Practice on a Plane

Find more lessons and Quick Tips by Dr. David Wallace at http://www.myTalentForge.com/dw.

Hi there, I’m Dr. David Wallace with myTalentForge.com’s Quick Tip of the Week!

And this week’s tip is- practice away from your instrument.

Well what does that mean? How can you practice if you don’t have your instruments in your hand?

Well, believe it or not, I actually do my best practicing on planes and airplanes.

What I do is, I have my sheet music, and I am setting the score, I’m feeling the rhythm, I’m hearing every pitch in very clear detail, perfectly imagined.

I’m visualizing the motions that go into performing it. I’m seeing where that happens in the instrument and how my bow arm moves.

As a result, I am getting the music internalized so that way when I do play with the instrument, I’m playing from my internal intention, not playing and reacting to what’s going on physically.

And when I practice this way, what happens is I learned the music much more quickly – I get it internalized and memorized much more completely, and I make fewer mistakes.

So actually, a good rule that I sometimes give myself is play a passage 3 times mentally for every one time I play it physically.

Try that- see what happens.

Now this strategy is something that I’ll go into much more detail as well as present some more strategies in myTalentForge.com’s new series, Memorize It – a holistic approach to playing by heart.

And I will help you to become more effective in your practice time and much quicker and much more solid in memorizing music.

Take care! And that is your Quick Tip of the Week!