It's the start of a new term, a new academic year and a new season of performances. Autumn is a time of year where I've always found myself with a lot of new music to learn for various ensembles, and some of it is really hard!

But practising parts can be so dull. Especially as a violist when you will generally have more notes to play than almost any other section of the orchestra, and hardly any of those notes will be the tune!

My questions to you:
How do you prepare yourself for playing in your particular ensemble?
How do you learn and practise your parts?
How do you target the trickiest sections to make best use of your limited practice time?
How do you motivate yourself to practise the difficult but tedious sections?

Hoping to pick up some good tips....

The amount I do is very dependent on how hard the part is and how long I've got. During the rehearsals I try to mark on the part where there is a bit with a technical challenge or is exposed. Often these are the only bits that get practised. If I have time I will get hold of a score or multiple recordings of the work to see how my part interacts with others.

I find the most important aspect is to know how your part fits into the work as a whole so listening to recordings of the pieces is really valuable. You can even play along with a recording (it can work well with headphones, since it makes the recording sound louder than your own sound so makes playing along easy). This is easy these days with so much available on youtube.

Also by hearing the recording you can work out which of the more difficult sections are most important to get accurate, or which are well covered and you can get away with bluffing so long as you stay well in the right place.

If practise time is limited, then you can use time like when sitting on trains to practise through rhythms in your head, marking up beats where needed etc. Lots can be achieved without actually playing.

I find these techniques most productive for being comfortable within the orchestral or ensemble situation. I sympathise with boring viola parts. Being a flute player, it may be far more difficult to find opportunities to play in orchestras, but at least our parts are more satisfying when played alone!

I have a very good ear and listen to an awful lot of classical music - generally, if I'm playing something in an orchestra, I know how it should sound and where my part fits in. I'm always amazed by the number of people who can play a hideously wrong note and just have no idea that it's wrong! So orchestrally I tend to work on the things that are technically a pig.

However, for choral works (and those works that I DON'T know well orchestrally) I will have the CD on in the car to and from work (that's a total of 6 hours a week) until I have internalised the piece and the music holds no surprises. This is clearly a bit more "real" practice for singing than for playing, but I think that properly understanding the music is the key to playing it well, and the reason that I tend to pick things up very quickly is that I listen to lots of music and have a good memory. So that dead time on the train etc is a good way to get music under your skin and enable you to concentrate on the noise you produce when you get to perform it rather than blind panic for the notes.

yep....me too.

My sight reading is pretty good so I tend to only the practice the problematic parts.

How I practice depends on what the particular problem is:
1. Not being able to play the notes - usually I find there is only a few lines where this is particularly bad, so normal approach of playing slowly with metronome and speeding up. Someone on here mentioned the technique of 10 coins - every time you play it right you move a coin across, if you get it wrong all the coins go back to the start. It is very frustrating as it is amazing how many times you get it wrong on repeat number 9... But it is also very effective, and I've found it a good motivator for getting through the tedious bits. I tend to use it on short (2 to 4 bar) phrases.
2. Tricky rhythm - tapping out with metronome or listenign to recording nad trying to tap the part out to that. Often only takes one or two practice sessions to get it in my head.
3. Not being able to fit the part to the rest of the ensemble. Listening to recordings tends to help with this. Or a separate rehearsal, in our last concert I had a bit that played off against the clarinet that I was really struggling to get right. The conductor took us aside for 20 minutes or so at the start of one of the rehearsals and we managed to sort it out.

I usually put aside 10/ 15 minutes at the end of my normal practice for orchestra stuff, and I tend to just play through the trickiest bits in each piece rather than through whole pieces.

There's some good tips here, thanks folks. Some I already use and one or two are new to me, despite having played in various ensembles for over 20 years. Including what to actually do with a score on the odd occasion I manage to get my hands on one - thanks CJB.

Whoa, flobiano, 10 repetitions in a row, all correct? I admire your stamina! I do a similar thing without coins, but I only insist on 3 consecutive correct plays. That's quite hard enough.

I shall have to try listening to different recordings of the same piece for the next concert. Usually I am lazy and once I have got my hands on a CD, I just listen to that one recording. Youtube is my friend....

I only joined an orchestra in May, but I think I have used nearly all the tips above, so Me Too .

I like to try and count my bars rest while listening to a CD, which is sometimes quite hard as you cannot see the conductor's beat to check, and I like to try and note down something important that happens during them, to give me a clue if I lose count when playing. In a Mozart Symphony, we flautists had an 8 bar rest, followed by a 19 bar rest which was repeated. So I put a mark in just saying "15" and when The Old Lady saw it she asked me what it meant. I said that "something happens there" and when she asked "what?" I couldn't remember, so I just said that she would know when it happened. It was the start of four bars in a minor key . I think it was then that she called me a swot!

I also play along to a CD with headphones on - strange looks from people who look in the window. I don't always do this to the whole work, but occasionally I do allow the full time needed to go from start to finish. I use a metronome, practise the hard bits and try and get familiar with the complete work, I keep copies of the CDs in my car - so nothng new to add.

But.....it is all so exciting that I honestly don't think of it as hard work.

Gosh, this is a sensitive topic right now.

On Tuesday the first flautist (who is one of the best in our little orchestra) and I came in for a particularly hard tongue-lashing as we were sight-reading Dvorak's Slavonic Dance No.1. Our timing and pulse seemed to be a it off and we made each other worse, deteriorating as we got more and more anxious.

I could do with flobiano's sightreading skills!

I do some variations on the above. I have no idea whether it's a good thing to do or not but last year I learned my Fireworks part (a humble 3rd oboe) by playing along with a CD - without headphones, much to my mother's utter dismay (she doesn't like Handel). I also like to get a look at the full score if I can.

Our conductor (also my oboe teacher) is now insisting that we attempt to read at speed and not slow down, even for the difficult bits. He recommends taking one note at a time if necessary. Another variation on that is to play, for example, just the first couple of notes of each bar and gradually add more. It does seem to work but I must confess that at home I do sometimes slow down so I can work out how the notes and rhythms fit together. I mostly do as flobiano does, just concentrate on the difficult parts.

Another tactic for, say, a rather fast difficult phrase is to try playing the notes in a more complicated rhythm so that when you go back to the original it seems easy ( ).

None of this helps the viola player's conundrum, of how to practice dull accompaniment parts , I'm afraid (except maybe the CD accompaniment idea)*. A useful approach some of us in the orchestra have is to try to meet by section or in small groups in between rehearsals to practice. That also helps with finding out how things fit together. Sometimes you think you've worked it out on your own but when you play together at rehearsal it all falls apart because somebody else's syncopation or whatever put you off the beat.

Where "something important" happens, as gedall40 says, I find I have to pencil something in on my part, at least until I know the piece well enough eg. "flutes arpeggios..." or whatever. I am told that actually one doesn't really have time to read and absorb this while playing but I find it helps me, even if it's a sort of placebo effect for my over-anxious sub-conscious.

* I discovered that Windows Media Player has an option to slow down or speed up a track and it doesn't appear to affect pitch. I haven't often used it but it could be pretty useful for practicing. I don't believe iTunes has a function like that unfortunately.

Ok, to put my original post into context, I've been playing in ensembles of various kinds for near enough 25 years. I have average sight-reading skills, so what I really need is to motivate myself to practice my parts, as I know how beneficial it is.

My current orchestra typically has its first rehearsal a week before the concert. That's right, an amateur orchestra, one week's preparation. I tend to get my parts a couple of weeks before that, but it's not until we've got stuck into rehearsals that I've got "into" the pieces enough that I actually want to practice my parts (and when you work full-time there isn't much available practice time between first batch of rehearsals and final batch). Each time I turn up to the first rehearsal and groan inwardly, knowing how much practising would have helped both my playing and my enjoyment of it, and still most times I fail to prepare adequately.

I am hoping that a couple of your tips will help me to focus. Even if I don't manage to cover every bar of my part before rehearsals, there are a few techniques I could now use that should make a big difference, and maybe other people reading this can benefit too!

To add a tip of my own, I read up on the pieces as far as I can before the first rehearsal. Understanding something about the context of the music (example Shostakovich), the composer's state of mind (example Schumann) or the story described by the music (any programme music/tone poem) brings it to life and gives it greater meaning.

Good tip about Windows Media Player, thanks Katica. I didn't know you could make it slow down. I'm a big fan of practising slowly. Speed is the one thing I genuinely feel it's ok to compromise on if you've got to concentrate on a really difficult bit.

I'm with you here! Ensemble playing is one of the most exciting things I have the privilege of doing. And it is a privilege, which is why I need to look at all possible ways of giving it my best shot. If that includes asking basic questions after a quarter of a century, then so be it!

I've found myself in that situation more than once. Often without the luxuary of having
the music in advance. Under those circumstances I try to listen to the work lots listening out for any prominent clarinet moments (assuming I'm on cl that is). In the rehearsal I mark the buts that went wrong with a star at begining and end of the awkward bit. I also mark accidentals in if there were any oops moments.

Probably the most important thing I do is to put an appointment with my clarinet into my diary to avoid life overtaking. In an emergancy I've been known to take a day off just for resolving the issues.

Exactly what I am doing right now!!! But not easy if you are viola-mad with a week's notice!

I like the "date with my oboe" idea - I need to that more often.

By the way, I'm sorry if this is a bit but maybe viola-mad or other other violists could recommend some viola repertoire to listen to? If I played a string instrument I think it would be the viola and oddly enough I see there are some other oboists with viola inclinations... But I only ever hear the viola accompanying except for the odd solo passage in ensemble pieces. I'd be very happy to expand my music library...

Actually, I have also been known to take the odd day off work in the run-up to a concert. Sometimes it is the only way of thieving back some time for practice!!

I would recommend starting with Elgar's Alassio. Ok, it's orchestral, but it has the most beautiful (and quite long) viola solo in the middle of it. There's stacks of stuff for solo viola, but it can be difficult to get hold of recordings. In terms of what is moderately easy to get hold of, there's a disc called English Music for Viola, I think it's on Hyperion Helios. That's got a nice selection of short pieces, mostly 19th/20th century. Otherwise, raid Youtube for the following pieces which are core viola repertoire: Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata, Brahms Eb Sonata op120 (same as for Clarinet) or Eccles G Minor sonata.

Ah, everybody loves the viola really. It's just that most of them are scared of the jokes.