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Friday, December 21, 2018

There are goals and there are GOALS.

Instructional sites are full of advice about using practice goals:   "Set a goal for every practice session";  "clearly state your short-, medium- , and long-term goals"; "work out your long term goals and work backwards to schedule the work towards them", "list your goals on practice log and mark off how many times you work on them"; "break your goals down into small bite-sized chunks";  "Make your goals so that your practice can always end on success"; "if you can't achieve your goal, make it smaller, go slower!" And the list goes on.  But there are some things that involve a shift in mindset, a difficult new technique, or more flexibility or strength that will take weeks or months for the penny to drop --  how do you have goals for those?   I've been thinking about this while I've been sweating my way through one painful measure at a time of a Bach piece - each measure taking me days to figure out and make my fingers do it (and then I promptly forget and have to go over it again).  Yes I can break it down into smaller goals (figure out which notes need to be damped, work out the fingering that allows me to do it, practice at a speed that will allow me to do it, figure out which notes need to be emphasized, etc)   But there is so little progress in a given practice session that it's hard to feel like it was successful.  And you know what?  You really do need a little success to encourage you to keep plugging away at it!

So is there another way to approach this?   I had the same realization when I made myself practice sight-reading.  In my case I don't see any obvious progress from day to day or even week to week.  So I set myself a goal of working my way through sight reading materials every day, the goal being to do it for 15 minutes.   Once the need to achieve a perfect read-through was taken away, I found it much more fun to do it, and often the 15 minutes stretched to 30 minutes.  And after a while there WAS progress  - but it crept up so slowly I didn't notice it (but when I did, there was a real sense of achievement!)  The secret there seems to be just to put the time in, and when enough incremental progress has been made that there is finally an achievable goal, then, and only then, set the goal.

Even though I wrote this down, I still had a hard time making myself practice the Bach - a week went by while I ignored it,  Today it was almost back to square one.  However just like parking a thumb on the string and thumb damping, I'm hopeful it will eventually click.  In the meantime, I'll just practice a measure for 15 minutes at a time and see what happens...


Friday, December 14, 2018

Overload

Someone mentioned feeling overloaded with music books the other day, and I thought to myself -that's exactly how I'm feeling with respect to learning to play...  Even though I don't have to deal with exams or others' expectations, my own internal expectations mandate that I should somehow be progressing faster (or at all, maybe).

 I think part of it is how difficult I'm finding the music I'm currently learning.  I spent over an hour trying to work out how to play one measly measure this morning, and even then I'm not sure I came up with a good solution.  And what about the seasonal music I promise myself I'll learn every year then leave till it's too late?  And my poor duet partner has probably given up on me because I still haven't got around to learning the music.  Then there's all the new orchestra music that's about to arrive.  Not to mention I'm still trying to learn to sight read and figure out how to arrange things......  

I think it's time for some triage.  Either I drop everything else for a while while I concentrate on getting a handle on the hard stuff, or I give the hard stuff a break, learn a Christmas tune or two, and do some enjoyable messing around. As my GT is on break for a few weeks, I'm beginning to think it's the ideal time for the second option 😁