How to Get More Done in Your Cello Practice
Happy New Year! I hope your holiday season was warm and wonderful. And as we get ready to plunge into 2023, I wanted to just pop in quickly to give you some ideas about how to make use of this time of reinvention.
Thinking about a New Year’s resolution? Ugh! You say. That is a sure path to failure down the road and feeling bad about myself!
But if we choose our goals wisely, we can totally succeed!
Sometimes one small change can have long lasting effects. And the key to successfully sticking to a resolution is to make it small and achievable on a daily basis.
Here is a list of 5 minute practice goals that I’m going to incorporate into my practice habits for 2023.
Play a passage with a metronome - it can be slow or fast, but the goal here is to strengthen my inner sense of rhythm and time.
Set up a tuner on my stand - while I may not always get completely every note “in the green” each time, having the tuner on my stand gives me a quick read on how consistent my pitch is (it’s usually on the high side! Isn’t that consistent of me?!?)
Look at a piece I’m working on and spend 5 minutes away from the instrument writing down some thoughts/feelings/visuals that come to mind. This forces me to think of what I want to achieve from each piece I work on. No technical things to worry about! Just pure imagination.
Let's do a little math here. If you practice 5 days a week, this hack will result in 100 minutes a month or 1200 minutes a year (20 hours/year), that will go towards making you a more aware player! I think that's time well spent and the great thing is it's practically painless! We can all do ANYTHING for 5 minutes!
Well, except for maybe fighting off a mountain lion or bear in your back yard.
The goal here is not to chain yourself to any one 5 minute practice. Anything you do to focus intently for 5 minutes on an aspect of your playing will work.
Just getting out of your normal routine can shake up your brain and help you start looking in a new direction.
Do you have any 5 minute hacks that you can do that will have long lasting results for your practicing and playing? Let me know! I’d love to hear from you. You can email me here.