| The only thing that I really gain by doing a lot of extra practice is accuracy. I can maintain both my range and endurance by doing a modest amount of practicing - roughly 45 minutes to 2 hours per day - I RARELY get more than 2 hours of practice in, and if I do, it's broken up into 20 - 30 minute sessions for three or four sessions. (I usually only get about 45 minutes to an hour 4 to 5 times a week.) Most of the time my "practice" is really what I would call an extended warm up where I'm doing long tones first, then lip slurs, then articulation exercises, scales, music excerpts, sight reading, etc, mainly to tighten up my fundamentals.
I rarely go into a practice session with a specific goal in mind - my "goal" is always to clean things up as much as possible, which for me is more a matter of concentration and focus rather than being a matter of chops.
With my life being what it is with all of the activities that surround a freelance musician who also has a full time day job, a wife, a house, two kids and all of the trimmings and trappings that go with, practice for me can really be a hit or miss proposition these days.
Take last night for instance.
For starters, I have been EXTREMELY busy with my day job lately and pulling a 10 - 12 hour day has become the rule, rather than the exception over the last couple of weeks, so I am mentally fatigued before I ever even step through the door after work. Last night was no exception.
Combine with this the fact that my practice room in the basement is crammed full of other junk from my project of trying to finish the basement. Since I had drywallers coming in to put drywall over my wall frames, I had to clear out the rest of the basement and a lot of that wound up in my practice room, where it has been for about a week. Needless to say, with all of this stuff going on, I haven't practiced much lately but since I have a gig this weekend, I knew I had to get back on it.
Anyway, all I did last night was play a G in the staff for 20 minutes (see "20 minute G spot") and I did some really light articulation stuff for about another 10 minutes. 30 minutes of light practicing was all I could muster last night, and I did this with no music in front of me, standing in the corner or my crammed practice room sometime around midnight.
The point is, I'll do more of the same tonight, and where I probably won't kick any tail on the gig on Saturday night, I won't have too much trouble doing what I have to to get the gig done.
For me, anything more than two hours is overkill, but then again, for the playing that I do, I don't have to have ultra endurance or be ultra accurate - it's a pretty low pressure gig.
__________________ Patrick Gleason
email me at: trickg1@hotmail.com
"What we do in life echoes in eternity"
"At my signal, unleash hell."
- Maximus Decimus Meridius |