Make Your Practice Sound as Good as Your Performance

I’ve noticed a trend among my students. It’s unanimous. They all do it.

What I’m talking about today is the habit of separating practice tone and development from performance tone and development.

In other words, my students all practice sounding one way, but when they perform, it sounds another way entirely, sometimes like two different musicians. 

Which didn’t occur to me until I started going to my student’s various recitals, where I heard tone and vibrato and phrasing that never happened in the practice studio. 

Why not practice everything as if one were performing?  In other words, play even the lowliest of scales with as beautiful a tone as possible all the time.

Break up stock patterns by playing scales and triads in three, or five, not just four/four up and down. Play them backwards. Make melodies from the triads.

Keep the air flow and the tone going at all times, even when cranking out those endless finger-busting classical arpeggios. 

Work on melodies in the same way. Not just, “well, I gotta get this done so I can get back to my computer games,” but, practice them as if in front of an (imaginary) audience.

How to get better faster:  from this day forward, make everything you play, every note that comes out of your horn in practice as pretty and musical and expressive as your skills will allow as if performing in front of thousands of adoring fans at the Hollywood Bowl.

Dig?  

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