Finding Time to Practice Your Flute

Tips for Finding Time to Practice Your Flute

It can be really hard to fit everything in one day, it’s liked doing a juggling act! And the older we get, the busier we become. As the saying goes, “You’ll never have as much time as you have right now”.

But here are some principles of practicing to remember as you are planning your day:

*Try to practice every day. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but it should happen every day.

*Prioritize your practice time. Even if you just have 20 minutes, start with the most difficult, and end with something that makes you happy.

*Sometimes it’s best to just practice scales or tone studies. Every piece is made out of scales and tone, so if you practice those things, your pieces will be much easier and make more sense.

Prioritize your practice time

It might be interesting to know that the two best times for the brain to retain or remember the information you want to put in there are:

1) The 2o minutes right before you fall asleep.

2) The first couple of hours right after you wake up.

This means the things you are thinking about during those two times of the day will stick in your brain like glue, or gum to the bottom of a shoe, so everything else that happens the rest of the day is in some way based on the things you thought then.

Also don’t forget, it is possible to do some practicing without your flute! Of course you should always practice every day, if you can, but your brain can do some of the heavy lifting without touching your flute. This means that if you have some time in the car when you are driving places, or when you are walking from class to class, or eating lunch, or at the dentist, or in the grocery store, or in bed before you fall asleep, or in the shower while you are getting ready, you can do what is called “mental practice”

You can also do what is called “mental practice”

 

Here are a few suggestions:

*Listening to your piece with accompaniment. If you are listening to the piece at night, it works best if it is the last thing you listen to before you fall asleep.

*Practice breathing from you diaphragm. You can do this anywhere. Just pay attention to what your body is doing when you breathe, and you’ll begin to notice patterns.

*Looking at your music like you’re reading a book. Think of your melody as the hero in a story, and pay attention to how it works with the other parts, or characters in your piece. It might surprise you what you find, and you’ll remember it later.

*You can even mark different characters in different colors, or imagine up a storyline or concepts to go with your piece and then write it in your music. This really helps because it puts another brain tag on your music, so that your brain will remember it in lots of different ways, and that will increase your ability to memorize and feel even more confident when you play it.

Brain-Tag Your Music

This means if you imagine what it is like playing your pieces, and think about what your fingers are doing, and what your breath should feel like, when you go to play your piece again, your brain will remember that.

Remembering these tips will help you find and make the most of your flute practicing time.