Creating Your Perfect Practice Routine
The Importance of Routine
Routine is a part of our daily lives in most things we do be it work, exercise, cooking meals, brushing our teeth, commuting to work or school, getting ready for bed, and so much more. Routines allow us to organize everyday tasks into achievable patterns that feel less daunting both physically and mentally.
A great example of adding a new routine to your life is implementing an exercise plan. If you’re committed to fitting physical activity into your daily or weekly schedule, you’re likely going to do some planning in advance. First, you’ll probably consider what your goals are and why you want to embark on this new journey to begin with. The why’s could vary from medical reasons, weight loss, the pursuit of a new sport or hobby, muscle gain, desire to feel physically healthier, wanting your clothes to fit better, or improved mental health, to name a few. Depending on your why, you may set several goals for yourself followed by benchmarks to meet along the way and successes you can celebrate. Then, depending on your goals and how quickly you’d like to achieve them, you may decide what types of exercises you need to do, how often you need to do them, how to make them more challenging over time as you get stronger, and when all of this fits into your current schedule. In addition, you may decide to change other daily habits to help meet your goals. For example, you choose to get up 30 minutes earlier in order to squeeze your workout in before the rest of your family is awake or cook healthier meals.
This all probably sounds very familiar; as I’m sure you’ve gathered, building routines for our musical journey is no different!
Steps to Building a New Routine:
Make a conscious decision to commit to something for a specific reason: your why
Set your mind on a goal, then break it into smaller, bite-sized, short-term goals
Plan around your goals, schedule, and how quickly you’d like to progress
Today’s post will focus on step 2.
The Goal of Practicing
Depending on where you are in your musical journey, your practice sessions and goals will vary greatly. This article highlighting an interview with Yo-Yo Ma and his views on the goals of practicing at different skill levels is a must-read. I will summarize the main points below, but the entire article really is worth your time!
Practice Goals for Beginners:
Focus on proper set-up, form, posture, and technique- the fundamentals
Become familiar with your instrument by playing as many correct notes as possible; increase comfort navigating around instrument with a pleasant tone
Learn to internalize a steady beat by practicing with a metronome
Learn to self analyze and make corrections so as to not make the same mistake twice
Listen to as much music as possible to engage your imagination, find intrinsic motivation, stay inspired, and provide examples to emulate in your own playing (more about this soon)!
Generally, become comfortable with playing and performing
An advancing musician has familiarized themselves with their instrument in a deep and meaningful way. Their main goal is to now determine how they as an individual practice most efficiently and effectively in order to make the most of their practice time.
Practice Goals for Advancing Musicians:
Get better at the art of practicing in order to maximize work accomplished in minimal time
Identify what practice techniques work best for them as an individual- when a teacher offers advice or solutions, what works and what doesn’t?
Take successful techniques and create a systematized approach to practicing a new piece of music
Before playing a new piece, identify the challenges presented and how they can be tackled
Become familiar with the style of a piece by listening to music by the composer, similar works from the musical time period, etc
Critique performances of current piece to formulate own interpretation
Once a musician is able to perform consistently and comfortably at a high level, their dedicated practice time will revolve around performer interpretation of the piece in progress. They are taking the proverbial recipe and making it their own.
An excerpt from CelloLoft’s article on Yo-Yo Ma’s practice routine:
“An advanced players’ goal is to interpret deeply without the instrument getting in the way. Like Yo-Yo says, they practice as little as possible (because why waste time?!) and in such a way that “missing” a note or idea is impossible. They put their knowledge of theory and history to use, informing their artistic decisions. Then, they get outta there!”
Practice Goals for an Advanced Musician: please note every performer has their own practice methods- this serves more as an example for beginning and advancing musicians to understand what they are working towards long term.
Dissect music with and without an instrument, identifying key moments, how phrases are structured, the overall form of the piece, harmony, the evolution of motifs, etc
Research performance style of piece
Continue implementing systematized practice routine and increasing practice efficiency to minimize amount of time spent vs material accomplished. At this point a musician understands how to practice in such a way that they can’t play imperfectly.
Understanding the goals of practicing makes it easier for a musician to reach their own personal goals in a timely manner.
Setting Specific and Achievable Personal Goals
It’s time for some audience participation! This is where you define your own personal cello goals. Remember, these are goals for you; don’t worry about what anyone else is doing. Consider reflecting on your why during this process. I highly recommend having a special notebook where you can write your goals as part of the practice journaling process (separate blog post- more soon!)
Setting goals lets us know where we want and need to make progress and what we are striving to hear out of our cello that day. This is part of establishing our routine and systematized practice structure.
Have you ever thought to yourself “ughhhh, I really should practice today…”? Admit it, we all have. This thought process occurs when we lack goals, direction, and a plan of action. Without direction or a task to tackle, it becomes incredibly difficult to find the intrinsic motivation to practice. We don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish, so we have no metric for monitoring our progress in that moment either. It’s vital as part of one’s musical growth to always have something to reach for: to know what comes next.
Let’s figure out what this looks like for you and where you currently are on your musical journey.
Do you have your special notebook or journal ready? Open up to the first page and start by putting today’s date and taking time to write out your why. No really, just do it. It will serve as a reflection tool time and time again. You’ll be glad it’s there later. The first set of goals we will tackle today will focus on big-picture items and become more specific and refined over time. We have to start somewhere and what better time than now.
Below the date and your why, title a new section “Long Term Goals”. Here is where you will make note of what you hope to ultimately be able to accomplish with or on your instrument. Perhaps you want to be able to play with an amateur orchestra someday or you were really inspired by Bach’s Prelude. You may find that your why and long term goal look very similar. This is a good observation to take note of.
Next up is “Mid Term Goals”. Let’s use this section to set a goal for a year out from now. What piece do you want to be able to play a year from now? What techniques do you want to begin learning or master? Vibrato, shifting, a specific bow technique, etc… Maybe you want to be able to play in front of your church or for a family gathering or call your sister on her birthday and play Happy Birthday. Remember, these goals are for you. Be realistic in your goal setting by choosing something that will push and progress you while still being obtainable within the specified timeframe (1 year).
After you’ve defined your long term and mid term goals, reframe your vision to much sooner in the future for “Short Term Goals”. What do you hope to accomplish this week? Yes, it’s just as important if not more-so to set goals at this micro level. Consider the music and exercises your teacher has assigned to you or that you’re otherwise working on, the techniques involved in each piece or exercise, and where there is room for progress. Consider categories such as tone (the way you sound), intonation (how in tune you are), rhythmic accuracy, tempo, bowing techniques and articulations, clean shifts, dynamics, posture and positioning, and bow hold. These goals will play a big role in setting your specific, daily cello goals so more detail here can be useful.
Creating a Structured Practice Plan
As you develop your personal routine and set goals for yourself, keep in mind it is important to focus less on amount of time practiced and more on the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of your practicing (unless you are an absolute beginner building muscle memory and fundamentals). Your practice sessions should revolve around reaching the daily goals you have set for yourself which will stem from “trouble spots” in your music. I will do a deep dive on effective practice strategies in a separate post, but for now, let’s create a general outline for your practice plan.
On a new page in your journal, rewrite your weekly goal at the top along with the first of your chosen pre-planned practice days. Include space to track your session start and end time, too. This serves as a personal note only since we are focusing on the quality of our practice session. Remember as you create your daily goals that they should ultimately propel you towards your goal(s) for the week.
The outline of your first practice journal entry may include the following categories:
Date, start time-end time, weekly goal
Warming up the body away from your instrument
To help combat fatigue, stiffness, and injury, it is important to warm up the body prior to a practice session similarly to an athlete. This is especially important as musicians are prone to imbalances in flexibility and strength as a result of overusing certain muscle groups and underusing others.
Tina Guo is a professional cellist with some physical challenges similar to ones I personally face as a musician. She has an excellent stretching routine I like to follow, especially if I know I’m going to be practicing for a longer duration. I also regularly follow guided yoga routines on YouTube prior to practicing as well.
If you don’t have time for an entire routine, you can instead focus on a few stretches for your the fingers, wrists, shoulders, and spine. Try searching Google and/or YouTube for “Stretches for Musicians” to find a variety of stretches to try, then make your own routine from the ones you like best or find the most relief from. You may also consider including some balance and breathing exercises in this part of your session. The above warmups are an important part of getting ready to tackle your goals both physically and mentally.Warming up at your instrument
This part of your routine fires up the brain in addition to the body and should include daily drills that set you up for success throughout the rest of your practice session. I recommend warming up the left hand (LH) and right hand (RH) alone before combining them.
Choose warmups that reflect your goals and areas that require improvement. For example, if you know that in the piece of music you are working on you’d like to improve your intonation and a specific rhythm, incorporate those into your warmup. You may choose to play your trouble rhythm with a metronome on each of your open strings several times for RH reinforcement. Perhaps in a separate exercise, you focus on playing the same 3 notes with perfect intonation against a drone.
This is also a great place to work on areas of your playing that require general improvement outside of the piece you’re working on. If you’re working on building left hand strength and agility, you could also include an agility exercise here with a metronome that gradually gets faster over time.
Right hand warmup examples:
-Bow exercises away from the cello
-Open string bow exercises; long-tones or rhythmic
-Metronome exercises for developing a sense of steady beat
Left hand warmup examples:
-Agility exercises
-Trill exercises
-Double stops/other intonation practices
-Vibrato exercises
-Shifting exercisesScales/Other technical exercises- scales and arpeggios are often used as a way to become more familiar and comfortable with your instrument in a large variety of ways. They are fantastic for building coordination and dexterity in beginning musicians. This is an important part of your routine for improving and solidifying intonation as well since all scales follow the same pattern within their respective classification. Scales can also be altered as a way to reinforce different bow patterns and articulations and can be played at different speeds in different styles at different dynamic levels, and so on. The possibilities are truly endless.
ètude: The word ètude literally translates to “the study”. These short performable practice pieces are used to reinforce a specific musical technique, bridging the gap between technical exercises and repertoire.
Repertoire/Main Piece The bulk of your practice session (~half your time). This is where you will identify, analyze, break down, and isolate small sections that challenge you and turn them into daily goals. Review less challenging parts/parts you know well and enjoy towards the end of your session.
Fun Cooldown Piece: This should be something that makes you feel good, especially on days where a practice session may be particularly frustrating (this happens to everyone). Some of my students have turned to songs from Disney, Harry Potter, The Piano Guys, or their favorite non-classical artist. Other students prefer the classics and have opted for a short piece or except within this genre. Whatever you choose, it’s important that it makes you feel confident on your instrument in order to end your practice session on a proverbial (and possibly literal) high note. :)
Warmdown Stretches: After over and under using different muscles and sitting for any duration of time, it’s important to realign the body.
This routine will look different for everyone, of course. Beginning students will be missing a lot of these components while they focus on correct form, building strength, and mastering the fundamentals. There are also possibilities I did not include here that we will go into more detail on later such as sight reading, ear training, and music theory.
Not only will your routine vary based on personal preferences, but also how you’ve chosen to divide your scheduled practice throughout the week or day. If your practice time is split into multiple sessions throughout the day, you may choose to complete steps 1 through 4 during the first session and 5 through 7 during the second. Maybe you instead mix the routine up entirely or add or remove certain steps. What’s important is finding what works best for you as a progressing musician and individual. There is no wrong answer. Even if you figure out your perfect routine for right now, there’s a good chance it will look different a year from now. This is a process that will continue to evolve as you progress, grow, and experiences changes in your life that present more or less time to spend with your instrument.
While this entire process is time consuming, if the goal is learning to play your instrument well, then learning how to practice, formulating a personal practice routine, and setting achievable goals for yourself are not optional. If you’re not typically a “planner” type, I challenge you to try the methods and techniques shared over the course of this month for a month and make comparisons to your typical rate of progress. I have a feeling you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
My next post will dive more into the knitty-gritty problem-solving practice techniques that can help metamorphosize your mistakes into mastery. Stay tuned and happy practicing! ~Lisa
Resources & Further Reading/Watching
Practicing, Time Management, and Scheduling (YouTube- Cello Doll)
Developing Your Ideal Practice Routine (YoutTube- AdultCello)
Structuring Your Cello Practice Time (YouTube- AdultCello)
Unpacking Yo-Yo Ma’s Practice Routine
Beginning Cello Player- An Effective Practice Strategy
Effective Practicing: Warming Up
Stretches for Musicians (YouTube- Tina Guo)
