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Want to have a great practice? When you're working on the hard stuff, it can be difficult to remember to play with your best tone quality and musicianship. It's a lot easier to remember when playing easy warm-ups. Try playing or singing warm-ups with the best tone quality, best technique, best intonation, and best musicality that you have. This will make warming up a little more interesting, but the big payoff comes later; you will develop good habits and end up playing with a better tone quality and musicianship later in your practice, even when you are concentrating on other issues.

Work on it

Once you are warmed up, work on the music you need to practice. If pieces for upcoming lessons, rehearsals, or performances are difficult, those should be at the top of your practice list. Otherwise, you can always work on developing your repertoire. Your repertoire - sometimes called you repertory - is all of the pieces that you can play well right now. Whether professional, semi-professional, or amateur, musicians and bands always have a repertoire of music that they are ready to play when asked for a performance. Music learners should also work on developing a repertoire, partly to get into the (useful and fun) habit of being ready to play for people, and also because even inexperienced musicians may be asked by friends or relatives for an impromptu performance. Even beginners should be ready to play one piece on request. Waiting until one is an accomplished musician to develop a repertoire and play for others is not a good idea, because the lack of experience with performing can create unreasonably high performance standards and a fear of performing.

Suggestions for working on pieces

• Don't practice it wrong! Don't play wrong notes, leave notes out, or play wrong rhythms. Learning the music incorrectly is a step backwards; it actually becomes more difficult to do it correctly than if you had not practiced the piece at all. If the piece is too difficult to play correctly, slow it down enough that you can play all the notes in rhythm, correctly, no matter how slow this is. When you can play it correctly slowly, start speeding it up, but never practice it at a speed that you can't handle. If you do not know how the piece should sound, try to find a recording, ask for help from a teacher, director, band mate, or experienced musician, or enter the music into a music-writing program and listen to the playback.
• When playing through the music, do not simply trip over or stutter through the hard parts and go on. This approach also creates bad habits, making it nearly impossible for you to play the piece without stopping or stuttering at those spots. Stop, analyze the problem, fix it, play through the hard spots repeatedly until you can play them correctly. Then check to see if you can now "play through" the problem spots.
• If there's something you just can't play at all (a high note, for example), make it part of your warm-ups. Find an exercise that makes it easier to get to that note (or to double-tongue, or to do that giant slur, whatever is "too difficult") and do it every day the easy way . Eventually it will start becoming possible in the harder music, too.
• Frustration gets in the way of good practice. If frustration is causing you to sound progressively worse rather than better, try a completely different approach, or switch to a different piece.

Improving general skills

After working on specific pieces, you may want to reserve some of your practice time for developing general skills that you would like to have. Would you like to become a better sight-reader or learn how to read a different kind of notation? Would you like to be better at playing by ear, or at improvising? These skills will also improve if you practice them often and well, but they will not simply appear if you do not practice them!

Whatever skill you would like to develop, find a useful way to practice it. If you do not have a teacher, director, or band mates who can make suggestions, scour the Internet or consult "teach yourself to play" books for ideas. Then make it part of your regular practice time.

Cool down

While you were practicing the hard parts of your music, you may have become tense or frustrated, or forgotten to sing or play musically or with good tone quality or technique. End your practice time by playing or singing something you like that is easy for you. Relax and enjoy "performing" it for yourself, playing with your very best technique and musicianship. This is a good time to go through some of your already-established repertoire, to keep it polished, comfortable, and ready to perform.

Evaluate

To help set goals for future practice sessions, evaluate each session informally. What progress did you make on the difficult stuff during this session? What is still giving you trouble, and what could you do to address (in your warm-ups, practice, or lessons) that specific trouble? What should you work on in your next practice time? If you honestly believe a particular piece is ready for your next rehearsal or lesson, you can move it to your "cool down", and wait to get more feedback on it from others. If it is difficult for you to evaluate how well you are doing, consider recording yourself, at least occasionally, so that you get a chance to sit back and listen to yourself, rather than trying to listen and play at the same time. Don't be hypercritical, but be objective: this is good; that is what needs work. Again, if a teacher is not available to help, play whenever possible for your director, band mates, or other musicians and listen for useful feedback.

More resources

As of this writing, the Musician's Way site had many helpful tips on practicing.