Make a Cello practice plan. Specificity is Key!
Personally, as I learned to become more and more specific with my practice plan, I was able to get much better results for my efforts, and this played a huge role in developing the motivation needed to maintain a solid daily routine.
This is the third and final part of my mini-series on how to develop your ideal practice routine as an adult learner.
In part one we covered how to plan out a practice routine in terms of when, where, and how long your daily practice will be. We talked about making a fun ritual out of practice and about creating your cello shrine.
In part two we looked at how to approach practicing a piece on a more micro level, and about the meaning of “efficient practice” as it pertains to adult learners.
Now, let’s talk about structuring your practice plan on a more macro level.
For me, I want to know when and where I’m going to practice, but I also want to know exactly what I want to accomplish during the day’s practice, the week’s practice, etc.
The real way to improve is to create an overarching trajectory lasting days, weeks, even months, with specific goals in mind.
In my opinion, the worst and least motivating sentence that ever runs through my head is
“I really should practice…’’
This usually is a sign that I don’t have a specific plan or goal I’m working towards.
I know that I need to be “constantly improving” my playing, but I don’t currently have a specific goal so I’m going to just “practice” out of a sense of obligation to my craft.
Unfortunately, the days of my improving simply because I just sat down and played some cello ended a while ago.
If I have set goals in place or an upcoming performance scheduled, I find it much easier to practice because I already have an idea of what I’m going to want to hear out of my cello on that day, and I only have a limited amount of time to get my playing to the point where I can reliably produce those sounds on command.
So now let’s dive in and talk about structuring your practice. To me this question becomes more and more important the longer you’ve been playing.
As you progress, there will come a time when you’re plate is a little more full and a little more diverse.
If you’ve been playing 6 months to a year, maybe you’re working on a scale, an etude, and a performance piece.
Part of a good practice structure is making sure you work on the pieces and techniques assigned in a methodical manner so that everything is covered, and eventually, so that the most difficult areas receive the most attention.
When I was starting my journey and had yet to learn how to structure my practice, I had this “phenomenon” regarding the pieces and etudes I played; I always seemed to start off strong but finish with a whimper and not a bang.
As you probably already guessed, I would practice a piece by running through it from start to finish and seeing if I could play the whole thing without hiccups.
Sometimes there were so many hiccups that I would barely touch the middle or end of the piece, and usually by the time I was working on the final section of the piece, my 20-minutes of primo focus was totally drained and I was running on fumes mentally.
The solution was to create a practice structure AHEAD OF TIME, and the minute I did this it was like miracle grow on the quality of my practice and the results I was seeing.
This is where we learn to apply part two of this practice series to an actual piece of music.
For everything I’m working on, I ideally want to have a plan of attack in terms of how to learn or improve these pieces.
Once the my plan of attack is established, I want to divide my daily practice time up so that each piece gets touched in a meaningful way.
What’s tricky is that if you are giving yourself 45 minutes of practice a day and you have 3 or 4 things you’re working on (a scale, two small etude, and a performance piece for example), that means that you have to divide your time up wisely and still make progress on each task even if you’re only giving it 5-10 minutes a day of your attention!
Example: How I’d structure practicing an etude:
Let’s say I’ve been playing for a year now and my teacher just assigned me a two-page etude that is definitely going to be a challenge. And let’s say I practice 45 minutes a day and I also have a performance piece I’m still working on.
For me, I want to structure my practice so that I can stand up at the end of each session and feel like I’ve really grasped something and solidified it to the point that I can build upon it the next day.
For the 2 page etude in question that might mean saying, “Okay I’m giving 30 of my 45 minutes to this etude today and I’m going to try to learn the first two lines.”
Yes, that means that 90% of the etude will go untouched.
But if you spend those 30 minutes wading through the entire etude, you run the risk of feeling adrift in a sea of notes and when you sit down to practice the next day, you won’t have much to build upon, so you’ll just have to dive into the sea of notes again.
So in those 30 minutes I will plug in my learning process for the first two lines. Analyzing the music, learning the left hand with pizzicato then trying it one note per bow for sound, and so on.
I should say that I’m not suggesting you polish the first two lines of the piece to a high gloss before even learning the notes of the other 90% of the etude.
In this particular example there are 2 ways I would consider approaching the etude.
One way would be to complete each step of the learning process in it’s entirety. Pizzicato through the whole etude, single bows through the whole etude, etc. This is probably the most foolproof but it also requires a lot of patience!
The other way would be to use a staggered approach like this: pizzicato the first two lines, then while you learn to pizzicato lines 3 and 4 you can also start the next step of the process for lines 1 and 2 (one bow per note).
Both approaches are methodical and even if by the next week all you have done is pizzicato’d the entire etude in tune and with the correct rhythm, I would argue that -especially as the pieces get more difficult- this will represent more progress towards your goal than by simply slashing your way through with the bow so that some parts are decent and other parts are uncoordinated and wonky sounding.
The other great thing about applying a structured approach is that if the piece is easy enough for you to skip steps in the process, you will know immediately and so it takes out any guess work as to how well you know the piece.
I mean, if you sit down and pizzicato through the piece 99% perfectly on your first try, then you can go ahead and move on to separate bows.
If that goes 99% perfectly, great, move on to the next step. You get the picture.
So that concludes this brief 3-article series on practicing the cello as an adult learner. This is what I wished I had seen when I first started my cello journey because it certainly would have helped me progress more efficiently!
The art of practicing the cello is an incredibly complex, incredibly nuanced subject of conversation and there is a lot I left out in the interest of staying concise and somewhat linear. For every guideline I gave, there will be exceptions.
But my biggest goal is to convince you to approach the instrument and its repertoire with concrete goals and an efficient learning process so that you can eventually get out of your own way and let your artistry shine through.
