Unique Content Article: Separating Playing and Practicing For Musical Success!

Separating Playing and Practicing For Musical Success!

by Lawrence Russel

Probably one of the most common things I have discovered in students of all skill levels and playing styles are that the concepts of "playing" and "practicing" are often confused and do not have a clear definition in how they are thought of and approached. Time and time again, as a guitar teacher, and specifically in jazz education, when the focus of improvisation may lend a hand in the ambiguity within these two terms, a pupil may have a hard time separating them, resulting in their progress becoming stunted and their musical vocabulary getting stale.

Many times in which I've asked a student "what are you working on?" or "how are you practicing that?" I get a response involving simply just playing passively without concentration of a given concept, or without clearly defining what they are working on to begin with. To this, I outline what I feel practicing should be, and how it differs from just playing. While this may be somewhat selective to improvised music, this definition can be adjusted and applied to whatever styles, levels, etc

Practicing is just like batting in baseball, in which warming up with using a weight on the bat, will make it light, and easy to swing when you take it off. In doing this one will have far more power as well as control than previously had. Within these terms musically, it can be seen as limitation. Practicing or specifically one form of practicing like this can be assigning your student clear exercises, concepts and ideas to work on which are very specific and outlined, and help all areas of complete musicianship.

Take this for example: Assigning a pattern to use for a scale getting it to a specific BPM within several keys can be seen as the "weight on the bat". When they have completed this, it is the now the time to "get up to bat" where they will utilize the exercise within a real musical context. Here, I could have the student improvise using the scale and pattern, and now by me having gave them such a limitation with concrete, outlined terms, them now using this concept can have a feeling of being natural as well as musical far more than it had been previously and the student will have "taken the weight off the baseball bat"

To clearly define what the "playing" element of this is, which the student will be doing in tandem with practicing, as well as performing live, to me is playing their instrument while taking away the concrete, analytical, conscious part of the musical mind; and just taking part of "living in the moment performing". This is where the student will leave everything they had been practicing at home. Ever so often, one's playing can get off while attempting to remember their practice material an what they had been working on, or even forcing what they had been working on into the music, immediately taking the student out of the moment, and causing barriers in-between the hand, the ear, and the mind resulting in their playing suffering.

This concept of practicing vs. playing may be quite simple just in terms of being conscious of it, but being clear about it can in the big picture, help a student grow leaps and bounds, and offer them exponential success in the practice room as well as the stage.



For more resources for the music teacher and student alike be sure to check out these articles on online <a href="http://www.squidoo.com/online-music-lessons-and-online-music-schools">music school</a>s and <a href="http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-Guitar-Lessons-on-YouTube-Can-Only-Get-You-So-Far&id=7506318">online music lessons</a>!

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New Unique Article!

Title: Separating Playing and Practicing For Musical Success!
Author: Lawrence Russel
Email: kwashington444@yahoo.com
Keywords: music, music education, education, jazz, jazz education, music lessons, music teacher, music lessons, guitar lessons, piano lessons
Word Count: 563
Category: Music
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