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June 2, 2007 at 12:27 AM

Reading my blogs today, I came across The Collaborative Piano Blog, who's post from the 31st of May talks about 15 ways to add 10 minutes practice into your day. This comes off the back of a LifeDev post on the Power of 10 minutes.
Chris Foley, from The Collaborative Piano Blog, comes up with some interesting ways to spend 10 minutes. While focussed towards the piano, there is always material that translates well to other instruments. Here's my list of 15, adapted for the violin.

1. Warm up with Technical excercises. Kreutzer, Rode, Wohlfart etc


2. Warm up by jumping to the part that is making your life difficult


3. Warm up by playing a piece with the most beautiful sound that you can make. (Though choose a piece where it's appropriate)


4. Sight read!


5. Review memorisation for a piece or passage


6. Review by ultra-slow practicing of a passage


7. Play a difficult passage with as many different interpretations as you can think of


8. Play a passage focussing on your left hand only - fingers landing in the right spot, intonation, vibrato, shifting etc


9. Play a passage focussing on your right hand only - is the bow straight? is it in the right position on the string, are you in the right part of the bow, should you be playing on or off the string, would it be better as Up-Down-Up-Down or Up-Up-Up-Down?


10. Sing your part


11. Visualise a passage, then play. Repeat


12. Visualise a passage without doing any playing


13. Play a piece in a completely different style to the piece that you're working on


14. Play through some repertoire related to what you're playing. Eg if you're playing a Mozart Concerto, take a look at the other Mozart Concertos, and perhaps the Haydn Concertos


15. Take a cool down. Easy technical work, sight-reading, or a piece you enjoy playing.

Rather similar to the original list, I agree. But many of the things we do in music are the same across the board. One of my lecturers tells the story about how the teacher he learnt the most from wasn't actually a classical cellist, but a jazz trumpeter. There are common threads across all instruments, it's just the technical details that are different.

This same lecturer was talking to me yesterday about the use of channels. Basically, the idea was that our brains have difficulty focussing on more than one thing at once. And we also have difficulty focussing on one thing when we have distractions. His suggestion was to try and practice focussing on only one aspect, and then switch to a different channel. For example, for scales, his channels might be:

1. Straight Bow


2. Fingers land in the right spot


3. Strong tone


4. Fingers adjust when not in the right spot

And that would be it. He would then go through a scale, and the first run through he would only be focussed on a straight bow. If his intonation was shonky, that wouldn't matter, so long as his bow was straight. Then he would focus on getting his fingers to land in the right spot, and not adjusting if it was out. Then play with a strong tone, Then adjust his fingers if they were out.
The idea behind this is to focus your work on one area, rather than spreading your focus across the many different areas. 5 minutes spent focussing on one area with 100% of your attention is much more likely to be helpful than half an hour with your attention spread between 5 different areas.

Reposted from Top Left Hand Page