Music Tip

Practice advice from Sean Bray

www.myspace.com/guitaristseanbray

Practicing something is an art unto itself. A person can practice incorrectly for hours and achieve almost nothing. I am a firm believer in keeping a practice journal and being very specific in what you are  going to practice. Our minds work better in intervals and retain much more information when given a task to achieve and then a break.

Here are some tips I give my students to help them get the most out of their time and effort with regards to practicing.

• Practise in short intervals. You will learn a lot more if you break up your days practice into small determined intervals. No daydreaming allowed!! In the journal that you are keeping map out what you are planning to achieve over the span of the week. Break up your day’s practise into small intervals of ten minutes or so to start. In that ten minutes focus on the one thing you are trying to achieve. Let’s say for example your major scales. Within that ten minutes of focused practicing play that scale numerous times at various tempos. Of course always practise with a metronome. The next ten minutes (after a break of course) work on something else like a piece of music or a couple of bars of a piece of music.
• Practise while watching television. Yes you read this correctly. Obviously not all of your practicing can be done this way but you can achieve a lot while engaging your mind with something else. You can play that scale with the proper technique or those arpeggios over and over again without driving yourself crazy as you are engaging your mind in another activity. This helps work on muscle memory. You will only get better on an instrument if you are playing it all the time.
• Log how many focused hours you practice a week. It’s a good motivator to try and beat that score the next week.
• I tell my students to practice two ways. First, Practice Practice which means practicing the piece of music or scale/arpeggio a few notes at a time and getting them under your fingers. Repeating bars to really understand them. Second type of practicing I call Performance Practice, which is playing the piece or scale/ arpeggio from beginning to end in tempo (even if it’s really slow but constant). This is really important because it teaches you about performing. Even if you make a bunch of mistakes keep going and get to the end in tempo. Then you go back and Practice Practice the parts you messed up on.

Good Luck and enjoy the musical journey. Playing an instrument is the best thing in the world. Have fun.

Located in Toronto, Elite Music Academy is a private music school offering music lessons in diverse instruments including acoustic, electric and classical guitar. To book a free consultation call the main desk at 416 406 5355 ext 1.