Double bassist and blogger Joe Lewis wrote a post yesterday that raised some very good questions. He writes:
I’ve often thought much about efficiency when practicing music. I used to park myself in a practice room from dawn until midnight back at NEC and even before then. I would break my practice routines down into 15 minute increments, and have it all laid out on a schedule. Practice would occur for anywhere from 4 to 12 hours per day, including breaks of course. I was nuts, and obsessed. What can I say?
Nowadays time is limited. I have a day job. I have a family. I have classes that I take at night. But I remain obsessed. After the homework is done and the kids are in bed, I might have anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours to practice on any given weekday. What do you practice when time is limited?
This is an excellent question–I have grappled with this problem for a long time. The older you get, the 
more booked up your time becomes. I remember fondly my years spent while in music school, locked away in a practice room for the entire day. My favorite kind of day consisted of practice from morning until night. I would head over to the music school with a lunch and a book.
- 9-12 a.m. – scales, etudes, Sevcik bowing studies
- 12-1 p.m. – lunch
- 1-3 p.m. – Bottesini, Bach, other solo repertoire
- 3-4 p.m. – take a walk outside and stretch out
- 4-6 p.m. – orchestral repertoire
- 6-7 p.m. – coffee and muffin from the student union
- 7-9 p.m. – more orchestral repertoire
I’d then go out with friends and blow off some steam, feeling totally satisfied from my long day of practice.
Fast forward a few years, and I suddenly found those nine hours of practice dwindling down to two or three. Orchestra rehearsals, teaching, and other commitments have a way of eating away at your available practice time, until you find that instead of four relaxed practice sessions, you only have one relatively rushed practice session.
This limited time calls for much more efficiency. Instead of spreading out skill development over an entire day, with three hours devoted to technique, another three or four to orchestral repertoire, and still more to solo music, it is now necessary to cram all that work into one session.
While there is likely a good deal of less-than-efficient practicing in the aforementioned nine hour practice day, there is something to be said for really taking the time to allow a skill to develop and not rushing it. I know that those long days helped me immensely, preparing me for the more limited practice time I would face later in life.
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Here’s the sticky question: how do you cope with even more limited time? What if you only have 15 or 20 minutes a day to practice? Is there any hope of improvement, or even basic skill maintenance? I’ll chime in on this topic in a future post (I’ve definitely got some strategies), but I’d love to hear thoughts from readers on practice schedule strategies and lengths.
Related Posts:
- Musical life in the “zone”
- Why do so many bassists blog?
- Recent posts about musical life
- Why I’m a jazz player – post from Bill Harrison
- Ira Gold on practicing (audio)
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I don’t think that it is possible for an adult to make any improvement on 15-20 minutes of daily practice when playing a stringed instrument. Some kids manage to do it, which might have something to do with being children.
If you have a considerable amount of technique already, it is possible to maintain a functional level of technique on an hour or so of a mix of Sevcik, Dounis (for violin), carefully-chosen etudes, and solo Bach. After an hour of focused technical practice, I like to believe that every additional amount of practice time contributes to improvement rather than simply subsistence.
Jason, your schedule above sounds frighteningly close to what I used to do back in the early days… 😉
The 9 hour practice schedule is definitely far in the past for me–it’s probably been 10 years since I put in one of those sessions. Still, I think that there’s something to be said for an all-day practice session (with lots of breaks) here and there, although, like Matt Heller mentioned, I wouldn’t make a practice of it.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve practiced more than three hours in one day. It’s been years…..
Ditto – maybe 12 years for me since pulling a day like that. I actually would map out my practice sessions in detailed little schedules beforehand – 5 minutes of some certain exercise, 10 minutes of this etude, 20 minutes of that solo, and then on to the excerpts. The breaks tended to be longer than any actual playing of course…
Nowadays I’m happy to find a 2 hour chunk of time to devote to practicing, and I find myself practicing in a far different manner. Before, I would map out a laundry list of things I had to take care of, and not stop until I had every single item checked off. Now due to time constraints I am far more selective about what I’m going to work on, and similar to what Matt discussed, I tend to go straight for focused spots that need tending to rather than playing through something.
I have also found a great tool for checking myself by doing periodic recordings of whatever I am working on. This gives you the chance to play through something start to finish, but has the added benefit of making you a bit self-conscious, and you can play it back for yourself to hear The Truth™ and pick out what things you need to work on next time.
Looking for the ideal practice routine, I’ve found y’all on this site. My only difference is that that I pick the 5-string banjo. I’ve recntly broke my foot and can’t work, so I’m home with much practice time on my hands. I’ve been doing these all day sessions spoken about and my fingers have been really in shape. When I started playing 35 years ago, I was a lost kid who did nothing but pick a banjo after the death of my mother. Although I did not structure my practice sessions, I literally carried my banjo on my back everywhere I went and constantly played. As I put in this sort of dedication today, I find myself getting very happy with my picking, even as my hands are getting older and stiffer. I suppose the moral of the story is “The more you play the better you sound”. Rich Gulya
I’d say that even if you can’t spend all day practicing, every bit helps even if it takes longer to get there. I read somewhere that virtuoso players have usually invested 10000 hrs in their skill. I’m way too old to make that kind of investment, but I still feel I’m progressing. When I’m pushed for time I used to find I’d try to do as much as possible and skip through things. I found a better approach was to make a plan for what I’d do and try to achieve over a couple of weeks. I found it better to say spend a 1/2 hour practice just working on intonation one day, scales the next, master first 8 bars of a piece the next and so on. And also be able to stop when you’ve done your bit. Over time it really does add up.