How to Navigate a Practicing Slump: Four Tips

You probably know what a practicing slump feels like. Where once you might have practiced happily, even eagerly, now the thought of picking up your instrument makes you tired, or maybe even grumpy. You might dodge the practice room, but then you feel guilty about it. Or, you might succeed in dragging yourself there, but every minute feels like a grind. Why are you doing this again? What’s the point?

Practicing slumps are normal. I have them; my colleagues have them; my students have them. But I think we’re particularly vulnerable to them after we’ve attempted big, sweeping changes….in other words, for many of us, in January.

We make bold promises in January. We embark on new musical journeys and projects. We tell ourselves that this is the year we’re going to get it all done! We practice every day! With enthusiasm!

By February, our resolve beings to flag. Our January pace proves difficult to sustain, and we’re more and more tempted to throw up our hands and maybe also go back to bed. February is like January with a hangover.

Practicing slumps are totally normal, but it’s also important that we know how to navigate through them. A practice slump in an of itself isn’t harmful, but if you let it drag you down, it can diminish your participation in, and enjoyment of, music– and that’s a sad thing!

So how do you deal with a practicing slump, whether in February or any other time? Here are my top four tips!

Take a Break

Sometimes we need to intentionally rest and reset. If you spend three days away from the instrument by accident, intending to play every day, you’re going to fill guilty and powerless. But if you allot yourself three days of time-limited, intentional rest, chances are fairly good that you’ll return to your practice refreshed and reenergized. The key is to make your break purposeful and deliberate.

Wait it Out

This is the route I probably take the most. Sometimes, with a practicing slump, you just need to ride it out. If I’m feeling the tell-tale lack of energy and enthusiasm that signifies a practicing slump, I’ll put in a bare minimum amount of time, stopping once I reach it unless I feel like doing more. Putting in, say, 20 minutes a day keeps me in the game and helps me maintain my technique, as well as the habit of practicing, while I wait for my enthusiasm to return.

Shake it Up

Sometimes you don’t need a break from practicing so much as you need a break from practicing a particular thing. Instead of walking away from the instrument, try something different. Memorize a favorite tune, listen to recorder players online, sight read easy pieces, mess with a different clef. Trying something new, or even just swapping tasks, can bring your practicing slump to a close.

Phone a Friend

There’s nothing like engaging musically with other people to help us a practicing slump! Grab a friend and try something musical. You can play with them, listen to music together, ask them to be your audience for a mini-performance….even teach them the rudiments of the recorder! Getting another human being in the room can be immensely beneficial.

If you find yourself in a practicing slump this month (or any month), try one of these techniques. February may be extra long this year, but your practicing slump doesn’t have to be!

Four Shortcuts to Get You There Faster!

Since last month’s post focused on shortcuts you really shouldn’t take, I thought I’d turn it around this month and share four musical shortcuts you can take guilt-free! Yes, that’s right: I’m about to give you permission to cut some corners. Enjoy it, because it won’t last!

Shortcut #1: Don’t play the whole piece every time you practice. Although playing through an entire piece IS an essential type of practice, you should also be making time for focused, high-frequency practice on the specific areas that need work. Not every part of every piece is going to need the same amount of your time and energy, and you want to allocate accordingly.

Shortcut #2: Write it down. Sometimes I get the impression that students think writing things down is cheating. It’s not! Do you keep missing a note? Write in the letter name. Do you keep forgetting an ornament you really want to do? Write it out. Do you have trouble with a tricky rhythm? Mark where the beats fall within the phrase. What your music looks like doesn’t matter. What it sounds like does! So use the tools at your disposal to prime yourself for success!

Shortcut #3: Listen. It’s OK to listen to a piece you’re learning on Youtube! Really it is! While it’s absolutely true that you never want to use listening as a crutch (i.e., you shouldn’t HAVE to do it in order to tackle a piece), listening to a piece you’re learning as you follow the score can be a fantastic way to preview the journey ahead of you- or to get ideas as you go.

Shortcut #4: Prioritize intent. We recorder players often play music that is not intended for recorder. And when we do, we can bump up against some of the limitations of the instrument. Like the need to breathe. Or the fact that, no matter what we do, many recorders are never going to be really loud in the lowest range. In these cases, I think it can be valuable to prioritize intent over content. What the heck does that mean? Well, let’s say that it’s clear that the composer wants you to be very loud and trumpet-like as you play a series of low As on the alto recorder. You could spend hours trying to (minimally) increase the brassiness of your low notes… or you could decide to take that section up an octave or two and be done. Or let’s say a composer wants 32 measures of gentle, rolling sixteenth notes. You could devote a month to playing every single one of those notes, gasping like a dying fish every few measures, or you could decide to judiciously eliminate a few unaccented, harmonically redundant notes to sneak in sips of air. By prioritizing the intent of the music, as opposed to playing every single note exactly as written, you could actually be conveying the composer’s intention more powerfully.

Practice Pitfalls: Are You Self-Sabotaging?

You practice and you practice and you practice.  But when it comes time to play with others, things fall apart.

Sound familiar?

There are dozens of factors that contribute to how you perform when the chips are down- too many to enumerate a single blog entry.  But it’s worth doing a quick audit of your practice routine to see if you’re falling victim to any of these four common practice traps.  Because if you are, there's an easy fix!

Do-it-over-itis

What do you do when you’re practicing and you make a mistake? If you reflexively go back and replay a passage every time you make a mistake, you may suffer from do-it-over-itis.  Do-it-over-itis is particularly dangerous for ensemble players: By the time you’ve gone back and fixed your mistake, your ensemble mates have moved on.  (And even if you didn’t actually go back, you probably had to spend mental energy suppressing the urge to do so!)

When you practice running a piece, make a note of problem spots for later and then, after your run, spend focused time working out the kinks.

Practicing quickly

Yes, we all want to be able to play quickly.  But it’s a counterintuitive truth that we only develop the ability to play quickly by practicing slowly.  Practicing beyond the capacity of what you can do means practicing mistakes -and since we get better at doing whatever we practice, practicing mistakes isn’t the way to go. You know this.  We all know this.  But it’s 100% worth reminding ourselves. 

Slow down when you practice.

Skipping rests

I was guilty of this one for far, far too long.  Guess what you’ll be tempted to do in performance?  Furthermore, you’ll be missing an opportunity to develop the necessary and valuable skill of maintaining a beat internally when you’re not playing.

Enjoy –and practice- the silences.

Fingers only

If there’s one thing that drives me nuts, it’s hearing students warm up or practice while “marking” their breath- i.e., deliberately underblowing. Airflow is the beating, glorious heart of recorder playing, and practicing without it doesn’t accomplish much of anything.

Always practice with fully engaged air.

Transform Your Practice: Keeping a Practice Journal

Yes, it's true: An unprepossessing 3x5 inch notebook can become the most important tool in your musical arsenal.

It’s called a practice journal, and if you use it thoughtfully, it can increase the effectiveness, efficiency, and joyfulness of your practice!

A practice journal serves multiple functions:  It keeps you accountable, tracks your progress, and helps you chart your course.  It can also evolve into a resource you can refer back to later for ideas and inspiration.

The physical form of the practice journal can vary. I use a small notebook- easy to open, carry, and modify.  I’m not picky about the cover, but if you’re a visual person, having a beautiful object might increase your chances of using it.  You could also use a word doc or note-taking software as a journal.  There’s even an app- though I find it to be more limiting than free-form journaling.

Whatever it looks like, a successful practice journal allows you to tracks several things:

• Time:  When did you practice?  For how long?  I typically jot down my start and end times.  Why track your time?  It's not meant to be punitive or shaming.  Rather, tracking is one of the best ways to motivate yourself.  It's also yields valuable information.  Try jotting a few notes about how you felt prior to and during practice.  You may discover patterns in your practice: perhaps you practice with more energy after dinner, for example, as opposed to before you've eaten.
• Target: What’s your goal?  Writing down what you’re trying to work on, whether it be for the task, hour, week, month, or year, helps you focus your energies and harness your attention. Some goals I’ve set recently include improving my clef reading and brushing up on RV 443. 
• Task: What did you practice?  Ideally, your tasks should relate closely to your targets.  I might make a note that I practiced reading tenor cleft excerpts for 10 minutes, e.g., or that I spent 5 minutes practicing the tricky bit in the Vivaldi at half time.
• Thoughts:  How did go? What did you learn?  If I discover something in the course of my practice that will be helpful to remember, things I tried that I want to avoid or amplify, I jot them down.  Reflecting on my practice helps me refine it.  It also helps my build on each day's practice moving forward.
• Tomorrow: At the end of each session’s entry, I make a note of what I want to accomplish the following day (or week, or month).  I might read a longer excerpt, or tick up my metronome marking, or make a note to listen with my score to a piece for an upcoming concert.
• Odds and Ends: This is optional, butI tend to use my journal as a place to jot down things I want to remember.  It might be a sonata want to play, or a recording I want to listen to, or something somebody said that was extremely helpful.  I star these kinds of entries so that I can flip back through my journal and quickly locate ideas, inspiration, and advice. 

Happy Journaling!

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