Practise makes perfect. Perfectly insane. (Suzanne)

I really really need to start practising more. Faculty of Music guidelines state that you should be practising at least 3-4 hours a day, and right now I’m averaging about two and a half. It’s not enough, both in terms of the amount of hours, and in terms of the progress I’m making. I have the time to do it, but I really don’t like the idea of cutting out sleep, or downtime, because I feel that if you don’t take short breaks between productive activity, you suffer bigtime from diminishing returns, not to mention risk your sanity.

I’m also kind of wondering how I should structure my practise time, really. Back in high school I did music in my spare time, so it wasn’t really a big deal — I’d practise all my major and minor scales and arpeggios, legato only, for half an hour, then I’d work on a piece for an hour, and spend another half an hour on miscellaneous stuff like a second piece, or a study, or some orchestra stuff. But here there’s just so much to practise; even if I did practise four hours daily every day, I still wouldn’t be able to fit everything in.

Anyway, I have a tendency to plan things in blogs because typing it out when under the impression that I have to explain it to someone else helps me think. You can totally ignore the rest of this post because it’s really just a brain dump that has no relevance to anyone other than me. And yes, it sounds kind of creepily organised, but it’s not, I rarely ever actually follow any of my plans, but it still really helps just to think about it all, even if I never refer to it again, just so that I have the psychological effect of knowing that it is actually possible to get it done.

The list of things I have to practise goes something like this:
1) All major and minor scales, arpeggios, and broken chords. Legato, staccato, and two types of mixed articulation (if I did this all in one practise session, it would take two and a half hours. I’ve tried. And I wanted to shoot myself out of boredom afterwards, so I think I’ll definitely have to spread this out over multiple sessions across a week)

2) Two etudes for the technical exam (half an hour each for decent progress)

3) Two orchestral excerpts for the technical exam (don’t know how long these’ll take because we haven’t been told what to prepare yet)

4) Real orchestral material, for orchestra. (one hour to make a decent amount of progress)

5) Pieces which I’m learning for fun, for concert class performances, as possible choices for end of year recital, and college tutorials (an hour each, and I’m currently working on two or three, but all are fairly low priority at the moment)

6) Miscellaneous material for woodwind class projects (I’m just going to pick things which overlap with the rest of the goals to save time, so this should at most be 15 extra minutes)

7) Aural studies solfege and rhythm exercises, which I set aside 20-30 minutes a day for (the lecturer recommends ten minutes a day, but I am truly and totally terrible at both solfege and rhythm, so I like to spend extra time since it’s not a huge time commitment anyway)

8) Warm ups and cool downs, because if you don’t do these before practise, especially as a wind player, you run the very real risk of all sorts of nasty health problems, like repetitive strain injuries and orthodontal problems.

9) Random noisemaking. Just for fun, because I think it’s important to have fun 🙂

So if I were to do all that in one session, I would need a practise room for about 6-7 hours a day. That would be problematic because:
a) Practise room overcrowding means that I probably wouldn’t be able to find a room for that long unless I practised at the Berkeley Street or Royal Parade practise block at 3 am in the morning.
b) If I actually did 6 hours a day, I’d probably flunk out of law.
c) Most of the readily available practise rooms feel like coffins because they’re small padded rooms which have no windows or sources of ventilation.

Clearly, I have to spread it out:
a) All scales, arpeggios, and broken chords, in one type of articulation per day (1 hour, but usually takes up to half an hour longer because sometime during the broken chords my attention span ends and I end up thinking about what to eat for lunch instead)
b) One etude (half an hour)
c) Orchestra work and orchestral excerpts (half an hour)
d) A piece (half an hour)
e) Block of time allocated to anything else that needs immediate attention (45 minutes)
f) Various break times and warmup times.

which means that I need access to a practise room for about four hours a day, and that I’ll actually be practising for about three and a quarter hours + warmup + random noisemaking. Ideally I have to spread this throughout the day, because it actually does take a very long time to fully get over being tired from practise, so maybe I’ll split it into four one hour sessions, two hours in the afternoon, and two hours in the evening. (Almost all my lectures are in the morning on Mon-Thu. It’s a pity, because I’m most awake about an hour after breakfast, and as much as I appreciate being awake for a discussion on formalism and procedural legality in the law every morning, I really would like that extra level of concentration for practise too)