5 Rules for Successful Violin Practicing

as violinists we all know that sometimes it can be difficult to motivate ourselves to practice but once we get that self-discipline and get ourselves into the practice room what should we be doing when we're in there to make the most of our time well today i'm going to be answering that question with five rules for the most effective practicing i'm tobiah murphy and this is murphy music academy [Music] now if you're looking for not just the best practice advice but personalized practice advice delivered straight to your front door then you need to sign up for lessons here at murphy music academy either in person if you happen to live in southeast michigan or for most people online so if you're interested in that you should shoot an email to admin at murphymusicacademy.org link will be in the description below and of course if you like the video then you should go ahead and like the video and if you haven't already done this yet go ahead and subscribe now on to rule number one consistency is more important than time spent now i am not one of those people that likes to say oh you don't actually need to practice that much in order to get good at violin you just have to find the secret correct way of practicing and that's all it takes there are only two types of people in my experience that say that and that's the one percent of people for which that's actually true and the other group of people that like talk that way are typically people that don't play that well the rest of us actually need to practice and if you look through the annals of history just about every major violinist you love spent many many many many many hours a day practicing to perfect their art but what if and this is very likely for most of you you don't have hours and hours to spend each day on practicing the violin well then you should take whatever time you do have and make sure that you put in at least a little bit of time every single day this is especially true when you are a more beginner or early intermediate student it is actually not that advisable that a beginning student practices two or three hours a day and i know some people it's not particularly common but there are some beginners that get so gung-ho that they try to do that it's actually probably counterproductive because it's likely that you don't know enough about what you're doing to avoid practicing in a way that your teacher is going to have to undo later because you spent so many hours essentially practicing the wrong thing when it comes to the early stages of the violin most of what you're trying to learn is good motor patterns and these type of motor patterns are things that are served best by making sure you do a little bit of them every day doing them incrementally not instead instead of trying to master them in just one fell swoop the other side of this is we need to think about how we actually learn things a lot of the times when we practice we don't get it that day we may get it a little bit better but it doesn't actually become a part of us until we let it stew in ourselves for a while until we sleep on it so having that continual process of practice something kind of get a little bit but then a lot of the learning happens in sort of absorbing it while maybe we're doing other things during the day maybe while we're sleeping and then going to it the next day and adding a little bit to that then adding a little bit to that the next day actually is a lot better for learning instead of trying to spend a lot of time just hammering it into ourselves now for the more advanced students out there you actually are going to have to start increasing the amount of time that you practice however if it doesn't work within your current life to be able to practice like two or three hours every day which would be ideal or maybe even more then what i would suggest is you combine both having you know a certain time where you spend a lot of time practicing because often that's what it takes to really dig into a piece of music or maybe to get through all of the music and scales and etudes that you're learning and also try as much as you can to keep the consistency on the other days that maybe you don't have as much time so let's just say tuesday is your big practice day okay you get two or three hours done you really dive into your music and then for the rest of the days maybe you can only put in 30 minutes maybe an hour maybe even less than that and you just go through and you try to keep whatever it is you practiced on your previous day just make sure that it's still stewing within you so you keep that consistency throughout the week until your next big practice day rule number two your primary focus should be on motor patterns something i like to tell my students is that my primary job as a teacher is actually to try to get them to do less and less everybody that plays the violin starts out playing with doing way too much motion and the teacher is there hopefully to try to get that motion to be streamlined and to be more and more efficient as you progress in practice whether you are working on an actual etude or technical exercise or you are working on your music you want to try to shave off as much unnecessary motion as possible now you might be thinking well i think i should be focusing on intonation or on tone or a musicality and the thing is that you would actually achieve more in terms of what you want to accomplish with all of those things if you focused more on streamlining your motor patterns than if you just focused on each of those different aspects of playing individually so for example let's say that i'm playing a passage and i notice that a couple of notes are a little bit flat now if i just wanted to focus on the intonation i would say okay i'm just going to try to make those notes aim a little bit higher but what if i looked a little bit deeper what if i looked for the cause what is my hand doing physically that might be causing the fingers to go out of tune let's say for example and this is a common problem i lift my fingers too high off the fingerboard okay so getting to the same place every time is not as easy to do let's say i tend to pull my fingers back when i take them off instead of lifting them straight up so the course of action for the fingers is going to tend to be a little bit more inconsistent this way not only do i fix the intonation problem of that particular passage but i am also probably going to start being able to fix intonation problems generally for my playing now that is just a very obvious example of something that can go wrong in because of motor patterns however these are things you can apply to just about almost anything that is going wrong within your play now sometimes you will run into something that is more specific to its own problem and you're not actually doing anything wrong within your technique but if you are having problems within your playing and you're trying to fix whether it's intonation or whether it's tone or whether it's even something like rhythm always double check to make sure you have all your ducks in a row in terms of how efficient your motor patterns are rule number three everything is about control control control whenever you start practicing a piece of music your primary goal besides everything else i've mentioned so far is that you should have complete control over every aspect of your playing the reason why every single teacher you've had has really tried to make you understand the importance of slow practice is not because they're trying to torture you or because slow practice is in any case a magic thing it's because you have to be able to start with something that you can control so when you start your next piece of music and you start to do slow practice because that's just what you do you don't want to be thinking all right now i've got to do my slow practice because that's just how you start when you learn a piece of music your focus should be what does it take for me at the very start to be able to play this at whatever tempo that happens to be with complete calm and control over every single aspect of the music whether that's intonation rhythm tone everything for a more concrete example of this i'd like to take a look at the middle section of the second movement of the mendelssohn violin concerto a notoriously difficult section both in terms of control of the bow and the fingers and what i had a student do with a lot of these awkward double stop shifts is that you would actually stop before each one for just a little bit and then very slowly shift and you were meant to stop and shift in such a way that you could do the same thing every time that control aspect i talked about and it doesn't matter that you have to maybe break the tempo for a little bit so long as you're being very conscious of it because what this does when you're just kind of wood shedding the section is that you can lay groundwork for exactly the way your hand and fingers need to move to be able to hit those shifts every single time so for example if we start here [Applause] [Music] here i'm going to make sure i get to this easily shift [Applause] take advantage of this here's a big one really make sure i can set up from here to here [Music] not quite as good that time [Music] that's better [Music] [Applause] [Music] and so by going through this you are able to set a groundwork for yourself to be able to be more accurate when you start to play it faster now another advantage of approaching practicing with this viewpoint is that you are able to start a more difficult thorny section not from a position of fear you might have noticed that i'm playing very very lightly when i practice in that way and that's because when i am approaching a difficult section for the first time or having a student approach a difficult section for the first time what you want to make sure you're doing is playing with as much relaxation as possible and much of that as i said before control is possible so you play very light you play very relaxed and you play in such a way where nothing because you're allowing yourself to take time for that control feels frantic rule number four slow practice must imitate fast performance continuing on with the idea of doing slow practice with specific purpose it may not be true that if you can play something slowly you can play it quickly however if you want to play something quickly you do have to learn how to play it slowly first but you want to make sure that you're doing your slow practice in a very specific way for instance let's take this rather annoying section from the last movement of the brahms violin concerto [Music] so if i wanted to be able to well i guess i already did but if i wanted to be able to get that up to tempo i'm not going to want to practice that with big long bows for each of those notes even though it would be a great way for me to get good sound on every note and probably hit it what i want to do is kind of try to figure out what i think i need to do technically in terms of bow speed in terms of how much bow i'm using in terms of what the arm is doing at the fast tempo and try to mimic that at the slow tempo so instead what i would be trying to do at a slow tempo would be this [Music] if i start from there then as i keep going faster and faster i'm going to be much closer to what i'm trying to do if the end goal rather than if i just played the notes and then just kept moving the metronome up and up and up where then i would actually be forced to start having to practice it in a different manner where here i've already started with the idea of trying to mimic what i was going to be doing at a faster tempo and practicing that slowly now you may be thinking to yourself wow tobiah that seems like an incredibly obvious point why why would you even bring that up but you would probably be surprised just how often maybe not yourself but probably you doesn't pay attention to this when they are practicing something slowly you play with way too big of bow on notes that you would never be able to use that much bow on when you're going up to tempo you are using way too much motion in your fingers that you would never be able to get away with in a fast passage when you're practicing it slower these are things that once somebody points them out to you you're like oh yeah that that is incredibly obvious but most people until it's pointed out to them do not realize that this is how they are supposed to be practicing rule number five and this would not be murphy music academy video without this focus on your bow now i made an entire video about this which you should now go watch so i don't really have a whole lot to say here however suffice it to say that just about everything you do in your left hand does not mean anything at all if you do not have good bow technique the bow should lead the playing and often the fingers if they are well practiced will take care of themselves if most of your mind is focused on what your bow is doing anyway these have been my top five rules for practicing violin i'm sure there are more so why don't you drop a few of your favorites down in the comments in any case i've been tobiah murphy for murphy music academy always here to remind you that there is no pleasure in mediocrity happy practicing and i'll see you next time

Channel: Murphy Music Academy

Views: 11,007

Keywords: twoset violin, violin, viola, cello, ling ling, practice, Julia Bushkova, UNT, the bow, hand, grip, hold, hang, russian, best way, best, moscow, conservatory, texas, help, guide, arm weight, the bow hand, bowing hand, bowing, bow arm, bowing arm, bow grip, bow hold, learn, university, violin techniques, violin advice, professor, abrsm, mozart, soloist, auditions, perform, concert, tutorial, education, lesson, tobiah murphy, murphy music academy, Daniel Kurganov, focus, lecture, Bruch Violin Concerto

Id: XHGUkeBa-zE

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021