Organizing a Practice Routine (Nov 25) Questions / Suggestions
Hey everybody! 
Since we had already so many great workshops on different practice methods, studies and exercices, let's do a workshop that is dedicated to gather and organize all the valuable insights from our great guests!
Find the start time in your time zone by clicking the photo or following this event link:
https://app.tonebase.co/guitar/live/player/organizing-practice-routine
We are going to be using this thread to gather suggestions and questions!
- What questions do you have on this topic?
- Any particular area you would like me to focus on?
Forum questions will be answered first!
"Designing a practice session that covers all tasks within a certain amount of time is not an easy task. Tonebase host Martin Zimny walks you through his practice routine and gives advice on how to organize the multitude of exercices, studies and scales into a daily routine. What exercices are indespensable for every session, what are your short term or long term goals and when and how should we remix our routine? Grab your guitars and get ready to get organized! "
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Hi Martin, I wanted you to recommend a routine, to improve the technique, that would make me play more relaxed, I dedicate 4 or 5 hours to studying and my level is intermediate, Thanks
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Giuseppe Gasparini thank you for your question, your question will be the first to be answered! :) Playing relaxed is of the greatest importance if you invest so many hours for practicing!
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Hi Martin. I very much look forward to hearing your approach to the daily routine, but was wondering if you could also say a few words about the larger picture: Time devoted to reading composer biographies, analysis of pieces (even ones you are not playing), active listening to other music, sight reading etc. Also how that is likely to differ between amateurs and professionals and change as you move from beginner to intermediate to advanced.
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Peter Hi Peter, thank you for your question! Unfortunately I didn't see it prior to the live stream, so I'd like to take the chance to pick up the discussion here!
When I teach my students I always encourage them to research a little bit more about the composers they are playing. It's very common that very young players sometimes don't even know the composer of the piece they are playing, so I try to combat that from early on.
All the topics you are referring to are crucial for the development into an informed professional performer! Over the course of this development one will more and more become musicologist of his or her own, as all the information and secondary literature is out there, for free. A lot of the information for performing a certain style of music can be found within the methods of their respective time. My go-to's i.e. are the methods by Johann Joachim Quantz ("Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen" and by Leopold Mozart ("Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule") for earlier music.But of course as you are starting out as a beginner all this information can overwhelm you. I started to go down this path at the age of 15 when I played Giuliani Sonata in C major, op.15. To further my knowledge of Viennese style I started to compare recordings of Beethoven Sonatas by different performers and listened to them while reading the score.
So I would say that in the beginning, we consume distilled information, reading what is already inside of the score, the preface of certain editions, brief biographies of the composers we play. Additionally, you want to cover the style of the epoch, listening to the most influential composers of a time period played by great performers. As you dig deeper, there is a vast amount information covered in the methods of their respective time helping you to make informed decisions for your personal interpretation.
I was never a big reader of biographies, but I did enjoy very much the biographies of H. W. Henze ("Reiselieder in böhmischen Quinten") and of course the beautifully written biography of Arthur Rubinstein! Those probably didn't affect my playing instantaneously, but reading a good book never harmed anyone :)
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Hi Martin,
Thank you for the workshop. My question at this stage is: do you practice sight-reading? If not, how do you improve it?
Have fun.
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Hi Igor !
I actually NEVER practiced sight reading! I had a very eye-opening theory class together with MIRCEA where we were supposed to sight read a two part invention by Bach and transpose it an octave higher instantaneously. I failed miserably because I realized something:
Where my dear friend was seeing notes, I was seeing tablature! So where Mircea's incredible brain only needed to take the name of the note and search it on a higher string, the algorithm in my brain was greatly more ineffective:- Seeing the written dot on the score
- identifying it as the 2nd string, first fret
- thus identifying it as a c
- transposing it visually on the score
- playing the first string 8th fret
- fail & repeat.
Of course i knew that the not on the score was a C, but reading music and playing music has always been the same step, so I couldn't just eliminate that line of code from my sight-reading.exe (haha), I NEEDED to play that note before I was able to properly transpose it.
After that I worked on rewiring my brain into a more effective I/O processor by simply reading the melody of a certain passage in real time, thus eliminating the need to identify to playing position, that worked great for me.
Btw., rhythm was always easier for me as it has a more visual approach. The scores are usually laid out in a way that the score respects certain key points of a metrum, so if it's not going too crazy, you can see the downbeats of a bar and derive the rest from that quicker!
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martin Interesting view point, Martin! Thanks a lot.
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After many years of reworking scores for a brass band, I am good at transposing, but only in my mind. Transposing "a vista" and directly on the guitar is beyond my reach, I need to practice it :-) It can be fun (though probably frustrating at first).
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Marek Tabisz A good practice can be to play a piece in a new mode, i.e. instead of e minor you play e phrygian (which is e minor only without any key signatures)! I heard that Carlo Marchione can do this masterfully (i.e. playing Rossiniana in G-Lydian).
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Thank you Martin for a very useful session! I will implement the Excel spreadsheet method. I also love having things organised - some times I just loose track of what pieces I am working on. Included for everyone is a copy of your mind map I made in draw.io. I exchanged Barrios tremolo piece with just Barrios / Tárrega.
And yes, I did the time stamps :-)
7:20 - Introduction.
8:39 - On a routine to improve technique and play more relaxed with many hours at your disposal. Martin talks about his own practise routines when he was studying and today.
16:43 - Concept of preparing hand before practising repetoire.
17:33 - Basic routing of MZ: 50 minutes of warming up muscles and technique exercises. 10 minutes break. Practise with intent.
20:23 - Private online classes.
21:47 - Only 2 hours for practice.
23:06 - MZ's first bare minimum practise: String crossing.
30:40 - After every exercise -> hang shoulders loose.
33:05 - Increase the speed during practise. -> Practicing with a metronome.
36:51 - Warming up without the guitar.
40:00 - String crossing and slur exercises. (44:42)
47:53 - Breaking up the day with different practise techniques.
50:28 - Using audio & video to analyse technique.
53:15 - Spreading technique over a week rather than 4-5 hours -> Useful for short term goals. Work economically with your time. Make a big task into smaller tasks.
56:26 - Recap of bare minimum exercises with thoughts on tirando.
57: 53 - Scales.
58:30 - MZ's concept basic practise routine.
59:15 - Slurs with fixed fingers. (1:13:55)
1:00:07 - Agility exercises.
1:02:55 - Change of position.
1:04:04 - Relaxation and playing fast.
1:19:32 - What are slurs with a fixed finger?
1:22:00 - Semi-chromatic scales (4 notes per string).
1:24:35 - Feeling for relaxation (David Martinez).
1:27:57 - Arpeggios.
1:36:36 - How to practise scales -> play slowly - shift quickly.
1:40:45 - Developing speed.
1:43:10 - Working on studies.
1:52:04 - Repertoire training with Excel spreadsheet. Great = ready for concert.
1:59:24 - Ralph Towner (available on Martin's YouTube channel).
2:02:55 - How many pieces do you work on at a time?
2:06:02 - No dedicated software tools for practise planning.-
Philip Awesome, thank you so much!!!
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Golden Nuggets:
Speed comes from relaxation - not force.
- Martin Zimny (1:39:43)All passages of a piece needs the same attention.
- Gabriel Bianco (1:57:27) -
sorry to bump this. But anyone using any apps for this purposes? I saw some of the apps on app store can easily record your sessions, set reminders (for break), set calendar and track how much time you spend on individual practices.
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don I only use a metronome without distractions (bought the Pro Metronome App to get rid of the ads) and my built-in Timer App! I actually recommend to get the smartphone out of the way as it‘s a big source of distraction, so I do have a metronome and a watch for that purpose.
I actually have used a very cool timer app before where I can set multiple tasks with their respective times (10min Slurs, then 10min Opposing Motion, then 20min Arpeggios and Apoyando, then 10min Tremolo, then 10min Break, then Repertoire etc.), but the app I’ve used for that got discontinued.
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Martin Thank you! I just downloaded the app modacity it seems to describe what your previous app was doing but turns it requires a monthly subscription to continue using it.
I ended up 'stealing' your excel to track progress instead.
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don I ran into the same problem, haha!
Keeping an overview with an excel tab is a great way to track your practice session over a longer period of time, glad that you liked that approach!
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Hi Martin,
Your livestream on practice last night made me want to return to this one again. One thing wasn’t so clear. Is this a three hour (50 minutes) practice session? One hour right and left hand warm ups, one hour studies, one hour repertoire?
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Debbie Oh yeah, in that case that was how I organized my routine! But if your focus isn't so much on studies, on could easily fit some study practice into the technique / warm-up part! For example, I don't need to play through the whole Villa-Lobos #1 in order to derive enough arpeggio material!
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Martin thanks Martin. Sometimes I only have two hours in which case I can do as you suggest and just play parts of studies for arpeggios or scales. But if I have three hours I’m trying to give more attention to studies I’ve never done. I never finished all the Brouwer (my favorite) Sor, or Carcassi studies. And then when I finish with those there are the Villa-Lobos and Ponce studies I’d like to do as well. And some of them are so beautiful they can double as repertoire pieces. I like your practice approach. I think it is practical because life is busy!
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Debbie I agree with you say about studies doubling as repertoire. Indeed, I would say that many (if not most) studies are repertoire, period. Perhaps a distinction between 'study' and 'exercise' might be useful. In the latter class I would include, for example, the 120 arpeggio patterns from Giuliani's opus 1: these are no doubt a staple of many practice routines, but you would not expect to see them included in a concert program! The converse situation exists for the twelve Villa-Lobos etudes. With the exception of the first one, they are unlikely to be a part of anyone's warm-up (virtuosos excepted, I suppose) but they are often enough heard in performance. For this reason, I have come to approach most studies in much the same way I approach repertoire: if I want to learn one, I work at it for a period of some days or weeks, but once I have mastered it, I move onto to something else. A small number I do maintain over a longer period as part of my 'permanent' repertoire, but few indeed are those that I revisit regularly.
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I think there is a good discussion to be had here about studies. As I’m not a youngster anymore I want to be selective with my time. It seems there are a few approaches and I’m trying to find the one that’s right for me.
1). I learn each study fully and decide whether it’s nice enough to keep as a rep piece.
2). I learn each study so-so then decide whether to learn it fully or just take excerpts from it as a warm up.
3). I listen to the studies on YouTube or whatever and/or sight read them (because that’s good to practice too) and decide it’s nice enough to learn fully or to take an excerpt from as a warm up.
4). I only spend my time on repertoire and make warmup studies from those pieces. This could also include some of the studies I’d like to include as repertoire.
So basically I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the time and effort, when time is limited, to learn all the studies up to a performance grade level, regardless of whether I keep it as a rep piece or not. Are they really that much more valuable than a non-study repertoire piece?
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Hi. Thanks for the session. Could you please let me know how to obtain the practice PDF you have in the video? Thanks again, and great work!
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Tony Gunia HI Tony, what pdf do you now exactly? I'm sharing the pdf with the exercises and my practice sheet with you, let me know if you need anything else!
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Thank you Martin...exactly what I was looking for. You rock!
