Students frequently ask/beg/lament: what should I practice? How much? In what order? For how long? Should I write it all in a journal? Count my reps? While these are decent questions, I think the better one to ask is “how should I practice?” Think of it this way: the first method of inquiry assumes that practice of one thing does not have much impact on another: so, if the what is the most important thing, and you want to improve across everything you’re working on, you’ll have to spend time on a huge variety of things: scales, arpeggios, technical studies, ensemble and solo music, sight reading, etc. It makes sense that especially more advanced players become nearly paralyzed by the sheer volume of notes to get through every week if the measure of progress is so narrow.

If you shift your question over to finding the best way to practice, to finding the optimal manner of study, the proposition becomes at once more manageable and more impactful. This is because whatever you are working on should be a vehicle for your advancement as an instrumentalist. As a whole musician. When you practice for quality and refocus your goals, every single positive step you take is felt across everything you play. Here’s an example of the shift in perspective I am advocating for:

Let’s say you are working on the A major scale, an étude, and the first half of a Bach Prelude.

If you’re thinking “what should I practice?”, you start with A major scale because that’s the “easiest” item. You play it, maybe with a tuner, go up and down a few times, correct some shifts that were pitchy, then your mind starts to wander and you go to the étude because you’re either bored or frustrated or not interested because, well, scales aren’t that interesting. You do the same thing with the étude, being diligent and not just repeating it over and over. Then you get to your piece, where you do the same.

When you lead with “how should I practice”, you first have to consider what you’d like to accomplish. For instance, if you know that there is a shift in the scale that is unstable, you need to understand why. Now, it takes some sophistication to analyze something like that, but if you have lessons, your instructor has likely (not always…I do occasionally hear from students whose teachers have never broken down technique or mental approach) mentioned what the shift should feel like. If that shift is unreliable, what are the chances that the issue is isolated? The only shift you’ll ever encounter that is a problem? Why work on a shift as if it only represents an issue in this one context? So, what I’d suggest you do instead is practice to remedy the underlying issue across every domain. When you shift in your étude or the Bach, you should be exemplifying the same approach each time. Working out a shift in a passage should help remedy every other shift, regardless of context. This is why I rarely begin my practice with a scale. Instead, I start with a gentle warm up (harmonics and quiet playing to foster control and softness) and then pick up whatever has been stuck in my craw over the last few sessions. Once I hone in on what I need to adjust to make the shift more reliable, I look for opportunities to make those adjustments consciously in the other places where it occurs.

To do that, you need to understand what the ideal is and how your efforts differ from that ideal. This post will not delve into any specific guidance in terms of technique, but the idea to grab onto with both hands is that you can wring so much more good stuff out of your practice time if you’re organized and thinking clearly about what your body and mind should be doing every moment you sit down to play the instrument. If you’re not organized and physically present, you can still do reasonably well, but it’s a longer path, and as someone who traveled it for nearly half of her journey with the cello, I can say it’s not a road I’d recommend to anyone who wants to play reliably or have any sense of self-determination in music.

So in this post, I’d like to introduce some concepts I’ve been working with over the last few years: a structure to impose on whatever you practice to build strength upon strength, no matter where you are in your progress.

I call them “practice modes”, and each one is meant to be diagnostic and curative: you should be able to parse what the trouble is, work out the kinks, and plug the now-fixed element back into context and build an interpretation from there.

Mode 1 is where you will have to spend the most time, at least when you’re bringing this infrastructure on board. It’s where I find the most gratifying sense of peace and confidence each time I practice. Think of Mode 1 as a fact check. You have to satisfy every one of the following criteria before even dreaming about moving on to some other aspect of practice or playing. Compared with a less thorough, less investigative approach, can you see how many holes this method closes up? Or rather, exposes, then closes up?

Don’t overlook the “neutral emotional outlook” aspect. As you may or may not have noticed, but everything we repeat becomes strengthened. Repeating the fear associated with a passage fortifies the fear. Repeating the cringe for a note you can’t hear until you realize it’s out of tune makes sure that note will always feel horrifying. If you’re anything like me, rewiring these associations will take some doing, but this is the most essential and rewarding part of the work. Don’t skimp here if you’re going to try and implement this in your practice!

I’ll go more into the details in subsequent posts, but “shifts as endpoints” means that you conceive of your shifts in terms of origin and destination as opposed to the journey. That way madness lies…if you only practice laborious, glissando-ing shifts…you’re get very good at those, and not so good at the sound you’re after. This will feel like a quantum leap in confidence after Mode 1. If you keep missing the shift, you need Mode 1 still. Don’t go on to 2 and 3 without complete confidence.

Mode 3 is truly devilish! Advanced players who have come to rely on vibrato as their primary tool will feel stripped bare, and that, friends, is the point. If you can make expressive music and coherent phrases by being in control of your bow and the way you place notes in time, you won’t need to rely on vibrato so much. Then, when you add it, it fulfills its true purpose: to burnish the beauty you have already created. I’ve seen the idea behind this quote attributed to a number of string players, and it rings absolutely true:

Vibrato is like ketchup. Putting vibrato on every note is like adding ketchup to everything you eat. It’s great on fries, but do you really want it on your cereal? In your coffee? Of course not.

I used to watch cooking shows a lot, and this philosophy reminds me of those chefs who would always make some gorgeous dish with exquisite care and well-selected ingredients and at the last minute would suffer some crisis of confidence and douse the plate in truffle oil. The judges would recoil twice: once, when the contestant was dumping the stuff on the plate, and again, when they’d taste the dish and get a mouthful of the potent concoction! Truffle oil obliterates nearly every other flavor. The same is true of most vibrato: it is a purposeful disfiguring of the pitch but can easily become cover for lousy intonation or the only interesting thing about a passage.

Vibrato is a tool for decorating your notes, not the foundation of creating music. Use it wisely, with discernment, and realize also that there are a number of variables: a wider versus a more contained sound; a faster versus a more relaxed speed, etc.

Practice modes require discipline, and if you’re anything like me, after a little bit of internal resistance, it should feel like a balm for a busy mind and a near desperate desire for improvement and direction. If you only halfway apply these ideas, you probably will still benefit from them, but the only way to see if this will work for you is to do it meticulously. Patiently. Repeatedly.

Let me know how it works out for you!