpts.com

From Bart Meijer
Posted on March 15, 2014 at 7:25 AM

Michael, thank you. I made a list of your tips, to put on the wall so I can see them while practicing.
Do you agree with the following summary?

Practice tools (Michael O’Gieblyn)

motto: practice running at high altitude to make things more difficult

1: Just Don’t Practice (won’t get you very far)

2: Mirror your hands
put both hands on the violin, and pizz with the same RH fingers your LH uses
later, do the same while bowing (difficult!)

3: Put your thing down, flip it, and reverse it
play the whole passage backwards (to check intonation)

4: Play the subdivisions
fill the rhythms out with the subdivisions

5: Practice piano passages forte

6: Use a metronome
make music together with it (!)
for example, put it on the off-beat

7: Practice melodic intervals as double stops

8: Change the Bowing
separate notes slurred – helps you stop freaking out about the bowing
slurred notes separate – helps achieve clarity

9: Practice the Skeleton
the shifts

10: Reverse Engineer It
Start at the end and work your way backwards

11: Whistle While you Work
whistle the note right before you play it

12: Add ghost (or guide) note in change of position
Zwolle

13: No Hands
sing it! points the way to phrasing

14: No Right Hand
strong LH in soft passages
think of upward motion of LH fingers

15: No Left Hand
only open strings

16: Planes
seven in number: G, D, A, E, GD, DA, AE
pause before string changes

17: Rhythms :
long-short-long-short
short-long-short-long
long-short-short-short. etc

Zwolle is a railway station in the Netherlands where one often changes trains. The metaphor is my teacher's.

From Zina Francisca
Posted on March 15, 2014 at 2:46 PM

@Bart
I wondered about Zwolle first, but now I see. Lost count of how many times I have changed trains there.

From Michael O'Gieblyn
Posted on March 17, 2014 at 3:14 PM

Hi Bart!

That's a great summary. You get the gold star for watching the whole video and taking notes :-)

I hope these have been helpful to you.
Thanks for watching.
-Michael

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17 Practice tips that skyrocket progress and instantly save you time.

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