Not thinking so much in terms of "nagging parents" or "an impending exam" here, but in terms of what things you do that make it easier to fit practice into your routine, avoid procrastinating or just simply make it more likely that you'll actually do some.

I've found that the easier I make it to just pick up an instrument and play, the more likely I am to do so. I took one of my music stands down a couple of weeks ago to take somewhere and I didn't put it back up again when I got home. It's the one that my clarinet lives next to and my current clarinet music usually sits out on the stand. How much clarinet practice have I done in the last fortnight? Hardly any. I've played through a couple of things, balancing the music on my desk or wherever, but that's all.

And, stupid as it sounds, I find that not dumping stuff (my rucksack, a pile of library books, whatever it is I've walked in carrying) on the chair by the piano (often the first available space other than floor that I come to) makes me more likely to do piano practice. If there's piles of stuff on the chair, I'll have to move them to practice. I know that sounds incredibly lazy, but I think it's more of a psychological thing - if the chair is empty it's almost like an invitation to sit down for a moment and play a bit, which then usually turns into rather more than a moment.

Would only take me a few seconds to put my music stand up, or clear stuff off the chair, but /not/ having to do even those tiny things makes me far more inclined to practice. As for having to get an instrument out of its case or dig out the relevent sheet music - no way! I have to keep instruments and music out and ready to use.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who does this!

What other really silly things do you find make a big difference to the likelihood of your practising?

My practice is completely haphazard (in terms of when I do it, how often, how long for - not in terms of what I do once I'm actually practicing, which is usually fairly sensible and structured) for everything apart from organ (which has to be deliberate as it involves making the trip to a church and, in some cases, pre-booking the timeslot or arranging to collect a key).

T.

hi i am lucky in the fact that the spare room houses all the music instruments stands and cd player and not alot else ( if you dont look at the futon and book case ) so i can leave music out ready to play but usually dont strangly

i havent had a lesson till last week from the end of june and still played every day so its not lessons that make me pratice.

i think i should follow a more structured pratice time i do try long notes and scales but all too soon get tempted to play nice pieces

I am more inclined to practise if I do it as soon as I get in from work, rather than leaving it until I'm about to go to bed. I know it sounds obvious, but so often I put off practising until 'later' because I have other, more pressing things to do. I am more motivated to practise the piano if the piano lid is left up, rather than being shut... as for the violin, it works the same way in that if I can see the music left out, I start thinking about it and am then enthusiastic about practising.

I'm definitely practising properly this week as my teacher told me off for not rectifying something she had circled from my last lesson. Really I practice because I want to and I am excited about it. As far as piano goes, no excuse now, as there is a piano in the lounge and a keyboard in my bedroom.

What makes me NOT practice is a lack of direction. I don't know what to practice. I own an obscene amount of music (mostly secondhand, I add, like that's a good enough reason ) but I'm like a rabbit in the headlights when I come to practice. And how long do I practice a piece for? When's it 'ready'? What do I move on to next?

First lesson next week though What will then make me practise is havnig someone guiding me in what to be doing - and, of course, 'fear of teacher' being more powerful than 'fear of husband listening'!

I'm very bad at practicing. In my case, its largely because its so much hassle geeting my tuba out of its case and struggling to set everything up in limited space. My music teacher has had a break over the summer and I've been really missing lessons, so I've been practicing more, just because I've really wanted to.

I've been struggling to practise this summer because my clarinet and my spare were both broken! They both worked generally, but the niggling little faults just made me so unmotivated... Had a lesson yesterday, my teacher fixed one clarinet and I've some new music to work on! And today I have the other back in working order. So now I put them on the stand and just play..

Seriously though, I will HAVE to be organised this year, so I will practise as soon as I get in from school.

I have that problem with clarinet at the moment. I don't have lessons right now, I don't know what I ought to work on, I just know I need to keep playing it to build stamina and develop my embouchure, but I'm pretty aimless in terms of /what/ to play.

With organ, I can feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff I'm supposed to work on. I did over 4 hours in one session (with one quick pee break in the middle) earlier this week and didn't cover everything!
Organ gets my best practice though, as once I'm there I have no distractions and I know what I need to work on, so I just get stuck in and get through as much of it as I can before I get too cold/tired/hungry or have to be somewhere else or have to stop because the church is needed for something else.

Other instruments I have to make it very easy to just do odd bits of practice, which often turn into longer practice sessions.

One other thing I use (please don't laugh at me!) is colour-in charts for scales.
I know it's stupid, but I really like being able to colour in a little box on my chart. This is how I get through the nastier scale sets on flute. Not only that, but I do the nasty ones first to get them out the way, knowing that it means I'll be able to get several boxes really quickly and easily later on by doing the nice scale sets.
Yep, I have the motivational tendancies of a 5 year old! (If I got issued with a colour-in chart for tidying my room, or got given gold stars for unloading the dishwasher or taking the rubbish out, chores would get done with a lot less nagging.)

T.

Me too!

If it's a piece I really like/relate to, I have a tendency to go for it once the kids are in bed (poor saintly Mr LT! He has to put up with a lot from me.....) If it's a piece I'm really NOT keen on, I tend to give it a cursory bash only. My piano teacher has now virtually given up on trying to get me to practice those venomous pieces - so we use them for sight-reading practice instead as a compromise.
(Don't ask me about scales!)

I practise because I don't want to do anything else (homework, tidying etc)...! But I do like to though, especially if I have a public performance coming up

Practice for me is a chance to unwind from everything else - in order to play properly, I have to get myself into the right frame of mind, and that is automatically a de-stressor. Also, having made a lot of progress over the last few years, I know what did it, which helps me to want to do more.

And yes, having an exam, concert, or as was the case this year, a competition coming up certainly helps with focusing .

I always have the Oboe and Violin in it's case. Well, most of the time for oboe...

I need to do violin practice, but I don't do much at all...

Won't laugh at all - add in the motivational tendencies of a 61 year old. I write on a special calendar by the piano, the amount of time spent in practice. But this last month I have not done it because I have had to restrict my practice time while having treatment for a bad back. It is surprising just how it spurs me on when I know that I will be writing it down - and no-one will see it but me!

hi i struggle with scales and like the idea of colour scale charts can i ask where did you get yours from?

Midweek I need to practise pretty much as soon as I get home from work or there isn't really an opportunity. It can be difficult to get into the right frame of mind though, switching off from the stresses of work and commuting and on to the musical challenges. Comething I find helps with this is to listen to something motivating on my iPod on the way home - someone who's playing I aspire to, or several versions of a tune I'm working on, or put a solo I'm trying to transcribe on a loop. When I get home I'm ready to get my sax out and play.

I guess I'm a lazy instrumentalist! I haven't practiced my saxophone since the beginning of June - from the last day of Uni! I feel with my sax that I need a reason to practice, because I've been playing the instrument for such a long time now. With piano, I usually just wonder into Uni and sit and practice until I get fed up!

I just use a spreadsheet. Set up a table with C C# D Eb E etc. along the top of the columns and a wider blank column down the lefthand side in case I want to write dates or something. Border all the cells with a solid line, set the margins so that if I use a holepunch on it I'm not going to take chunks out of the chart itself. Then print it out. That's a nice general one that I can use for different instruments (anything where I'm doing scales in sets or in all keys). If you're going to practice every scale every day you could print it with days or dates in the row headings.

I also have another worksheet with more complicated charts that have the same column headings, but also have row headings for each type of scale/arpeggio and either marks in the cells to show which ones are on the syllabus or marks to show which ones are a 12th, which are an octave and down to the dominant, which are one or two octaves, etc. I tend to use those to keep track of what I've learned and what I need to learn, rather than what I'm practicing though.

I also have a chart of Reimenschneider (just 371 boxes with numbers in each), which I use to keep track of which ones I've used for sight-singing practice and could use to keep track of which ones I'd used for sight-transposition if I did it from that instead of out of a hymnbook.

You could just keep the chart on the computer and fill in the boxes there, but I like to have a paper copy and actually colour them in with coloured pencil. I don't think it would work for me at all if I didn't get to do the real colouring-in!

Hope that helps,
T.

It's true that something as simple as having to get an instrument out of it's case could be very offputting, silly as it sounds. In fact I'm impressed with all the people who manage to find the motivation to practise frequently when there's a lot of 'set up' involves, there's not the same ability to just sit down for a couple of minutes (and then usually get sucked in for a couple of hours ). I imagine it would alter the amount of practice I do adversely if I had to get out, set up and tune an instrument before starting....

It is the little things that make the difference.
Having my music stand permanently set up, with the right music on it and open (when I can decide what to practice ) is a great help.
Having my roll-bag with my recorders in actually unrolled and on the bed helps too, it's also a subtle warning to my husband that I'll be coming home and playng.
Definitely playing as soon as I get in from work - if I get sucked in to the computer, playing with the rats, tidying up the garden, pretty much anything else, then I won't play. I get in at about 4.35pm and dinner preparation starts at around 6pm - that hour and a nearly-a-half just disappears most days. If I practiced 4.45-5.15pm, I'd still have 45 minutes before dinner for other things!

One thing that I like about piano (sadly there aren't many!) is that, as well as being able to just sit down and start playing, the notes are all there and always sound the same.

On days when my breathing is poor and/or I'm snuffly, I know before I even pick up my flute that I'm going to sound rubbish. A few minutes of poor tone and inability to get the top notes saps my morale completely. I woke up this morning unable to breathe through my nose at all and although that's cleared a lot since, my breathing is shallow and I am /not/ looking forward to flute practice. I have asthma and allergic rhinitis, so this is not something that comes up just occasionally, like a cold.
Stupid thing is that regular practice helps control my asthma, so I know I should plough on regardless. But when I'm making a feeble sound, it's really demoralising. So I tend to practice less than I could (there are some days when I genuinely can't play because my breathing is really bad, but more often the issue is that I can play but it sounds pathetic and is a struggle, so I just wimp out), which can easily spiral into a viscious circle of worsening asthma leading to diminishing practice, leading to worsening asthma, leading to diminishing practice...
I'm usually pretty disciplined about it. But after I've had an asthma flare up (sometimes it just happens, no matter how good I've been about practice, avoiding triggers, etc), it's hard to get back to practicing again and the descent begins.

If I had to get my flute out of its case, find my flute music, etc. on top of getting past the "it's going to sound horrible, I don't want to do it" thing, I don't think I'd be touching my flute at all today. As it is, I'll keep seeing it sitting there ready and waiting, so at some point I'll pick it up and see how it sounds. Might get a pleasant surprise and, even if I don't, at least I'll play it a bit.

T.

When I go into the music room the first thing I generally see is the piano, sitting there with the lid open, music at the right page waiting to be played! It takes a fair amount of self-discipline to ignore the piano and open my violin case, get it out, tune it, retrieve the music stand from wherever it's gone, search the depths of the piano stool for the right music...On top of that, if I didn't actually enjoy practicing I doubt I would, or at least not as often.

When I can, I try to leave my violin 'set up' so that there's no hassle involved in playing it. Once you get away from the idea of 'having to practice for x amount of time', I think that's when you first begin to enjoy practicing, and if that means doing all I can to make it even more inviting then so be it!

I can totally sympathise

Agree about not having to practice for a certain amount of time. I think a lot of kids who are made to do that end up just doing 'busy work' - just playing over stuff without sorting out the mistakes or playing through stuff they already know well.
Much better to spend less time practicing, but use that time productively.

My practice on most things ranges from a few moments to over an hour. (If I do a few moments, I tend to do several small chunks spread through the day - like with flute I might pick it up and play one or two scale sets, then leave it a while, then do a few more scales later, then pick it up and play a piece or some orchestral studies, or just spend a few mins ripping apart a tricky phrase, so it all adds up.)

Organ, I usually do several hours at a time, but that's partly because of the logistics involved, partly because I have a lot more to work on and partly because it's my favourite instrument.
There are fewer distractions at church than at home too, which helps a lot.
The only thing that's sometimes a bit discouraging is when I have a whole bunch of new stuff to learn and even with lots of practice, none of it seems to be going anywhere. But what tends to happen is that after a couple of weeks, I can suddenly see a huge improvement in all of it, which gives me a real buzz. So, knowing that that's how it seems to work helps keep me motivated during the times when it feels as if I could practice forever and make no progress.

At the moment, piano practice is geared towards my exam - so mostly working on three pieces, the scales and doing some sight-reading. Not much to keep track of and, if I work sensibly, I can get through it all fairly quickly and still feel that I have actually made some progress (sorted out the fingering of an awkward section, improved the fluency of a difficult bar, improved some of the scales, etc).

Organ is all over the place:
technical work (scales, pedal exercises, studies, trio playing exercises, sight-reading)
service music (hymns, psalms, choral accompaniments)
pieces (exam pieces, voluntaries, keeping old ones up to standard, exploring new repertoire)
keyboard skills (sight-transposition, score-reading, keyboard harmony and improvisation).

Usually spend an hour or so on each section (apart from keyboard skills - I do sight-transposition in with service playing, score-reading in with technical work and the rest either doesn't happen or happens in 'general mess around' time once I'm done with everything else for the day).

Until I sorted it into systematic chunks like that, it was much more random and I felt completely swamped by what I needed to get through (specially as I can't do everything every time I practice, even for 2-3 hours). So I'd get home afterwards and tick stuff off in my practice log and realise how much stuff I hadn't done at all. Making it a bit more structured means that nothing gets neglected completely and I can vary the routine within each chunk so that things which don't get covered one session get done the next.

Disclaimer: I don't practice the organ every day! *grin*

"Little and often" is, in general, a good way to practice. 15 mins a day tends to be more benficial than 2 hours once a week, even though it adds up to less time in total.
But when you have to travel an hour's round-trip each time, it's not feasible. So I usually practice organ 2-3 times a week, though I'm trying to increase that to 4+. I want to get into a really good practice routine before the weather turns cold, cos it's going to take a lot more self-discipline to do it then!

T.

I tend to practice my flute more than my guitar as it's not as big or difficult to get it out. Having my music out, ready to play, doesnt make me practice more, but the Eh....no...OMG, please dont say I've got 7 minor seventh chords to learn for saturday!! does.

I practise because I absolutely LOVE playing the piano!! I make sure I do at least an hour a day, and always try to do more....so usually about 2 hours a day. I find that if I get up quite early to play the piano for an hour or two before doing anything else, then I get LOADS more practising done, because obviously I have more time in the day to do other stuff too (including more piano!).

I find that when I've got a new song to learn, or idea's for a song to learn, I practise more as I get very excited about it. My parents are more likely to force me off the piano as opposed to tell me to go and practise....and every lunch time (and spare moment) at school is spend in the music department on the piano's! (I'm sure the teachers must have a laugh of how we're always there EVERY lunchtime must have no other life!!! haha!)

And also I want to get to grade 8 before I leave school (3 years and I'm on grade 4!) so that I can go to Uni to get a music degree (and the Uni I want!).


XxX