{"id":112,"date":"2009-01-22T09:55:42","date_gmt":"2009-01-22T13:55:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/22\/8-revision-19\/"},"modified":"2014-02-04T22:56:35","modified_gmt":"2014-02-05T02:56:35","slug":"8-revision-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/?p=112","title":{"rendered":"Guitar Tip #1 &#8211; Practicing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Practicing:<br \/>\nObviously people fill tomes about different &#8220;practice&#8221; methods, and it&#8217;s a very complex topic. In this post I just want to write about what I find works for me right now (over the years I&#8217;ve tried many different ways of practicing).<\/p>\n<p>Most of the time when I pick up a new piece (or even something I haven&#8217;t played in a long time) I find that I can sight read through at least 80-90% of the piece (this is often slow reading at times). With this in mind, I approach the challenge in the following way:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I take any sections that I can&#8217;t read through and play them over a few times each until I can keep it up to tempo with the rest of the piece (I mean slower sight reading tempo, not performance tempo)<br \/>\n*this usually takes me 3-4 days depending on the difficulty of the work\n<\/li>\n<li>Once that&#8217;s done, I&#8217;m ready to start playing through the piece as a whole (in the beginning stages it may take me an hour or so to get through it all if it&#8217;s a big work). From this point I start doing 2 things:\n<ul>\n<li>(1) making mental notes of problem areas, that is:<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>anything that doesn&#8217;t sound good in terms of phrasing, lines, buzz, position leaps, etc&#8230; -Remember you are looking for the &#8220;consistent&#8221; mistakes<\/li>\n<li>anything that doesn&#8217;t feel good in the hands (this can be due to: bad fingerings and\/or lack of technique, in which case I have 2 options:<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>change the fingering to utilize another technique in which I am strong (if possible)<\/li>\n<li>if another fingering is not possible, like if the fingering change worsens legato or phrase lines, then I will take the technique, and based on how well I can already execute it, I will: start with extremely slow practice always trying to perform the action with as little effort as possible&#8230;..try to find &#8220;comfort&#8221; in the new technique; once I have the main idea of how to do it, I design a number of exercises to strengthen and improve the speed\/accuracy of the technique (all the while trying it out in the context of the music)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<li>(2) As I play through the piece at slow tempos I start trying out different musical ideas (interpretation). At first I find many passages are not sounding their best, but over time I come up with many good ideas&#8230;..and each time I think of a good idea, I play the passage a few times so that I wont forget it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>At this point practice for me becomes, rehearsing the piece from top to bottom and each time I hit a section that isn&#8217;t working as well as the rest, I stop for 5-15 minutes to work on making that section more comfortable (mentally and physically)\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I could write so much more on this topic, but I&#8217;ll leave my first post moderately short<br \/>\n\/e<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Practicing: Obviously people fill tomes about different &#8220;practice&#8221; methods, and it&#8217;s a very complex topic. In this post I just want to write about what I find works for me right now (over the years I&#8217;ve tried many different ways of practicing). Most of the time when I pick up a new piece (or even [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":511,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guitar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284,"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112\/revisions\/284"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}