The Practice Routine
It does not matter who my teacher is/was, or how much "talent" I have, one thing is certain for my craft, I need to practice! Regardless of what Allen Iverson has to say about this topic, I consider practice as important to the actual gig. Being a freelance musician is not like your normal 9-5 job, I don't get to play in front of an audience for 8 hours 5 days a week. I'm lucky if I get to perform more than a few hours a week. Also like I mentioned on my previous post most of the time I gig is completely unrehearsed and with different bands so I better have my chops ready to be able to respond or at least decently survive "anything" that comes my way musically speaking.
I'm not one of those persons that "gets it right away". You know, the kind of person that grabs a pencil and just can draw, or understand the material from just going to class, or aces the test after a long night partying. I'm the one spending hours at the library/room week after week night after night to be able "get it". I think that my natural ability is not that I can do things like play music, or do science, but instead I can spend countless hours working on one thing trying to understand it from different angles until I can make sense of it. This "superpower" not only helped me trough school and college but also through my music journey, specially during music practice.
Music practice is very personal and (could be) lonely, just me with the instrument working a song, an exercise, an idea for hours. At first when I started I had teachers and took some classes, so for the better part of 8 years I practiced what I was told, practiced the song for the test next week, or whatever exercise I was going to be evaluated on. Then at 18 when I went to college to study science, I stopped taking music classes…but I never stopped practicing.
I've been practicing on my own for over 17 years now, and for more than half that time I never knew if I was doing it "right", I was doing it for the sake of "being great or the best I could be at playing my instrument". That can be the goal, but it does not provide a good direction, and although there is never a right or wrong way of doing things in the arts, I believe practicing with a goal mentality is detrimental to the process, it could lead to a path of comparing and envy (I know, I've been there) and that disrupts the true nature of what practicing really is. Practice is about what can I do today and not where I want to be tomorrow, or months/years from now. Is about enjoying and sometimes suffer the process now regardless of how things might come out the day of the gig. I've practiced songs for days just to mess them up the day of the show. I've played flawlessly at shows things that I've never practiced. So music practice is not about the show, is about going through a self-discovery process where my weaknesses and strengths not only as musician but as a person are all revealed to me during a practice session.
Over time I became more conscious with my process and realized that in order to practice "right", I had to create a system tailored to my schedule, mental, physical and spiritual needs as a person. Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing some things I've learned to improve my practice routine.