Practicing: learning music or physical conditioning

[chouston3]

When you practice, do you practice to learn music or do physical conditioning?

The majority of my "practice" time is physical conditioning and I spend very little time actually learning music.

[tbdana]

I do a good long warmup, then practice my technique. I'm not sure that falls under "physical conditioning," but it's not learning music. After that I'll play some etudes, or improvise on a Jamey Abersold thing, or if I'm bored I'll pull out some piece and work on that a little bit.

But for me practice is practice, it's not music. I practice to become a better trombone player, and I bring along my improvement when I go to play music.

The exception is if I'm preparing for an audition or a specific solo performance or something, in which case I'll practice what I'm going to play at that event.

[imsevimse]

I try to combine my trombone technical practice needs with music. For example I practice alternate positions as much as I can on any music. I also experiment and do it differently next time I play the same thing if there are more than one possible option. I do it to find best move with the slide for a given passage I often find one option better in the end. Sometimes I pick a phrase from the music I play and make that into an etude and transpose it up or down in halfsteps. Most of the time I play without sheet music, except when I learn new stuff. I like to add some arpeggios and scales on the fly to sharpen my articulation. I always play such things from heart and never from sheet music. When I was young I did the opposite. I played allmost everything from sheet music. The change was an important wakeup.

/Tom

[WilliamLang]

Mostly physical conditioning and routine in the first half of the day. The second half is music focused building off of the trust the routine and physical conditioning gives me. FWIW I do try to play my routine at least a little musically though, there's really no need to make a hard line distinction.

[musicofnote]

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[VJOFan]

A behaviourilst would likely say it’s all conditioning. Even playing a phrase beautifully is a matter of training the body to do what the mind asks.

Directly by playing a piece or indirectly by isolating skills, all practice is becoming physically able to make the music happen.

The controversy isn’t “which” people spend most time on (because it’s both always) but rather whether it is most efficient for a specific player to almost exclusively play pieces of music or spend considerable time breaking down and practicing discrete skills.

[musicofnote]

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[musicofnote]

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[GabrielRice]

I wrote the following little article years back in response to a similar question on the old forum. I think there's a lot of value in simply having awareness of what mode you're in at any given stretch of time while you're practicing.

5 Modes of Practicing

1. Practicing Technique – working on the physical coordination needed to play your instrument or sing. For example: scales and arpeggios, long tones, tone or vocal placement exercises, fingering studies, etc. This is the time to cultivate the most relaxed, natural way of managing the interface between your mind, body and instrument. This is a lifelong endeavor, and because our bodies are continually changing, nobody ever has it perfected.

2. Practicing Music for Your Body – learning the music you intend to perform, addressing the technical demands and physical coordination, learning notes, ingraining the musical structures in the inner ear. This is the mode we most often call “woodshedding.” Mode 1 serves Mode 2, and Mode 2 can inform the focus of Mode 1.

3. Practicing Music for Music – exploring the music you will perform in a mindset of experimentation. Finding what makes it happen musically, making decisions – or simply experimenting – about relative dynamics, tempi, articulation styles, tone color. This doesn’t have to happen with your instrument! You can also study scores, listen to other music by the same composer, listen to other music in a similar style, etc. Instrumentalists can sing through music, either with your voice or just in your imagination, to develop phrasing ideas separately from instrumental concerns. Mode 2 serves Mode 3, and Mode 3 can inform the focus of Mode 2.

4. Practicing Performing, or Practicing Music for your Mind – practicing the music you will perform for the mindset and thought processes of actually performing. Commitment to the moment is vital in this mode – no stopping, no going back. And in order to fully commit, the critical, self-evaluating mind has to be turned off now! Only after you finish do you think back or listen back to a recording of what you have just done, and think about what needs to be addressed in the next session of Mode 2 or 3. This is an extremely important step if you want to be a successful performer, and particularly if you take auditions.

5. Practicing Joy – Refresh your memory of why you are doing all of this practicing. Listen to music you love, dance, sing. Play music you love, for yourself, just because you love it, even if you have no intention to ever perform it. Also, get together with friends to play duets, trios, quartets, small jazz combos, etc. This is crucial to a life as a musician, and feeds all of the work we do.

[imsevimse]

I wrote the following little article years back in response to a similar question on the old forum. I think there's a lot of value in simply having awareness of what mode you're in at any given stretch of time while you're practicing.

5 Modes of Practicing

1. Practicing Technique – working on the physical coordination needed to play your instrument or sing. For example: scales and arpeggios, long tones, tone or vocal placement exercises, fingering studies, etc. This is the time to cultivate the most relaxed, natural way of managing the interface between your mind, body and instrument. This is a lifelong endeavor, and because our bodies are continually changing, nobody ever has it perfected.

2. Practicing Music for Your Body – learning the music you intend to perform, addressing the technical demands and physical coordination, learning notes, ingraining the musical structures in the inner ear. This is the mode we most often call “woodshedding.” Mode 1 serves Mode 2, and Mode 2 can inform the focus of Mode 1.

3. Practicing Music for Music – exploring the music you will perform in a mindset of experimentation. Finding what makes it happen musically, making decisions – or simply experimenting – about relative dynamics, tempi, articulation styles, tone color. This doesn’t have to happen with your instrument! You can also study scores, listen to other music by the same composer, listen to other music in a similar style, etc. Instrumentalists can sing through music, either with your voice or just in your imagination, to develop phrasing ideas separately from instrumental concerns. Mode 2 serves Mode 3, and Mode 3 can inform the focus of Mode 2.

4. Practicing Performing, or Practicing Music for your Mind – practicing the music you will perform for the mindset and thought processes of actually performing. Commitment to the moment is vital in this mode – no stopping, no going back. And in order to fully commit, the critical, self-evaluating mind has to be turned off now! Only after you finish do you think back or listen back to a recording of what you have just done, and think about what needs to be addressed in the next session of Mode 2 or 3. This is an extremely important step if you want to be a successful performer, and particularly if you take auditions.

5. Practicing Joy – Refresh your memory of why you are doing all of this practicing. Listen to music you love, dance, sing. Play music you love, for yourself, just because you love it, even if you have no intention to ever perform it. Also, get together with friends to play duets, trios, quartets, small jazz combos, etc. This is crucial to a life as a musician, and feeds all of the work we do.

Great analysis!

/Tom

[Kbiggs]

My take on the approach or attitude towards practicing: I strive to make my practice a session in mindfulness.

Jon Kabat-Zinn has a useful definition of mindfulness:

[It] is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally,” says Kabat-Zinn. “And then I sometimes add, in the service of self-understanding and wisdom.”

When we add the physical aspects of performing music and the thoughts that go along with focus and concentration on a complex set of behaviors… well, there’s a lot there.

For me, it’s not music vs. physicality, although they come into it. It’s about paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment, in the service music.

[Burgerbob]

These days, a lot of Gabe's mode 1 and not much else.

[tbdana]

I practice to forget. Forget I’m playing the trombone.

The last thing I want to be doing when playing music is thinking about playing, or what I’m playing, or how I’m playing it. I want to just make music, and I can do that best when I’m only barely aware that the trombone is there.

So I practice. And if I practice well and enough, the horn disappears and music just comes from somewhere deep inside me and goes right to the audience. The trombone becomes as automatic as my heartbeat.

So, no, I don’t practice music. I practice so I can ignore my instrument and play music. The entire goal of practicing is to get past playing the trombone and play only music.

[Ozzlefinch]

I guess I'm the odd one out. I play music for practice. That's to say that every exercise I do is done to a drum track, play-along or something like that. Even if I'm just doing scales I like doing them in different styles with varying rhythms, I need to have a "feel" for music or I get really bored with it. I find that I learn better when the exercises have context to what I expect the final outcome to be. "Practice as you play" or whatever.

[Ozzlefinch]

I practice to forget. Forget I’m playing the trombone.

The last thing I want to be doing when playing music is thinking about playing, or what I’m playing, or how I’m playing it. I want to just make music, and I can do that best when I’m only barely aware that the trombone is there.

So I practice. And if I practice well and enough, the horn disappears and music just comes from somewhere deep inside me and goes right to the audience. The trombone becomes as automatic as my heartbeat.

So, no, I don’t practice music. I practice so I can ignore my instrument and play music. The entire goal of practicing is to get past playing the trombone and play only music.

Interesting perspective and one that I share. To paraphrase what you said: the philosophy is to play the music using the instrument (trombone in this case) as the tool that gets it done.

I use that same mindset when conducting training for the railroad. I don't teach the students how to operate a machine, I teach them how to repair the track using a machine.

It's a subtle difference, but one that I feel has major implications to achieving the final goal.

[AndrewMeronek]

I tend to practice both the "physical" and the "musical" focus, but my calisthenics is not practicing every physical activity on the trombone. It's just focusing on the elements I want to improve that I don't normally get to properly exercise in the course of my normal music-ing.

Example: I end up reinforcing legato, ping attacks, and pretty much everything in-between during playing and performing music in general, so I don't usually isolate those for calisthenics. Sometimes I will - like if I get a long string of jazz gigs and then a symphony concert where I'd want to re-dial in the articulation difference for symphony playing. Doesn't happen too often.

Example 2: I get some range building sometimes as part of my general playing and performing, but not enough. So I add range building calisthenics.

[AndrewMeronek]

Pretty soon I'll be doing some new musical pit orchestra gigs - for those I will definitely have less focus on calisthenics and more on learning the shows.