The four aspects of excellent practice as I see them are:

• quality
• consistency
• honesty
• robustness

Today I want to talk about quality.

Each of these elements contributes something powerful and distinct to the quality of your work. Right off the bat, sort these concepts into two piles: stuff you’re doing and stuff you’re not doing, or not doing very well.

The quality of your practice becomes the quality of your playing.

Mechanics and physical interaction with the instrument

This is everything. How you get to a note, how you play it, what your body has to do is the primary task, the largest thing that should be governing your practice. I’ve dedicated much of my life to helping folks cultivate an awareness of these things, and it’s not possible to sum them up within the confines of a paragraph, a blog post, or even a book. There are so many ways we come up with to intellectualize what is largely a physical pursuit!

It’s safe to say that I’ll be filling this new iteration of the blog with in-depth lessons on the physical approach, but the things to stick to are:

• everything done as softly as possible
• movements as efficient and simple as possible
• clear concept of the entire gesture

Global progress

All this means is that your work applies across everything you’re playing. If you do this, you’re in a game of learning and reinforcing broadly applicable ideas. If not, the game is learning, relearning, relearning…building castles out of sand right at the shoreline, every new piece a wave wiping the previous knowledge out of existence.

Audiating

Audiating is simply the act of being able to hear pitches inside your head. It’s an essential skill: hearing the destination note in a shift, for instance, helps your mind construct a more accurate map of the distance. It’s also excellent for qualitative judgements. If you can generate the ideal sound of a phrase in your mind, you are in a position to compare your sound against it and make precise adjustments.

If you’re not audiating, you can get into doom loops (worst cereal ever) where you know you’re not doing things right but it takes forever to see what’s happening. Or worse, you don’t know things aren’t going well until you in front of a teacher.

Something to remember: practice isn’t really about what you’re good at, or at least not entirely. The process is chiefly about discovering weak points and retrofitting them in a way that creates strength and deeper understanding. Don’t be afraid of having an ideal to compare your work against! It’s the only way forward, to be honest.

Resources:

EarBeater (what a name!)

Organized shifting

There are many ways to measure your shifts. I employ 2 main systems, and practice most shifts using both of them at one time or another. The first one is old finger shifting, which I have talked about in this post. The second one is using first finger as a guide, no matter what fingers are being used in a shift. This method is useful because if you think about it, 1 is always involved, even if it’s not the origin or destination finger. Mapping out where it starts and ends is a handy trick to make shifts more secure.

Resources:

Amit Peled The First Hour

Hans Jørgen Jensen and Minna Rose Chung’s master work Cello Mind

Rhythmic integrity

This one is a particular vulnerability for string players. The nature of our instrument—the way we can half commit to a pitch or the start/end of a bow stroke means we can get away without developing a strong sense of rhythm for a long time. I can attest to this! I got all the way to undergrad auditions without truly understanding how to parse complex rhythms. This filled common situations with dread: auditions, new music at rehearsals, casual get togethers where friends take out instruments and read from the chamber repertoire, studio work, any time I was tasked with transcribing something by ear.

Put simply, for most music we play, rhythm provides the structure that organizes the notes into something recognizable and interesting. It’s worth understanding this, because without a sense of pulse and rhythmic accuracy, music is just sound. When people don’t relate to esoteric and experimental music, it’s not usually a matter of notes: it’s because the rhythmic structure is not evident or well-tended.

I work with my students on rhythm ALL the time. Some of them, we have spent weeks, months, even—retrofitting a solid academic understanding of rhythm onto their already extant skill. Do not feel defeated if you find you’ve gotten by on guesswork and imitation; these are in themselves indicators of skills we need to be well developed musicians. They are just inadequate for the completion of your evolution into a confident, secure musician.

Resources:

Louis Bellson Modern Reading in 4/4

Louis Bellson Odd Time Reading Text

Mostly, I feel like working with an instructor is the best way to proceed. That way, your strengths and weaknesses can guide the curriculum.

Reasonable but high standards

The most fertile ground for practicing lies between the twin hells of zombie repetition and nit-picking perfectionism: a place where you can see what’s happening, notice where things aren’t working, and then dispatch the problems with patience, curiosity, and focus.

Playing anything over and over will just get you good at however you’ve been playing it, whether that’s good or bad. Mindless practice makes you really good at mindless practice and mindless playing. Excellent practice makes you an excellent practicer and an excellent player. It all depends on what you’re repeating and how.

So, while we all want to be as good as our favorite cellist, and that their playing should serve as inspiration and example, it is also important to set goals that are sensible.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite cellists playing one of my favorite movements of all time, and will show you how players of all levels can set goals according to what is reasonable.

The overarching idea is to be able to see your trajectory on the instrument from two places: what is your longest term goal, and what is the next thing you have to do?

I think it’s safe to say that all of our longest term goals are to play in tune, expressively, comfortably, in whatever style of music in whatever setting we desire. Not everyone wants to be in a community orchestra. Not everyone is obsessed with jigs and reels (though I highly recommend it). But the skillset is largely the same until we get to stylistic differences, so let’s assume our goals are similar.

Beginner: near term goal examples might be things like developing a bow hold, slurring more than 2 notes during scales, or learning to shift with confidence.

Intermediate: near term goals might be things like larger shifts, a polished, even vibrato, or maintaining comfort while working on double stops.

Advanced: near term goals might be maintaining soft hands during thumb position or off the string techniques, curating note lengths attentively, making long shifts feel effortless.

So while the goal is mastery, the work you do today has to be rooted in the next reasonable step, with reasonable, feasible results as the goal. Don’t ask, “Do I sound like Anastasia yet?” Ask, “Is this improved?” and “If it’s not improved, do I have new information about the work I need to do” That’s what we’re after.

Better questions, better answers, better practice.