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Your long-term goals will help set your medium-term goals. What do you need to do be able to do to make first chair or to start your own rock band? Improve your range, your reading ability, your tone quality, your tuning, your bowing or fingering technique? What method books would be most helpful? What less-difficult pieces will prepare you to play the pieces you can't play yet? If it's difficult for you to decide what you need to work on, ask for advice from your music teacher, director, band mates, or a musician you respect.

Your medium-term goals, plus any performances or lessons coming up soon, will determine your goals for this practice session. You must be prepared for lessons, rehearsals, and performances; and your director and teacher have chosen materials that will help you become a better musician. If you do not have any lesson materials to work on, and your ensemble music is easy for you, then find materials that challenge you in the areas that you need to be challenged. Work on developing a repertoire. Stay focused on what you want to accomplish right now, today, and on how that will help you get where you want to be.

Set practice times

Teachers and directors will advise you on how often and how long your individual practice times should be. If not, keep in mind two general rules: practicing often is more important than having lengthy practices, and the better you are, the more you have to practice to improve.

Practicing every day is ideal. Skipping a day occasionally won't hurt, and may even be necessary to rest your muscles and keep you fresh and excited about playing. But you should know that when you skip a day, you may lose some of the progress you were making. Skipping a day often (say, more than once a week) will make it difficult for you to move forward, because you will keep losing the progress you have already made. If you don't have time, just doing your warm-ups or cool-downs, or playing through some easy pieces, is better than skipping the day entirely.

Young musicians and other beginners do not need long practices to make progress. A ten-year-old beginning trumpet player, for example, may only need practices of fifteen or twenty minutes; any more than that will probably just strain the playing muscles. But the better you get, the longer your practices will have to be if you want to keep progressing. A sixteen-year-old pianist who has been playing for more than ten years may need to practice more than an hour a day to make further progress. Professionals typically practice several hours a day.

Warm up

Singing and playing musical instruments are physical activities, and warming up is just as important to the musician as it is to the athlete. Don't play the hard stuff cold; you won't be playing to the best of your ability, and will be wasting time and energy, not to mention making yourself frustrated. Warm-ups may feel like a waste of time, but you can turn them into some of the most productive minutes of your practice. If your teacher or director has given you specific warm-up exercises, do them. If not, ask for some, or find or invent some on your own. For example, if you hope to do solo or improv work, it is useful to practice scales. If you need to improve your range, find an exercise that helps you play high or low notes. If you are having trouble playing trills, staccato notes, or large leaps, develop simple warm-up exercises that help you practice those skills. Practicing those skills in an easy exercise every time you warm up will make them much more available when you need them in difficult pieces.