Practice

              To be a good musician a person needs practice.  For many people it can be a repetitive struggle and a chore, but there are a few people out there that enjoy practicing.  I personally don’t enjoy practicing because I would rather be watching television or doing something else, but in the end I still have to practice.  There can be individual practice and also ensemble practice as a full band.   

                For my band, practices are every morning for one hour and then on Mondays they happen from 6-9 p.m. and Saturday is an all-day practice.  There may be a few extra practices thrown in during the week, but that doesn’t happen too often.  For an ensemble to get better each person would need to practice individually first and then show up to ensemble practice ready to rehearse.  A common saying is practice makes perfect. 

                What should a person play during practice?  To start practice someone should do a warm-up.  Warm-ups can consist of scales, easy short warm-up songs, and long tones.  Scales can be boring and hard to memorize, but it helps improve memorization skills and remembering what is sharp or flat in a key signature.  Warm-up songs can be found in music books and are just meant for blowing a few notes and getting a person’s mouth ready to play.  Long tones are extremely helpful and are used to expand how many octaves a person can play.  A person would pick a base note (really low note) and play half and octave up and keeping going up half octaves until they can’t play any higher.  Long tones would be done chromatically so after doing the note A long tones the person would move on and do the note B long tones.  After doing that for several practices a person should be able to play higher and higher until the instrument is no longer capable of playing any higher.  After doing proper warm-ups a person would work on whatever music needs to be practiced for an ensemble rehearsal or other band rehearsals such as honor bands.  During practice a person should practice something until they can’t get it wrong.  My instructor taught me the penny or stick trick.  A person would line up seven pennies or pencils on the stand and when you play something correctly with no mistakes you would take away one penny or object and keep doing that until there are no pennies left.  If you mess up you would have to put all the pennies back on the stand and start over.  Practicing can be repetitive, but it is meant for improving someone’s playing skills.