Adaptable Practice Plans - Part 2

This is a simple follow up on my previous article. I had demonstrated how to approach each section of the practice plan, but I thought some further clarification is necessary on how to develop the plans for upcoming sessions. I have also made a print-out copy of the practice plan ready to fill in for your next practice session(s) which you can download here or use as a reference to make your own by hand.

Each category in the main practice plan is divided into sub-categories listed numerically, alphabetically, and in roman numerals.

For example, the section on arpeggio exercises is 4-D-II. 4 is Technique/theory, D is the sub-category of technical exercises, and II is the sub-sub-category of arpeggios.

So, to develop your upcoming plans. It helps to maintain this convention. So here is an example of the plan I have written for today's upcoming practice session:

1. Repertoire:

    A) Classical - Prelude in C Major, Solfeggietto in C minor.

2. Composition:

    A) Melody - Write a melody in D Major.

    B) Harmony - Write harmonies according to a 2-5-1 progression.

    C) Rhythm - Practice writing with tied and dotted notes.

3. Aural: 

    A) Chord progressions - Egao by Ikimonogakari, and Girlfriend by The Pillows.

    B) Melodies - Same as A.

    C) Riffs/phrases - The interlude riff from Vortex by Megadeth.

    D) Transcription - The intro melody to Rainmaker by Iron Maiden.

4. Technique and theory:

    A) Transposition and modulation - Solfeggietto in C minor, transposed to F minor.

    B) Harmonic analysis - Write the chord degrees of The Other Half by Within Temptation.

    C) Etudes - Czerny's School of Velocity exercise 1.   

    D) Technical exercises

        i. Scales - Write an exercise in D harmonic minor

        ii. Arpeggios - Write an arpeggio exercise using a DminMaj7 arpeggio.

    E) Sight-Reading - Pieces from Mikrokosmos by Bela Bartok.

    F) Metronome:

        i. Tempo - 75 BPM.

        ii. Time signature - 5/4.

        iii. Subdivision - Quavers.

5. Mental exercises:

    A) Visualisation.

        i. Instrument - Visualise the music in my mind on piano and guitar.

        ii. Notation - Visualise the music in my mind being transcribed, extra emphasis on tied and dotted notes.

        iii. Performance - Visualise myself busking.

        iv. Career - Visualise myself teaching one-on-one lessons.

    B) Hearing music in your mind - Allow any music to come to mind. Visualise it on piano, guitar, and being transcribed to notation.

    C) Positive affirmation - Remind yourself: "I love transcription, it is fun and easy", "Practice makes everything fun and easy".

    D) Journaling:

        i. Reflection - Write whatever is necessary post-practice.

        ii. Goals - Write thoughts on achieving fluency in reading, writing, and transcribing in musical notation.

    E) Imaginary practice - Imagine, visualise, and hear myself fluently reading, writing, and transcribing music.

Adaptable Practice Plans - Part 1

I recently devised a general practice plan, not only for myself but for others. You can download it here. This may not seem like much at first glance, but it is really something special when it is used as a framework to develop more specific practice plans adapted for each practice session.

In this article, I will demonstrate how to use this practice plan to optimise your individual practice sessions. It's pretty simple, as it essentially just boils down to writing down what you plan on practicing for your next session, and notating anything relevant.

Section 1 "Repertoire":

For repertoire, four categories are listed: Classical, jazz, music you like, and your original compositions. You can add or remove what ever style of music you prefer to work on, these are just suggestions that promote well-rounded musicianship.

An example of repertoire choices for an upcoming practice session could look like this:

• Classical:
• Solfeggietto in C minor by C.P.E Bach.
• Prelude in C major from The Well Tempered Clavier.
• Music I like:
• Plastic Love by Takeuchi Mariya.
• The End of This Chapter by Sonata Arctica.
• Originals:
• The Young Boy and the Little Muse.
• I'll Be Your Friend
• Happily Ever After

Those with a keen eye may have noticed I didn't choose any jazz repertoire like the general plan suggests. I purposely chose to omit something just to show that you don't need to practice every single thing every single time. It is up to you to create your own plans that work best for you in that given moment.

To augment your study and practice of new repertoire I highly suggest notating challenging passages and phrases to analyse, alter, and transpose to other keys.

Section 2 "Composition":

Composition doesn't need to be something complex. Just notating a bar or two of melody, a rhythmic pattern, or working on a chord progression, is a great start. With regular practice, this exercise naturally progresses into composing passages with greater depth, and that in turn progresses into composing entire pieces of music.

Here are some examples of what one might compose for the three compositional categories of melody, harmony, and rhythm:

Example of melodic composition:

Example of composing harmony:

CMaj7 - - - | Am7 - - - | Dm - - - | F - - - |

Example of composing rhythm:

Section 3 "Aural":

This is quite straight forward. Just try to try and translate what you hear musically onto the instrument, as a chord chart, a lead sheet, or as pure notation. 

Just a little bit of this practice often, in conjunction with other fields of practice, will sharpen your aural and transcription skills significantly.

Of course, this can't be done without choosing a song or a piece to study aurally. So it is vital that before your practice session, you write down the piece(s) you desire to study aurally in your practice journal as a reference.

Section 4 "Technique and Theory":

Transposition, harmonic analysis, etudes, and sight-reading practice are pretty straight forward. As usual, it is ideal to journal and notate your findings and ideas. Some examples could look like this:

Transposition examples:

• Play a minor 7th chord in all keys.
• Transpose the Prelude in C Major to D Major and F# Major.

Harmonic analysis example:

• Find the respective chord degrees for your original compositions.

Etude practice:

• School of Virtuosity Op 365 by Czerny - Exercise 3.
  

Sight-reading practice:

• Mikrokosmos by Bartok.

For technical exercises of scales and arpeggios, I highly suggest coming up with your own. This can be as simple as one or two bars of a scale or arpeggio pattern. I also suggest writing it in one key of your choice, but practicing it across all keys and discovering the most natural fingerings for each pattern.

Here are some examples:

A scale exercise in C Major:

An arpeggio exercise in C Major:

Metronome practice is also quite straight forward. Just choose a piece you have some familiarity with and alter the tempo. Faster is not necessarily better, as slowing down a piece may often reveal passages in which you have poor technique or excess tension which may then be resolved in order to play it more comfortably and with greater speed when it is appropriate.

Currently, I am working on my technique for Solfeggietto to ease the tension, build comfort, and increase the speed of my performance. This is achieved not only by incrementally increasing the tempo on the metronome, but also by playing at a slower tempo to refine the areas that I often rush and play hastily.

Improvising with the metronome is also good. Experiment with new time signatures like 7/4 and subdivisions like pentuplets. If you can't play it, slow it down.

Section 5 "Mental Exercises":

No access to an instrument, music, or pen and paper? No worries, just imagine it.

You can even plan ahead by writing in your practice journal what you plan to visualise and imagine hearing in those moments when you have no instrument or paper present.

If you're a multi-instrumentalist, you could perhaps choose to focus on visualising just one instrument for the day, or several instruments.

You could also choose to visualise notating music, it helps to have some kind of guide on what you will notate. You could plan "today, I will visualise quavers exploring the C major scale on the bass clef in 4/4 timing, and I will imagine that I can hear the notes that I choose in my mind".

Even your goals and career can benefit from visualisation exercises. Your next performance or music lesson will go along so much smoother if you can visualise and imagine it being fun, engaging, and going smoothly. Try to keep an open mind.

Positive affirmations are great to combat potential errors in our self image and impostor syndrome. Simply reminding yourself positive (but true) statements like "I have been practicing regularly, I am improving, and my goals are being achieved" is a great trick to wire your brain into being more motivated and less worried about poor performance.

Be positive, but be realistic. Nobody likes somebody who affirms they can achieve anything without putting in the practice.

Keeping a music journal is vital. If you aren't journaling your reflections and pursuit of goals, you are robbing yourself of a goldmine of insight, control, and progress. Please, I beg aspiring musicians who do not yet journal to embrace this practice, you will not regret it.

And lastly. Any area of your practice can be done mentally. Whether it is repertoire, composition, aural, or whatever. It will give you something better to do than gaze at your phone while on public transport.

Advice to Young Musicians - Robert Schumann

In the digital copy of Schumann's "Album for the Young", it introduces the pieces with a selection of quotes from Schumann.

For the sake of sharing these great insights, I have decided to post them here. My favourite quotes at the time of posting this are in bold text.

ADVICE TO YOUNG MUSICIANS

BY

ROBERT SCHUMANN

• The cultivation of the ear is the most important. Labour early torecognise notes and key. Endeavour to find what notes the bell, the window-pane, and the cuckoo express.

• Practise assiduously scales and other finger exercises. There are, however, many people who fancy they attain perfection by spending, even until an advanced age, several hours daily in mechanical execution : that is as if a person should exert himself to repeat his A, B, C, faster and faster. Employ your time better.

• " Mute " instruments, as they are called, have been invented. Try them awhile, just to see how useless they are. The dumb cannot teach speech.

• Be steady in keeping time. The performance of many virtuosi is like the gait of a drunken man. Follow not their example.

• Learn betimes the fundamental laws of harmony.

• Be not deterred by the words Theory, Thorough-bass, Counterpoint, &c. ; approach them as a friend, and their response will be most cordial.

• Never jingle. Play with ever-freshened eagerness, and always finish the piece.

• Slowness and hurry are both great faults.

• Take pains to play easy pieces well and prettily ; better this than a mere ordinary performance of difficult ones.

• Always keep to a well-tuned instrument.

• Be not satisfied with knowing your piece manually ; you must also be able to hum it without the aid of the instrument. Stimulate your imagination, so that you may retain firmly in the memory not only the melody of a composition but the harmony which accords with it.

• Exert yourself, even although you have but little voice, to sing at sight without the help of the instrument ; by this means the quickness of your ear will constantly increase. But if you have a good voice, neglect no opportunity of cultivating it ; consider it as the most valuable gift that heaven has conferred on you.

• You must not be content until you succeed in reading music without playing it.

• When playing, be unconcerned who hears you.

• Play always as if a master listened.

• Should any one place a composition before you to play for the first time, read it over previously.

• If you feel exhausted after having done your daily musical task, strain your faculties no farther. Better to rest, than work without inclination and cheerfulness.

• As you grow older, play nothing merely because it is the fashion. Time is precious. One must live a hundred lives to learn everything that is good.

• Children do not become healthy men by being fed on sweetmeats. The mental as well as the bodily fare must be simple and strengthening. The masters have sufficiently provided for the former ; adhere to them.

• Mere passages change with the time ; they are only of value when fluency leads to higher objects.

• You must not circulate bad compositions ; on the contrary, you must help with all your might to suppress them.

• Neither play bad compositions, nor, unless compelled, listen to them.

• Never strive in execution for the so-called bravura. Try to produce in a composition the impression which the composer had in view. More should not be sought. What is beyond is caricature.

• Regard it as something abominable to meddle with the pieces of good writers either by alteration, omission, or by the introduction of new-fangled ornaments. This is the greatest indignity you can inflict on art.

• Respecting the selection of study pieces, ask older musicians, and you will save much time.

• You must gradually make yourself acquainted with all the most important works of all the celebrated masters.

• Be not led astray by the approbation which great virtuosi, so-called, often secure. Esteem the approbation of the artist more than that of the multitude.

• All that is merely fashionable goes out of fashion in its turn; and if you continue to cultivate it till you are old, you will become a simpleton whom no one values.

• Much playing in society does more harm than good. Scrutinise the company ; but never play anything of which you feel in your conscience you would be ashamed.

• Neglect, however, no opportunity of practising duets, trios, This gives freedom and compass to your execution. And accompany singers frequently.

• If every one would play first fiddle, no orchestra could be got together. Let each musician keep his proper place.

• Be fond of your instrument, but without the vanity of considering it the highest and the only one. Remember that there are others, and quite as good. Remember also that there are singers, and that the most elevated music finds expression through the choir and orchestra. 

• As you grow older, have more to do with scores than virtuosi.

• Play assiduously the fugues of good masters, especially those of Job. Seb. Bach. Let his " Forty-eight " (Fugues and Preludes) be your daily bread ; you will then surely become an able musician.

• Seek, among your comrades, those who know more than you.

• Read poetry with diligence, as a relief from your musical studies. Take frequent exercise in the open air.

• Much can be learned from singers, but do not yield them unlimited credence.

• The world is large. Be modest ! You have not yet discovered and contrived what others before you have not already imagined and found out. And even if such should be the case, look on it as a gift from above to be shared with others.

• The study of the history of music, seconded by hearing the actual performance of the master-pieces of different epochs, will prove the most rapid and effectual cure for conceit and vanity.

• A charming book on music is Thibaut's treatise on ''The Purity of Musical Composition." Read it often, as you get older.

• When you pass by a church, and hear an organ played, go inside and listen. Should you be fortunate enough to obtain a seat at the instrument, try your small fingers on it, and be amazed at this omnipotence of music. 

• Neglect no opportunity of practising on the organ. There is no other instrument which inflicts such prompt chastisement on offensive and defective composition or execution.

• Sing assiduously in choruses, especially taking the middle parts. This forms the good musician.

• But what is it to be a musician? Not to have the eyes bent on the notes, and play the piece laboriously to the end ; not (supposing anyone happens to turn two leaves instead of one) to stick in the middle, without being able to go on. You are, however, a musician when with a new piece you almost divine what is coming, when you know an old acquaintance by rote—in a word, when you have music not only in your fingers, but in your head and heart too.

• But how does one become a good musician? Dear student, the chief thing, a good ear and quick comprehension, comes, as in all things, from above. Still, the natural ability may be cultivated and enhanced. Not by secluding yourself for days together and prosecuting mechanical studies, but by holding enlarged living musical intercourse—frequent engagements in choir and orchestra.

• Acquire an early and accurate knowledge of the compass of the human voice in its four principal registers ; watch it well in the choir ; study closely in what intervals lies its greatest power, in which others it glides into the soft and tender.

• Listen most attentively to all popular songs ; they are a mine of the most charming melodies, and afford an insight into the character of different nations.

• Apply yourself, as soon as possible, to reading the old clefs. You will otherwise leave untouched many treasures of by-gone times.

• Give early heed to the tone and character of the different instruments ; try to impress their particular sounds on your ear.

• Never neglect to hear good operas.

• Reverence what is old, but have a warm heart also for what is new. Indulge no prejudice against unknown names.

• Do not judge a composition from the first hearing; what pleases at the first moment, is not always the best. Masters require to be studied. Much will become clear to you at an advanced age only.

• In forming a judgment of compositions, distinguish between those which belong to true art, and those which are intended merely for the entertainment of amateurs. Abide by the first; do not quarrel with the others.

• " Melody" is the amateur's battle-cry, and certainly music with-out melody is naught. But understand clearly what they mean by it ; an easily comprehensible, agreeably rhythmical one, is all they care for. But there are melodies of a different stamp, and when you peruse Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, they flash before you in a thousand different lights. You will, it is to be hoped, soon grow weary of the thread-bare monotony of the so-called new Italian operatic melodies.

• Should you succeed in combining little melodies on the piano, that is already something; but if they come spontaneously, not on the piano, then rejoice still more, then stirs within you the instinctive sense of music. The fingers must perform the behest of the head, not the contrary.

• When you begin to compose, do all in the head. Do not try a piece on the instrument before you have it well prepared. If the music came from your soul, if you felt it, it will have this influence on others as well.

• Has Heaven bestowed on you a lively imagination, you will often, in solitary hours, sit entranced at the piano, longing to express in harmonies your inward fervour ; and the more mystical are your feelings, while you are drawn as it were into magic circles, the more obscure perhaps will the realm of harmony appear. These are youth's happiest hours. But beware of giving yourself up too often to a faculty which may insensibly mislead you to waste on phantoms your powers and your time. The management of form, the power of clear representation, can only be secured by the fixed stamp of writing. Be therefore more of a writer than a visionary.

• Become acquainted betimes with the art of directing an orchestra. Watch good conductors frequently ; endeavour even to accompany the direction in your own mind. This conduces to accuracy.

• Be diligent in the study of life, as well as of the arts and sciences.

• The laws of morality are also those of art. 

• By industry and endurance you will always rise higher.

• From one pound of iron, which costs but a few pence, many thousand watch-springs are made, and the value is increased a hundred thousand fold. Make faithful and profitable use of the pound which God has given thee.

• Without enthusiasm nothing genuine is accomplished in art. Art does not exist for the acquisition of riches.- Aim ever at becoming a greater and greater artist ; everything else comes to you of itself.

• Only when the form grows clear to you, will the spirit become so too.

• Perhaps it is genius alone that understands genius.

• Some one asserted that a perfect musician ought to be able to see, as if before him, at the very first hearing, the score of an orchestral piece however complicated. This is the greatest height that can be conceived.

• Of learning there is no end.