The+Delayed+Gratification+Practice+Method

=Advanced Practice Techniques= toc People who are just beginning to play an instrument need to play recognizable tunes and need to be involved in playing with others as quickly as possible because those are highly motivational and help people to overcome the initial technical challenges. This is also a good place to stay in terms of developing a wide repertoire and really enjoying the instrument.

Some people would like to move beyond this and to take greater challenges in their musical repertoire, whether it's learning a Mozart piano concerto, Foggy Mountain Breakdown at Earl's speed, the shuffle on Orange Blossom Special, Rawhide at Ricky's speed on mandolin (hang onto your hats for that one!), or George Shuffler-style cross picking on the guitar. Using special practice techniques can help you to get there, although these techniques are not as much fun as sitting down and jamming with some friends. When they compare practice to being in a woodshed playing so you won't disturb others, this is the practice reflected here! In other words, over time, these techniques will improve your fluency, your tone quality, your speed, and anything else you can name but with this kind of practice you may not notice much gain for awhile. So...here are some ways to do this.

=Factors Involved in Instrumental Technique= A good to great musician considers many different factors when assessing his/her own playing and in practicing to improve technique:
 * Left hand technique such as facility across the fingerboard, familiarity with all parts of the fingerboard, intonation (when there are no frets), coordination with right hand, speed of moving from hand position to hand position, speed and independence of all the fingers.
 * Right hand technique such as tone quality, facility with common patterns of sound production (e.g., rolls on the banjo), timing and sound production, steadiness in tempo, techniques that add to musicality such as using the fingers on the bow to smooth out bow changes, coordination with left hand.
 * Tone quality, which includes listening very carefully to the beginnings and endings of individual notes to ensure nothing gets in the way of a great sound (scratching of bow or unnecessary damping of strings), learning new tone quality techniques such as the different places to put the right hand on the banjo and when they should be used or the many different ways of making a note sound good on the violin.
 * Dynamics--all forms of music use louds and softs and good technique includes knowing when and how to use them.
 * Tempo--you cannot play something fast unless you can play it slow, believe it or not. If you cannot play it slow, then you are probably playing it inconsistently and will likely have trouble playing it accurately at speed.
 * Timing--given the choice between hearing someone play out of tune or play out of time, most people would choose the out of tune because it is hard to listen to fluctuations in timing. My personal belief on this is that we relate timing to our own heart rates and when one's heart beat becomes irregular, it's scary. Fortunately, there is an easy fix for this (metronome)!
 * Understanding how the piece works in terms of form, phrasing, chord structure, melody, etc. so that it can be played with musical expression
 * Special techniques: vibrato, for example.
 * Understanding the historical context of the piece and using that information to inform technical choices. If you are doing Scruggs, probably you should stick with Scruggs rolls and not chromatic technique, for example.
 * Task analysis, which means being able to take apart a hard part of a piece and work on the various techniques separately and then bringing them back together again.
 * Awareness of others' performances of the piece or pieces like it, which means listening for all these factors when playing a recording.
 * There are other factors, which I cannot think of right now. Basically, though, this is a finite list and while there are a lot of factors, the things you do may work on more than one factor at a time.

Left Hand
On stringed instruments, the left hand is responsible for pitch, whether that is simultaneous multiple pitches of chords (back up--playing the chords), single pitches of melody, or simultaneous multiple pitches that include chords and melody such as the way the melody fits into banjo rolls. Really good players coordinate the left hand with the timing of the right hand so everything sounds really good. The idea behind facility and familiarity is that when you think of a note, your hand should move to playing it without conscious effort. When you can do this, the music you imagine is free to flow out of your instrument which means you can focus on it instead of worrying about technique.

One way to develop left hand facility and familiarity is to play scales and arpeggios (broken chords) of various sorts all up and down your instrument. Don't just stay in that comfortable spot near the nut--work on the notes that are nearer to the bridge!

I watched Itzack Perlman play Klezmer (a form of Jewish folk music) with some wonderful Klezmer fiddlers. Both could handle the positions near the nut with great facility, but in addition to this, Itzack was able to handle the positions close to the bridge with equal facility. The more you know in the "stratosphere" of the instrument (a violin term because the pitches are really high the closer you get to the bridge), the more flexibility you have in solving technique issues such as being able to find an efficient place to play a group of notes or chords. Also the range of music you can imagine grows much wider. Finally, for fiddle players, especially, when someone wants to do something in G flat major, you won't panic.

Practicing scales and arpeggios: the best way to use these tools is to play different ones each time you practice, rather than trying to perfect one before going onto another. Over time, you can get to the point of mastery on some of this (then go find some harder ones!), but save your energy for mastering something for the pieces you actually want to play. You'll find that gradually you will be more and more able to do these, so play them as best you can and go back the next day to play some more. Do give yourself time to practice these exercises--maybe about 10-20% of your practice time.

Here are some resources--you can find more and you can find ones that are simpler, but this is what you want to work towards and you can start here as long as you understand this is part of delayed gratification!

Guitar scales
(has some really cool scales such as the various modes, which are common in bluegrass) Essentially the same thing for music readers (ignore the right hand suggestions unless you want to learn classical guitar finger picking):

Violin/Mandolin scales

Right Hand
A lot of people might think that the left hand is the most important to practice because that's where the pitches come from. Wrong! The right hand is the most important for string players, which is why people who are left handed might choose to get left handed instruments. Your dominant hand is on sound production for a very good reason!

The critical feature of music, timing, comes from the right hand. You can miss pitches and chords, but if you miss timing or your timing is uneven, you will sound amateurish. If your timing is correct, a few missed pitches won't matter. You'll sound great!

There is one tool that will help you with timing. The metronome. It's not glamorous, it's not fun, it's the broccoli (or whatever healthy food your mom made you eat) of music.

Think of the metronome as the weight training of music. If you use it judiciously, it will help you tremendously. If you use it unwisely, it can actually hurt your playing.

Wise use of the metronome: The goal is for your notes to be even and precise in terms of how long or short they are. If you listen to a really good banjo player, you will hear that notes sounding like machine gun bullets because the timing is so even. Related to this is the development of an internal sense of pulse so that when you are playing something slow, you still have a strong feel for exactly how long each note should be. The metronome can help you learn to play both fast and slow and should be used for this.

Fast playing: Okey dokey, this is where practicing becomes counterintuitive. In order to play fast, you have to be able to play slowly. If you take a tune you have been playing quickly and slow it down, you probably will find places where you are not sure of the notes or where you are imprecise in your playing.

So....start a difficult thing very slowly. Ridiculously slowly. So slow that you can have time to think about each note in relation to the metronome. If you want to play at 35 beats per minute (which can be a good starting point), put the metronome on 70 so there won't be so much silence between beats (the second click is the offbeat and the first one is the beat). You might notice that 35 beats per minute is the slowest that many metronomes will work. This is good, to start at the bottom of the metronome. After all you don't pick up really heavy weights until you have been doing the lighter ones for awhile.

Make sure you are playing really well at that speed--with good tone, intonation, and all that stuff. Make sure your notes are exactly with the metronome--not a hair early or late. When you have good sound and competence at, say, 35, then move the metronome to 36 (okay, 38...) and do the same thing. Move it up another beat or two (maybe three, but for sure not ten) and play it again. Do this several times, working your way up maybe 20 or 30 levels.

Be sure that you are exactly with the metronome when you are working at a slow speed, that every off beat note is on the actual off beat, etc. This is why going slow is good--it helps you to sort out what goes where in terms of timing.

It's the next day, so start the metronome at something like 40--close to where you began--and work it up a little more. Keep climbing that mountain until you are up to speed playing accurately. This method works for whole pieces and also for that pesky few measures in something that you can't seem to get.

If you are playing by ear, you may wish to start a little faster because you are not trying to play the exact same notes every time, but start as slowly as you can. When you begin slowly, it gives you an opportunity to "dress up" your break with the extras that you would like to put in and to work the break up to speed with those extras in.

Tone Quality
A lot of the time when we practice, our ears hear what we want to hear--the piece played well. We don't hear the little scratches of the bow or the click of the pick on the guitar string or the obscured notes because one's fingers are inaccurate on the frets. It's a lot like writing, where you can't see your own mistakes because your brain adds the missing letters as you read.

Record yourself and listen for tone. Also listen for tone quality in recordings of the piece. When you are working with the metronome, go for great tone which means paying attention to how you begin and end notes. When you are practicing, constantly remind yourself to pay attention to tone quality.

Dynamics In classical music a lot of the dynamics are marked, particularly in the music of Beethoven and composers after him. In earlier music, such as that of Bach and other Baroque composers, dynamics were a part of the performance but you had to just know when to get louder and when to get softer.

In bluegrass there are dynamics also. For example, there is often a little instrumental sound between the lines of a song and that's where backup players tend to get a little louder. They back off when the next line comes along. This is part of the call and response pattern that forms the basis of a lot of American folk music.