Tag: Optimizing Your Violin Practice

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Practice Problems Practicing the Violin

How to Skip Your Music Practice

violin practice skip your music practice
photo credit: mfhiatt via photopin cc

Don’t want to practice today? No problem, since you should already keep a notebook or journal handy in your practice room.

On the days you will be practicing:

Just before practicing, jot down a sentence or two about your goals for the session. That’s always a good idea.

If you’re thinking: “I’m not going to practice today,”

Simply write the following in the journal: “I’ve decided I won’t be practicing today.”

Now release any guilt or non productive emotions and go about your day.

Now at least you’ve made a clear choice, and brought a greater degree of mindfulness to your practice. Pay attention to your practice journal over time, and see what happens.

photo credit: mfhiatt via photopin cc

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Practicing the Violin Transformation through the Violin

Why study a musical instrument?

study of the violin is transformational

How a violin practice transforms your life.

1. Learning how to truly master specific skills leads to a fulfilled life.
2. Motions and actions are how you shape your basic approach to the instrument. Using simplicity, ease and mastery moves you through life gracefully.
3. Practice is defining specific goals. Defining. Specific. Constant clarity.
4. Practice strategies are the pathway to your mastery. Thus choosing work that matters and doing that work mindfully, will produce a high quality result.
5. Performing is creating work that is important to other people. Like sales and marketing hinges on understanding others interests, problems and aspirations.
6. Performing is also facing up to your challenges. Life presents us with such challenges on a regular basis.
7. Choosing the violin (or any instrument) teaches you to define and implement large projects.

The violin or any instrument becomes transformational when (and only when) you approach it from this larger perspective.

If you’re in it just to learn a couple of songs, that’s OK too. Just don’t expect any more than a quick diversion.

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Practice Problems Practicing the Violin

How to Cut Your Practice Time in Half

invincible-violinist-oasis

Here’s a simple music practice shortcut for your consideration. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. And I can promise that you’ll achieve your current results and still cut your practice time in half. Or easily get twice as much done in the same amount of time.

It’s simply this: protect your practice as a sacred oasis from day to day life. It’s a place filled with curiosity, experimentation, discovery and a wonderful spacious feeling. In this place, impatience and frustration simply melts away. In this place the quality of your practice always exceeds expectations because any agenda exists only for the sheer joy of the work itself. It is truly immediate success on a new level.

On the other hand, you can continue to push and drive forward by force. Practice when over scheduled, exhausted or compelled. Accept gigs and auditions that cement unrealistic expectations into your life. We all know how that goes.

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Practicing the Violin Violin Lessons for Kids

The Buddhist Art of Violin Practice

Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography

Basketball MVP Allen Iverson famously had to take it on the chin for his poor attitude and memorable soundbites about practice. Still, western culture sees practice as a means to an end. Practice is the necessary evil we must endure on the path to musical bliss.

The problem with that western concept is that will power alone can’t sustain us through that 10,000 hours of must-do time on the chin rest. And no amount of parental nagging will can create a Sarasate Tarantella like the one I heard 12 year old violinist Karen Ferry play today.

Then how and when can we achieve true mastery and harmony with our instrument?

Continue reading “The Buddhist Art of Violin Practice”
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Getting Started on Violin Practicing the Violin

Feeling Lazy? Naughty? It Might Just Be Your Practice Room

choose your violin practice room with care

When it’s time to practice, your gorgeous home may be your very worst enemy. The luxurious carpet. The rich and inviting furnishings. The decorator paint colors on the wall. They’re all tiny signals that tell your mind: “Relax, enjoy. It’s all good.” And that may be the single worst message you can plant in your brain at practice time.

Continue reading “Feeling Lazy? Naughty? It Might Just Be Your Practice Room”