Part 1. Practice Techniques

• First and foremost, when you're learning a passage or a piece, practice slowly, then gradually increase your speed! 

It does no good to charge through passages over and over again, always making the same mistakes or making new ones. When you do this, you are practicing the mistakes.

Start at the slowest tempo that you make the fewest mistakes at, practice the places where you make the mistakes at that tempo, and increase the speed only when you have the whole passage down pat.

(Playing through stuff over and over again at a fast tempo is something that I see all the time, even with players who should know better. Again, people who insist on doing this are only practicing mistakes, and don't progress nearly as fast as others who use valid practice methods.)

• Practice scales, arpeggios, and short technical passages while you watch TV.

You will learn quicker if you aren't thinking about what you're doing. "Muscle memory" will take over, and you won't be as bored as if you were staring at a music stand. You should get past the point where you have to think about what you're doing, and do it automatically.  You will also naturally memorize technical passages and not have to look at the notes on the page. 

(This is how I learned all my scales, arpeggios, and intervals. I credit Bonanza and ABC News for most of it.)

Thinking can be baaaaaaaaaaaad, and get you into all kinds of trouble!

• Warm up as much as you think you need to to get things moving, then practice your repertoire or melodic etude first.  

Leave the scales, arpeggios, and technical exercises for later. 

Long tones can wait, too. The purpose of long tones is to make your embouchure stabile and enhance your muscle tone. What better time to play long tones than after you've gone through what you'll need to perform? What worse time to do long tones than at the beginning of a session, tiring yourself before you even get to the "meat" of what you want to perfect?

It's better to learn where you're likely to make mistakes when come into a performance or a lesson somewhat "cold" than not address problems until you're all warmed up and have been playing for a while.

• Always practice technical passages with a metronome. 

You will be surprised how often you rush, drag, or play unevenly without even knowing it. Practicing with a metronome will accelerate your learning; you'll spend less time perfecting passages. (This is one of the hardest things to convince people of.)

• Practice technical passages by using the "add a note" technique:

At full tempo, start with the first note, then add the next. When you're proficient with that interval, add a third, and so on and so on.

• Practice technical passages by varying the rhythm.

Examples:

• • If you have triplet 16ths, practice each triplet as an eighth followed by two sixteenths, then two sixteenths followed by an eighth, then a sixteenth, and eighth, and then the last sixteenth.

  • If you have four sixteenths, practice 16th-8th-16th-8th,  16th-8th-16th-16th and the other various combination.

Practicing with various rhythms will help you get up to speed faster than playing the passage as written over and over again. Also notice that, at any particular tempo, your fingers will move twice as fast as they need to in many of the patterns.

A final note: "Playing" is not the same as "practicing". I'll leave it up to you to figure out why I say so.

10-4 for now.