I (Melissa), am constantly on the hunt for ideas to help my students as well as myself learn. Recently I’ve been using video games to help re-frame practice sessions for specific students who love video games. To be clear - the ideas I’m presenting in these practice tips are not new or revolutionary but I hope to present them in a way that is engaging and fun.
I often get asked why I encourage scale practice. My answer is usually something along the lines of: a lot of our music is based on scales so by learning them ahead of time your making pieces of music easier to learn. This is true of articulation exercises and a lot of studies too.
Some video games use a mechanic often referred to as a “Skill Tree”. As you play you are awarded points as you level up your character or beat a big monster. As a player you can then spend those points on new abilities. In a skill tree you can decide to spend those points in a certain category of skills to get better and better in that category. For example if you play a game where you are learning spells you might decide you like the fire spells. So you spend your points learning the basic fire spell so the next level you can get a better fire spell. You can then follow that path all the way up until you get the ultimate fire spell!
Now re-frame this idea to a piece of music you are working on. What are the elements of the piece? What about the technical passages? Are they based on a scale or pattern? What articulation patterns are there? Are there passages of tuning that might be difficult? Once you have identified the elements of your piece think about what exercises or skills can you practice to make them easier. You might find a study that focuses in on the scale that your piece is based on. You might take the articulation in a passage and incorporate it into your warm up. I often encourage students to take a rhythmic passage and clap it or say it without their instrument. In fact there are university classes that are a combination of rhythmic exercises, sight singing and ear training, also a fact, that wasn’t my favourite course. A former teacher of mine (Trevor Pittman) encouraged us to make a warm up sheet with some short passages that we would like to master. By doing it a little each day they became less intimidating and it was focused on our specific goals. Also by focusing on your specific goal it helps to keep you motivated.
What skills do you want to focus your points on?