Reddit reviews The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the Heart
We found 5 Reddit comments about The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the Heart. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Three Rivers Press
I read this book 'The Art of Practicing' and I'd guess it teaches a similar meditative and mental-state approach to practicing. It was very helpful.
If I can be honest without hurting your feelings, the mistakes keep it from being enjoyable. The tempo is not anywhere near as important as the accuracy. However! You definitely demonstrate a skill and love for the instrument, and I am absolutely impressed with your stamina. Now that you've developed stamina and speed, you really need to focus on accuracy. By that I mean, play for 2 1/2 hours every day without making any mistakes, even if it means slowing yourself to half speed. If you do this, you will be back up to this speed, but without mistakes, before you know it.
Not to bang a dead steed, but playing that fast and making that many mistakes - ESPECIALLY if you do it every day - is just going to make you keep making those mistakes. You are spending two and a half hours a day making your hands stronger and enjoying yourself, but you would improve so much faster if you practiced efficiently, by lowering your speed and focusing on accuracy. Playing fast poorly will never lead to playing fast better. You have to play well, slowly, and then the speed comes. Every music teacher and instrumentalist I have ever met has drilled this point in to me.
I wasted years playing the bass and piano fast and sloppy thinking the accuracy would come if I just kept playing. It didn't come until I slowed down and developed it. I wasn't teaching myself to play well, I was teaching myself to do exactly what I was doing - play poorly and quickly.
You have the stamina, the passion, and the skills. Forget about speed, your tempo doesn't need practice. Accuracy takes practice. So if you aren't practicing your accuracy... you're just making yourself better at making mistakes.
I would highly recommend The Art of Practicing if you would like to learn how to get the most out of your practice time.
Uploading something like this takes a lot of courage, so I hope you take these words as the support they are meant to be. I promise if you slow down to whatever speed allows you to play 100% perfectly, you will see drastic improvement in a short amount of time and be back up to this speed, with full accuracy, before you know it. Like, literally just a few weeks. It was the greatest lesson I ever learned about practicing.
Practice doesn't make perfect... perfect practice makes perfect.
I found developing a stronger connection with what I was playing helped and using that connection to really put everything you have into what you are playing.
That way in those situations you can concentrate more on connecting with that music rather than having your attention diverted.
I think there are some mind games that can help as well.
The two books I would recommend reading are:
The art of practicing is more of an all round book about approach to practicing, approach to live, connecting with the instrument and some of the physiological things that go on.
The inner game is based off of pioneering sprots psychology and takes those mental aspects alot further.
One part simply put is this equation:
Performance = Potential - Interference
So here you have the potential side / your skill, when you play with other people your interferance in your mind is low, so you achieve good performance representative of how good your potential performance could be.
However, when you play with people there, there your mental interference goes way up which subtracts greatly from your potential and leaves you with a poor performance.
Most sports people and musicians / anybody doing something with skill has this issue. The usual thing when trying to learn something / get better is always to concentrate on learning how to play more / beter, i.e. learn this technique, this scale etc.
Doing that is all about increasing potential, however, you can get equal benefit by reducing interference. I.e, you can perform better sorting your mind out. And its what alot of professional sports players (musicians etc) have done / concentrated on since the 70's
So that inner game is all about trying to define + understand these things and then some exercises and things to try and help reduce interferance.
Also, I'd always recommed Victor Wootens book The music lesson. Its all about connecting to music in general.
Check out The Art of Practice by Madeleine Bruser https://www.amazon.com/Art-Practicing-Guide-Making-Music/dp/0609801775/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+art+of+practicing&qid=1570647913&sr=8-1 But yeah take care of yourself and just take it slow.
The Art of Practicing is a favorite of mine. The Art of Tennis is good too.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Practicing-Guide-Making/dp/0609801775