Tag: practice

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Don’t want to practice? Listen to this instead.

If you’ve never heard of Seth Godin, and you’re in any type of entrepreneurial or customer-focused field (like musicians and teachers), you should check him out. His daily blog entries are both incredibly insightful and ridiculously short. Take this 7-sentence entry posted a few weeks ago as an example. Short, to-the-point, and incredibly insightful. A…
No time to practice? Here’s how to do it!

The past couple of years, I’ve been on a pretty big productivity kick. I’ve read books, blogs, downloaded apps, and watched Youtube videos, all in an effort to try to maximize my ability to do things quickly and effectively. I’m still pretty far from where I feel I should be – productivity wise – but…
A New (To Me) Resource for Brass Players

I recently stumbled across TromboneTools.com, a website by David Vining. David Vining is the trombone professor at the University of Northern Arizona and a co-owner of Mountain Peak Music, as well as a member of the Flagstaff Symphony and a freelance trombonist. Although (obviously) geared toward trombone players, TromboneTools.com features lots of great resources and…
Reducing Frustration and Rage Quitting During Practice

Like I mentioned in my post a few days ago about optimizing your practice sessions by using ship dates, the All-District auditions for Kentucky are happening over the next couple of weeks, with lots of playing tests and chair auditions occurring around the same time (and usually on the same music). Right after Thanksgiving, those students…
Practice Strategy: Use Ship Dates to Optimize Practice Time

It’s getting pretty close to All-District and All-State auditions here in Kentucky. That means that lots of students are starting to feel the pressure to get their audition music finalized. Of course, these students that are stressing most about the audition are the same students that have been practicing in an unorganized way (or not…
MuseScore + IMSLP = OpenScore

A new project and Kickstarter recently announced by Edward Guo, founder of IMSLP and Thomas Bonte, CEO and co-founder of MuseScore, aims to take music into the digital age with the OpenScore project. The OpenScore Project The goal of the OpenScore Kickstarter project – launched on May 29 – is to transfer public domain classical…
Why You Should Make Purposeful Mistakes In Practice

One of my biggest breakthroughs in my horn playing came around a decade ago when I was studying with a great horn player and teacher that I’ll simply call Mr. P. Mr. P helped me fix (or start to fix, at least) the numerous problems that I had in my playing with a variety of approaches.…
Tradition vs Progress in Horn Pedagogy and Playing

A new post over at HornMatters.com by John Ericson about the future of French horn playing raise some very interesting points about the negative side of “traditional pedagogy”, and raises quite a few good points for teachers (and students) who want to continue to move forward. Tradition Vs. Progress The basic premise of Mr. Ericson’s…
Minimum Viable Warm-up – Never Feel Unprepared for Playing!

Most brass players know the importance of a good warm-up. This is probably the single most important session of playing that you do each day since it gives you a chance to focus on the basics of playing. If you’re curious about some of the exercises that I use with my students, I have some…
In a Practice Slump? This 5-minute Video Can Help

If you’re like most people, at times you’ve struggled with making progress in the practice room. Sometimes it seems that you can slave away for hours, days, or weeks and make little to no progress (or even regress!). When you feel like your in a practice slump like this, I find that the most effective…