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Consistency is Key

It is very important that practicing becomes a HABIT. Nobody has time to practice. Nobody has time to get to the gym. Nobody has time to… If you find yourself telling yourself that you don’t have time to do something that you’ve decided is important to you and you have a goal, then you have to MAKE the time to do it. It’s just that simple. Decide a certain part of the day will be the time that you dedicated to giving your instrument some love. Even if you are not perfect or the practice session isn’t as long as you think it should be, the fact that you are putting some time in, really adds up!

Play Everything Correctly as Many Times as You Can

It’s money in the bank! This is how your brain learns. Never make the error of practicing until you get something right. Practicing everything until you can’t get it wrong. The reasoning is very simple. If you play something 9 times wrong and then on the 10th time you play it correctly, you have effectively reinforced the incorrect way 9X more than the correct way. This is why you can get stuck on difficult passages that never seem to improve. Start slow, and gradually build speed. Here are some other very important characteristics of effective practice that I will be covering more in future videos:

• It’s very important to warm up. You need a good warm up routine. You need to warm up your mind and your body. Scales and technically less difficult repertoire are perfect for this.
• Use a metronome. The metronome is perfect. All great players use a metronome. The more you incorporate the perfection of the metronome into your practicing, the more perfection you will see in what you play.
• Slow practice = fast practice: Be patient! It’s important to start slow and build speed. Make sure you can play something perfectly at least 3X in a row before you build speed.
• Endurance = taking breaks. The human mind can only retain absolute focus for a certain period of time. Even the best of us can only keep a high level of concentration for about 45 min. Take a 5 or 10 min break after every 45 minutes of playing. Perhaps even more. If you are not focused, you are wasting your time.

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People often call Kennedy Violins and ask about how to take care of their violin. My response is usually to tell them that there is not a lot they have to do, other than wiping off the excess rosin after every practice session so it doesn’t have a chance to build up. However, where a person lives can have a substantial impact on not only the sound quality but the playability of their instrument, and also whether the parts of the violin stay glued together or not.

Excessive humidity can cause your instrument parts to warp and come unglued. But more people have to concern themselves with excessively dry air damaging their instrument. The larger your instrument, the more it is affected by changing humidity conditions so, if you play guitar, cello or base, you have to pay particular attention to the water content in the air. However, living in a temperate area will not get you off the hook.  If you live in an area that gets cold in the winter time, you should pay attention to the air quality your stringed instrument is subjected to. Often people in colder climates will keep their home furnaces on 24/7 and the result is very dry air. This can be the death of your instrument, especially if it’s a cello or bass. When wood does not have enough water in it, it shrinks, and if it contracts enough, it can crack.

At some point in a stringed instrument’s life, its ribs will start to separate from the top and bottom plates of the instrument because of changing humidity conditions. This is caused by the constant expansion and contraction of the violin parts. Initially, the hairline seams that develop between the ribs and plates are not noticeable to the naked eye, but the sound quality and responsiveness of the violin will be noticeably hindered to the trained ear.

Gluing the plates back to the ribs is a simple repair and isn’t terribly expensive. However, if left unchecked, stringed instruments like basses and cellos can develop cracks on their tops and backs and not only are these repairs expensive but often times will render the instrument unrepairable when considering the cost to correct the problem. If you have concerns about existing damage to your instrument, contact the shop and we can do an assessment.

The good news is, it is very easy and inexpensive to control the humidity conditions that your stringed instrument is subjected to.  A simple device like the Dampit brand humidifier can be placed in the F-hole of your stringed instrument when it is not in use and it will release a small amount of humidity into your violin, viola, cello or bass that will keep it from getting too dry. Boveda and D’Addario also have humidity-control products. You have to re-wet them everyday or every other day, depending on humidity conditions and they will last a long time. These devices even come with a handy paper humidity gauge, to give you an idea of what the water content of the air is. However, the easiest thing to do, is to just purchase a violin case with a built in hygrometer gauge.

Violin Case Hygrometer Gauge

Every once in a while, simply have a look at the gauge to check the humidity content in the air.  The ideal humidity is around 35%-60%. As long as you keep your instrument in this range, you are probably fine. Rapidly changing humidity conditions can be quite hard on your stringed instrument as well, so using a product like the Dampit can even out the humidity swings when you have to use your instrument in different venues and are unable to control the conditions to which your stringed instrument is subjected.

Simply paying attention to the air quality around your stringed instrument and using inexpensive devices like humidifier tubes, will ensure that your instrument will sound good, stay in tune, play well and will not need repair for many years!

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Everybody knows that if you want to be better at anything, you need to practice. Most people would also agree that while practicing is good, practicing more is better.  It’s also quite obvious that more accomplished musicians practice more than the people who are not accomplished musicians.

However, what many people are not aware of, is that talent plays a very small role in the overall success of any person wanting to master an instrument. Many studies have been conducted and what they show overwhelmingly, is that the amount of hours of practice and HOW you practice, will determine your success.

As a viola teacher, I’ve had the pleasure of instructing many students over the years. I assumed when I first started, as most people do, that the level of talent that a student had would probably determine how well they would comprehend my instruction, and also determine the level of their charismatic performance abilities.  After a few years of teaching and seeing many students travel through my pedagogical system, it became very obvious to me that the sheer amount of hours that were put into practicing made the biggest impact on success. If a student put in many hours of practice, pretty much every aspect of the learning process was easier.

The second thing that I learned a little farther down the road in my teaching career was that the virtuosic level a student achieved, had a lot to do with the material that I had them practice.  More and more I found that if I gave the student very targeted exercises utilizing scales, arpeggios and etudes, they became much more technically proficient at their instrument. In turn, this greatly assisted them in being able to learn just about any piece and it made the entire learning process easier and more fun.  As I became more experienced, I developed my own step by step systems to enable any student to master advanced techniques through a very controlled process. I directed them to work on specific techniques repeatedly until they could accomplish the exercise with ease. After I developed my own focused exercises for a particular technique, it became increasingly obvious that how much a student practiced was not nearly as important as HOW they practiced. The practice sessions and materials needed to be focused, specific and repeated until perfection was almost an imminent outcome.

Little did I know at the time, but I had stumbled upon a phenomenon known as deliberate practice.  I found it related to the concepts in Geoff Colvin’s book entitled Talent is Overrated, in which the author goes into great detail about the benefits of practicing a lot and practicing properly.  He sites study after study in which it is proven beyond a doubt that mastering an instrument or anything else in life, is achieved by practicing a lot and practicing deliberately.  He also shows that any natural proclivity that a student may have towards a given task, has little effect on the overall success of the student.

To be more specific about what deliberate practice is, I will give a few real world examples.  If you set out to learn a concerto, you could play a page at a time and play the page over and over again.  You’d repeat the page until you reached the point at which you felt it’s finally acceptable to perform or that you’ve reached the point at which you can’t improve it anymore. This practice technique will yield results and you will improve your ability to play that particular page.  However, this is a very inefficient way to practice and while it may eventually make you a better player, it will never enable you to master your instrument. To truly master the piece as well as your instrument, you’ll want to take a particular measure and practice it until you’ve mastered the particular technique that it is requesting of you.  For example, if you have several measures that have trills, make sure you know exactly what note the trill starts on AND ends with and practice the trill over and over again until it is controlled and consistent. After you’ve practiced it over and over again, and can play it consistently without fault, play the same measure but in context with the rest of the page.  Play several measures before and after it, to make sure your mind can properly transition from one technique to the other without musical interruption. Let’s say you have a few measures where you have to play a descending scale with off the string spicatto stroke. Instead of playing the line over and over again that includes the spicatto section, practice your spicatto on a note or two on a string of your choice and practice it until it is clear, controlled and relaxed. Next, practice just the passage with the spicatto technique and play it until it is just as clear, controlled and relaxed as the single note spicatto that you just practiced.  Once you’ve mastered this, add the measures before and after the spicatto passage and you will have mastered the entire section and will not have to be filled with fear when it comes up in your solo performance.

Regarding spicatto specifically, I have about 9 exercises that I give students when it is time for them to learn spicatto.  The exercises are always done with a metronome. They start off with a very simple exercise. First they play a 2 octave scale and bounce every note 4 times.  Their goal is to reach a certain speed of stroke, clarity and relaxation during play. Once they’ve mastered this, they go on to a 3 octave scale. The next exercise will be a little harder.  They will slur two notes and play the next two up bow and go up and down the 3 octave scale. There are many exercises after this. Each exercise practices a very specific bowing technique that they will assuredly come across in their solo and orchestral repertoire and when they see it, they will be ready for it.

The point of all of this is, you want to practice A LOT. You can’t get anywhere without it.  Studies have shown that the average best players at most conservatories practice 25-28 hours per week and there are NO exceptions. If you want to master your instrument, this is what you’ll have to do.  However, making sure that your practice focuses on very specific techniques, will ensure that you are practicing deliberately. Remember, an amateur practices a passage until they get it right. A professional practices a passage until they can’t get it wrong…

Happy practicing!

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