Practice

The Practice Files - How to practise like a pro

What’s your approach to practising? Are you a last minute crammer? Or someone who works diligently every day? My hope today is to open your eyes to the way practice works. Not just a case of ‘do this, do that’, but what actually goes on inside your body. Learning about this has helped me understand the process of learning and practice and I hope it’ll also help you harness your body’s ability to learn.

How do we learn new skills?

Have you ever considered what goes on inside your body when you practise? I suspect most of us go about learning music without giving it a second thought, but a little knowledge can be a powerful tool to help us understand the best way to improve our playing.

Let’s begin with a few basics of physiology…

In order to move any part of our bodies, an electrical impulse needs to travel from our brain, along our nerves, telling the muscles and tendons to move. Every second of the day our brains send endless electrical messages out to all parts of our anatomy, almost all of them without any conscious decision making. Think about the simple act of eating, for instance. Messages have to be sent to our hands to manipulate the cutlery (quite aside from the process of deciding which piece of food you want to eat next), followed by another to lift the fork to our lips and then our jaws and throat need yet more messages with instructions to chew and swallow. When you break down that process it’s amazing how many complex actions we carry out every second without a second thought.

What you may not realise is that we have secret weapon helping us learn these repetitive skills, making them quicker and more instinctive. That weapon is a substance called myelin.

What is myelin?

Myelin is a phospholipid membrane - a dense type of fat which wraps about our nerve fibres to insulate them. As you can see from this image, it builds up in sausage-like shapes around the nerves. This insulation prevents electrical impulses leaking from the nerves, resulting in stronger, more efficient neural pathways. Myelin acts just like the plastic insulation around copper wiring, helping channel electrical signals to their destination without interruption. Fundamentally, when we’re playing the recorder, it helps messages travel from the brain to our fingers, tongue and lungs quicker, allowing us to play with greater fluency and speed.

The more layers of myelin we build up, the more accurate and speedier our thoughts and movements become. Uninsulated nerve fibres are like the copper wires used to provide the slow dial-up internet connection we used in the early days of the internet. In contrast, once they’ve been wrapped with myelin they become more like the optic fibre which provides us with super-fast fibre internet today – infinitely quicker.

The best way to trigger the myelination of nerve pathways is by making mistakes (something we’re all very capable of!), before fixing those mistakes through practice. Each time we fire a neural circuit (the path the messages take along the nerves) correctly, cells called oligodendrocytes and astrocytes sense this and respond by wrapping the nerves in myelin. The more often this happens, the more layers of myelin are laid down and the closer we get to building our own human equivalent of a super-fast optic fibre cable. A signal can travel through a myelinated nerve pathway up to a hundred times fast than an uninsulated one, and that can make a huge difference to the speed and accuracy our playing!

A one-way process

Once your body has wrapped a nerve pathway in myelin, that insulation is there permanently. It can only be disrupted by disease, such as Multiple Sclerosis, which destroys myelin. With diseases like this, the loss of myelin means nerves lose their ability to conduct electrical impulses, resulting in a loss of vital motor skills.

If you’ve ever wondered why bad habits are so hard to break, this is because of the one-way nature of myelination. Once you’ve created and insulated the nerve pathway to play a wrong note or rhythm, the only way to undo that is to practise the notes correctly, creating another freshly myelinated one. If ever there was a good reason to practise with care, this is surely it!

Is myelin only used for music making?

Absolutely not - myelin isn’t uniquely used to help us learn a musical instrument. It responds in the same way to any repetition, so it’ll do its job with any skill you’re working on. Whether you’re trying to play a C minor scale, develop your golf swing, memorising where the buttons are on your camera, learning a new chess move or language, myelin is used.

Following Einstein’s death, an autopsy was carried out on his body and the construction of his brain was revealed to be largely the same as other men of his age. However, his brain contained twice as many of the cells which support the production of myelin. At the time, the significance of this was unknown, but as we’ve learnt more about the way myelin works, it seems entirely logical that this would be the case in a man whose brain developed so many ground breaking mathematical concepts. Imagine how much myelin Bach must have had after a lifetime of honing his compositional skills!

Is there a best time to add myelin to our nerve pathways?

In our youth, and as young adults, we lay down myelin astonishingly easily - this is why children pick up new skills at such a fast rate. The ability to myelinate nerves at a high rate continues until around the age of 50. After this it’s a harder process, but we retain the ability to add myelin throughout our life - just at a slower rate. If you’ve ever wondered why it’s so much harder to learn a brand new skill as an older adult (be that learning a musical instrument, a new language, learning to ski) it’s because of this change in the way our bodies create myelin. Please don’t let this put you off though! You absolutely can learn new skills as an adult, but it will just take a little longer.

Something we can all do

The mechanism of laying down myelin is a unifying process for all humans. We often think of the best musicians as having an innate talent, with them from birth; something that’s missing from the rest of us. There may be an element of truth here, but in reality professional musicians and sports people have also spent many years firing particular nerve circuits over and over, laying down thick layers of myelin to help them make music or play sport really well.

I make no claims to be the best recorder playing in the world, but I sometimes see looks of astonishment at concerts and courses as I play fast music. An expression on the faces of the audience which says, “How on earth can it be possible to play the recorder that quickly?!” I don’t have a God-given gift, but instead I’ve spent most of my life practising, insulating my nerve pathways to make my reactions faster and more accurate. I had no idea all this was happening inside my body as I practised, but it means I can still play quickly, even though I’m now the wrong side of 50. If you’ve come to learning an instrument later in life it make take a longer to build up this speed, but it’s never too late to make more of the skills you have. Practise in the right way and you’ll be surprised what you can achieve.

If you’ve ever wondered why humans have the ability to create languages, this is down to myelin too. We have 20% more of it than monkeys – a key difference which means we can talk and they can’t. They have the equivalent of copper wiring, compared to our optic fibres!

The fallacy of muscle memory

The more we develop a particular nerve circuit, the less we’re aware that we’re using it. Gradually the activity becomes automatic; stored in our unconscious mind. This function is often described as ‘muscle memory’. In reality, muscles have no memory - it’s simply a convenient description. Instead, the process of myelinating the nerves makes it seem like our muscles have somehow remembered what to do.

What myelin means for our practice.

That’s the science bit over with – now to figure out what this means for our music making!

You’ll be pleased to hear that you’re not expected to be perfect. In fact, making mistakes is critical. As we recognise our mistakes we then practise to correct them, and it’s the process which trigger the myelination of our nerves. What is important is that you practise in the right way. In Daniel Coyle’s book, The Talent Code he describes this as deep practice. I’ll help you figure out what this is in a moment, but first let me describe a scene I saw time after time when I was teaching children in schools.

Let me introduce you to Tom, a pupil I taught many years ago… Tom arrives for his lesson and plays me a piece of music he’s practised. After a few bars he makes a mistake. Realising his error, he immediately goes back to the beginning to start again, only to stumble at the same spot. This is the crunch point. By repeating that error Tom has already started the process of myelinating the nerve pathway controlling that mistake, meaning it it’s likely he’ll continue making it – the first step to a bad habit!

So what could Tom do differently? To avoid these bad habit making steps, it’s much better to stop straight away and attend to the error. Playing a much shorter passage of notes, ensuring they’re actually right, means you begin to trigger a positive myelination process, insulating the right nerve pathway rather than the wrong one. Of course, Tom is far from unique in this respect. I saw countless pupils do exactly the same during my years as a school teacher and I’m sure I sometimes did this too in my own practice.

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett

This short TED video shows the way Myelin works very effectively, as well as exploring some of the practice tips I’ll talk about in more detail next…

Now let’s take a look at ways you can put yourself on the path to deep practice.

Perfect your practice technique

The first steps to deep practice

Deep practice is a process of identifying and isolating your mistakes, then slowly and carefully, correcting the errors through repetition. At every point you want to ensure you’re playing things correctly so you fire the same nerve pathway every time, allowing your body to insulate it with myelin. Each correct repetition you make helps ensure you build good habits which will last.

The most important way to correct mistakes in your playing and your technique is to slow down. We all want to go as far and as fast as we can, but in reality it’s far better to take things at a slower pace. Let’s take a hypothetical example…

Let’s say you’re working on this movement from Van Eyck’s Der Fluyten Lusthof and you stumble over the section marked in red, fumbling the fingering for the top B flat. These are the steps I would suggest you try to overcome the mistake, ensuring you gain complete fluency through the semiquavers:

1.      Check the fingering for top B flat and very slowly practise moving back and forth between that and top A. Are your fingers moving exactly together? Look at and feel the quality of your finger movements – make them small, quick and positive, while keeping your fingers relaxed. Repeat this movement many times and focus on consistency. Being able to play it correctly a couple of times could be a coincidence, but if you can do it perfectly ten times that’s less likely to be down to chance. Now make the same finger movements more quickly, only increasing the speed further when you have achieved consistency.

2.      Expand your zone of focus a little wider – a note further, playing G - A - B flat - A - G. Still go slowly – if you can’t play it slowly, it certainly won’t happen at speed. Again, make lots of repetitions before speeding up.

3.      Continue this expansion process – perhaps adding in the notes from the four notes before the B flat, through to the end of the beat containing the B flat. At all times begin slowly, focusing on precision and quality of finger movements.

4.      When you’re sure you’ve got the beats around the B flat secure, then go back further and play more of he piece to check if you can maintain the accuracy in the context of the wider music.

This whole process might only take a few minutes, but it’ll have a big effect on the fluency of your playing and can be applied to any similar mistake.

Chunking

Chunking is a term used to describe the process of breaking any concept or piece of work down into smaller units to understand and learn more effectively. It’s immensely useful for music, but is also often used in teaching children to read, and the principles can be helpful in many areas of learning.

The process of chunking involves breaking a piece down into small sections, which you slowly repeat over and over to achieve fluency. The important thing is to begin with genuinely small pieces, playing them slowly enough that you can consistently play them cleanly and accurately. As I suggested with the Van Eyck example above, repeating these chunks ten times is a good place to begin, because that helps you really understand whether you’ve nailed the passage.

When you succeed with an individual chunk, move on to the next group of notes and repeat the same process. When these are secure you can then bring the chunks back together and see if you can play the longer passage accurately. If reconnecting the chunks results in mistakes, choose a slower speed and try again, with lots of repetition.

Speed is a really important element of this process. It may feel like you’re admitting defeat by playing a passage at a metronome speed of 50 beats per minute when the music should really be played at 120. But if you can achieve real fluency and accuracy at this super-slow tempo you’re then in a position to gradually increase the speed. Remember too that you won’t need to follow this approach with every note in a new piece. There will be some passages which fall easily under the fingers straight away, and these won’t need to be chunked. Chunking should be your tool of choice for sections which are on the edge of your technique - the patches which feel tantalisingly out of reach!

Let’s look at the Van Eyck again and I’ll show with different colours how you could break it down. Let’s imagine you’re having trouble with the last bar of line 3. In the three examples below I show how you could break this down into small chunks, before gradually reconnecting those chunks together.

We begin by breaking the bar down into its four beats. Each chunk is shown with a red box. Notice how I’ve included the first note of the next beat into each box - that helps you make a connection between the beats, so you don’t hesitate here when you reconnect them. Play each box really slowly at least ten times, focusing on accuracy and fluency. Only increase the speed you play each chunk when you can reliably play them with fluency. If you still stumble over these chunks, don’t be afraid to break them down into even smaller elements.

Another useful addition to this process is to play the chunks in different ways. You could play them as dotted rhythms or perhaps add some slurs. These additions give you more to think about - if you can achieve fluency with added challenges, playing the music as printed will feel easier!

When you’re happy with these chunks you can then gradually bring the chunks together…

Finally, bring all four beats together. If you need to reduce the speed again at first, that’s absolutely fine. Again, fluency and accuracy is always the most important thing. Once again, make lots of repetitions to ensure you’re really myelinating those nerve pathways!

Extreme Chunking. At one American music school, Meadowmount School of Music near New York, extreme chunking is a technique used in the teaching. One technique the students use is to cut their music into strips (a photocopy, not the original!) and practise these short sections in a random order. They might also breaking the strips down into even smaller chunks and using different rhythm patterns as I’ve described above. Once the strips of music are fluent they can gradually be brought back together, building the pieces back up again in the right order.

If you ever find you can only play a piece of music well when you start from a particular place (often the beginning) this could be a useful technique for you. Breaking the music down into a random order helps you disassociate the different sections from each other. When you bring them back together you should then be able to start from any point with equal ease.

I used a similar process as a teenager when practising scales and arpeggios for exams. Learning them from a book meant I found I could easily play them in the printed order because I’d become accustomed to the familiar progression from one key to another. To prepare myself for the moment the examiner would ask me for scales in a random order I wrote each one on a small card and drew them from a box. Because they came out in a different combination every time I gradually learnt to disassociate the keys from the order I’d learnt them in.

Little and often

If you’re really doing deep practice, it won’t be something you can sustain for long periods. Don’t be afraid to work in shorter bursts - perhaps several times a day. When I’m working in this way on a piece of music I might spend 15-20 minutes really breaking something down, slowly increasing my speed. As soon as I feel my concentration is waning or I begin making increasing numbers of mistakes, I’ll step away from my music for a while and come back in an hour or two. This method of practising is useful if you’re a busy person who doesn’t have two hours at a time to practise. Little and often is the way to go! To really make progress on a new piece of music, it’s important to practise regularly. Even one short practice session every day will have more impact than a longer splurge once a week.

“If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.”

Virtuoso pianist, Vladimir Horovitz.

Practice comes in different forms

Aside from the deep practice techniques I’ve described above there are lots of other ways you can improve your playing. Treat the list below as your ‘practice menu’. In a restaurant you may choose fish and chips one day, but might be in the mood for roast beef another day. Music making can be the same - there’s no reason why every practice session needs to follow the same pattern.

Contemplative/mindful practice

Not feeling inspired to really work on a whole piece of music? Feeling in a more meditative mood? Try this simple, creative exercise…

Pick an easy scale and play just the first five notes. Keep it really simple so you don’t even need to look at the notes on the page - it could be as simple as C-D-E-F-G.

Play the notes really slowly - spend four steady beats on each note. Do this several times and close your eyes. Really listen to your playing, focusing on your tone. Is it even and consistent? Are you making a beautiful tone that you really enjoy? Are there notes which suddenly jump out, either weaker or louder than the rest? Keep repeating the pattern slowly, aiming for consistency. There’s absolutely no rush - be in the moment and really listen.

Adjust your breath pressure and see what effect this has on your tone. Really focus on the physical sensations. How far is your tongue moving as you articulate the notes? Is the transition between notes smooth or lumpy?

Now think about your fingers. Are they relaxed? How far are they moving from the recorder and are they rising and falling quickly and neatly? At every repetition, be inwardly critical of what you feel and hear, actively adjusting your movements to improve every aspect of your technique.

Even this slow, contemplative form of practice is beneficial, even if you don’t feel you’re making great strides. This sort of practice can be very therapeutic and relaxing. Remember, even at this pace, every repetition and improvement you make lays down a little more myelin around your nerve pathways!

Practise by thinking

As you work on improving a piece of music, it can be helpful to do some mental practice away from your instrument. Studies have shown that just workng through an activity in your mind can help reinforce the skills you’ve been practising. Don’t try necessarily do this with an entire piece of music, but pick a phrase or short section to play through in your head. Count through the rhythms, imagining how it will sound as you play it. If you have a train or bus journey you could take your music with you and spend some of the time on this sort of mental practice. Elite athletes sometimes visualise the skills they use during their training. Gymnasts will think through routines in their mind before competing, and Formula 1 drivers will mentally drive the corners of the race circuit before heading out on track, imagining which gears they’ll use in different places.

Silent practice

Another take on the mental practice I mentioned just now is to work on your music without actually blowing into your recorder. You could hold the instrument and rest the mouthpiece on your chin. I’ve also been known to finger through passages using a pencil or an instrument cleaning rod - especially handy if you want to do some silent practice while travelling on the train! Taking away the sound makes you focus on the quality of your finger movements without being distracted by wrong or split notes. Are your fingers moving exactly together? Look at the way your they’re moving - are they quick and neat, or does one of them look a little sluggish?

Listening to improve your awareness

It’s easy to get obsessed with our own playing, but it’s important to also listen to other musicians - and I mean really listen.

Pick a piece you want to learn, or something by a composer whose music you enjoy. Seek out difference recordings of the same piece (perhaps using a music streaming service, CDs from your local library, videos of performances by professional musicians on YouTube) and try to identify which elements attract you to particular performances. Is it the way they phrase the music? Do you like one performer’s choice of articulation? Does one player pick a tempo which really sings to you, or is is their tone quality?

Be like a child in a sweet shop - pick and choose which elements you might wish to use in your own performances. If there are aspects you don’t like, ask yourself what you would do differently? When you come to play the music yourself, think outside the box and try different approaches. Go on, go really wild! Don’t be afraid to try radically different ways of playing - dramatic tempi, dynamics, ornamentation - and see what appeals to you. Take risks in the knowledge that no one need know about your failures, but you might discover something amazing!

There’s no shame in borrowing elements you enjoy in recordings for your own playing. You might like the way a performer adds a trill in a certain place, or their choice of dynamic for a particular phrase. Imitation is not stealing - you’re just trying on different musical clothes to see which styles suit you best!

Don’t be afraid to use your pencil!

If you’ve been reading my Score Lines blog for a while, you’ll know I’m a great believer in using a pencil to help you add useful reminders or creative decisions into your music. There’s nothing more frustrating than coming up with a really great idea as you practise, only to find it vanished from your brain as you slept and you can’t remember it the next morning! I wrote a blog post all about my enthusiasm for making greater use of a pencil in your music making - if you haven’t already read it, or need a refresher, you can find it here.

Practice should always be an active process

Finally, aways be sure to practise in an active rather than a passive way. Be alert, listen and pay attention to what you hear and feel physically, rather than just letting the music wash over you.

Further practice tips

Here are a few bonus practice tips which have helped me over the years….

Work with music that excites you. If you adore Baroque music, explore that and work with your enthusiasms. If you love jazz, don’t let others tell you you’d be better off learning the saxophone. You can play jazz on the recorder, so pursue your passion because it’ll motivate you to practise.

Fuel your motivation with your successes. Practising can be frustrating and satisfying in equal measure. Don’t always set yourself targets which are really well beyond your abilities. Sometimes pick a slightly easier piece and do some deep practice on that until you can truly play it well. Success in your practice can be addictive. Once you’ve proved to yourself that you can master a piece, that’ll motivate you to keep going and aim higher,

Think of the music you play in a more visual or descriptive way. if you’re struggling to find meaning in the music you’re learning, try to imagine a picture or story to go with it, or find some words to describe the mood you wish to conjure up. As a teenager I learnt a Capriccio by Heinrich Sutermeister on the clarinet and found it difficult to find the right character. Between myself and my teacher we came up with a storyline for the work about a lady having an affair with her gardener and each musical theme related to a character in the story. This did the trick and suddenly my performance came alive! Be imaginative - sometimes a visual or linguistic concept can help you find what you’re looking for.

Make friends with your metronome. I know many musicians have a love/hate relationship with their metronome, but it can be an immensely helpful tool. If you fall into the ‘hate’ category, do take a look at my blog about using a metronome and I hope you’ll pick up some tips to help you make friends with your ticking assistant.

Putting my own advice into practice

To end I thought I’d share a glimpse of my own musical experiences - first from my days as a student and again more recently.

When I first began studying the recorder with Philip Thorby, at the age of 17, he set me what seemed a very dull task - slow scales and long notes, plus some exercises by Hans Ulrich Staeps. I’d only had a year of specialist recorder lessons prior to this and I really needed this concentrated focus to set me up with a truly sound technique. Without the pressure to learn complex pieces of music I was freed up to focus on how I was playing rather than what I was playing. Through the endless repetition of scales and exercises I came to appreciate the satisfaction of playing something simple really well. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was also laying down thick layers of myelin around my nerve pathways - something I’ve benefited from throughout my musical life.

Since I began my research for this blog post I reaped the benefit of my newfound knowledge when I needed to learn a new piece of Bach. Many of the scale and arpeggio patterns contained within it felt comfortable under my fingers - the nerve pathways I use to play C major, A minor, G major, D minor and other keys have evidently become so well insulated in myelin that I could rely on my fingers to find the patterns easily.

In contrast, passages containing more complicated, less predictable combinations of notes still needed some deep practice. This I did by playing them slowly, figuring out where an occasional alternative fingering might make things easier. I did exactly as I’ve described above, breaking the runs down into smaller groups of notes and made lots of repetitions. If I stumbled, I slowed it down further still until I could play it perfectly. I’d use different rhythms, slur notes that should be tongued so as to make it harder for myself. If I could play these passages well with extra hurdles strewn in front of me, performing them as written would feel like a walk in the park! Gradually I increased my speed, stepping back again if mistakes reappeared.

How long did this take? Remarkably little time. Every time I practised I’d play the music through, paying attention to areas which had settled, and noting the bars that were still rusty. These were the notes I then returned to and did yet more deep practice. Over the course of a fortnight, practising a little every day, I nailed those troublesome passages. I didn’t need to play for hours each day because my focus was laser like. Twenty or thirty minutes of really focused, deep practice is far more powerful than a couple of hours of playing through music, warts and all. Come concert day, the work paid off and all the passages I’d spectacularly fluffed at our rehearsal two weeks earlier had fallen into place - job done!

Could you do this too? Absolutely! Your aspiration may not be to perform a complex piece of Bach, with hundreds of notes per square inch, to a packed concert audience, but you’ll have other pieces you’d love to play really well. Perhaps you want to play your favourite folk song, or get to know a Handel recorder sonata really well, but the principles are the same.

Like many of my readers, I’m now the wrong side of 50, faced with the knowledge that my body will gradually lose its ability to myelinate my nerve pathways as swiftly as it once did. But the nerves I’ve already insulated remain and I can still reinforce those and continued to add newly insulated neural pathways. It may take a little longer, but I know that if I practise in the right way I can still achieve great things.

My advice to you is to slow down, repeat tricky bits often and well, and you too can avoid many of the pitfalls of sloppy practice. Use the knowledge you’ve learnt here as your superpower. Understanding the mechanics of how we learn gives you the ability to achieve more than you imagined you could ever do!

Further resources:

Through the course of my research, these are some of the books I’ve read and benefitted from. If, like me, you’re fascinated by the process of learning I can’t recommend these highly enough. I’ve included links to the books on Hive (my favourite online bookstore), but they’re available from all good bookshops.

Daniel Coyle - The Talent Code

This was a real ‘aha’ moment for me - my introduction to the existence of myelin and a much deeper understanding of how effective practising can best be achieved.

Glenn Kurtz - Practicing : A Musician's Return to Music

Notes on a life spent practising by a would be professional guitarist. I found a particularly interesting parallel to the recorder here. During his studies Glenn has a realisation that as a guitarist he’s a second class musician at music conservatoire - there’s unlikely to be a glittering career playing concertos with symphony orchestras, like pianists and violinists, or even a career as an orchestral player. This struck me as very similar to life as a professional recorder player - ours is a niche instrument whose players have to find their own unique way in the musical world.

David Eagleman - Livewired : The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

A fascinating book about the human brain and its astonishing ability to change and rewire itself, whether through our actions or in response to brain injury or strokes.

And finally, some videos related to the subject of music and the brain

How playing an instrument benefits your brain:

Why you're not stuck with the brain you're born with

A short film about neuroplasticity and the way our brains continually re-wire themselves through our lives as we learn new skills and create new neural pathways.

Learn to love your scales!

What comes into your mind when you think about scales and arpeggios? Perhaps memories from childhood - being nagged by a teacher to practise? Or maybe even a degree of perplexity about exactly what they are?

Many of us have a love/hate relationship with scales. When I think back to my teenage years I realise I owe my music teachers an apology for my lack of application when it came to these fundamental exercises. Time and again I would spend the last two or three weeks before a music exam frantically cramming my scales and arpeggios instead of learning them gradually over a longer period, Fortunately for me, I had an uncanny ability to learn them at speed and I usually got away with this last minute feverish rush of learning. The downside was that I never really absorbed them thoroughly, so within a couple of weeks of the exam I’d forgotten them all again! My slapdash approach must have been infuriating, but those teachers I’m still in touch with seem to have forgiven me!

Of course the irony is I’ve seen the same situation from the other side of the fence many times during my teaching career, quietly trying cajoling my students to start learning their scales and arpeggios as early as possible…

What are scales and arpeggios?

The first movement of Telemann’s Sonata in F major which is built upon lots of scale patterns.

Scales and arpeggios are the fundamental building blocks of music and all western music is created from these patterns. A scale uses neighbouring notes, while an arpeggio uses the 1st, 3rd and 5th steps of a scale to create a broken chord, where the notes are played in turn to create a melodic line rather than as harmonies.

Major and minor scales contain eight different pitches within each octave, arranged in a particular combination of tones and semitones. On the other hand, a chromatic scale includes all 12 notes - just as you would if you played every black and white note in order on the piano.

You’re probably most familiar with the concept of major, minor and chromatic scales, but there are many more types besides. Pentatonic scales have just five notes (sound just the black notes on a piano and you’re playing a pentatonic scale), modes are created from the patterns made by playing the white notes of the keyboard in different combinations, and jazz musicians have their own varieties of scales.

They’re not just a feature of western music either - in some musical cultures other patterns are used. For instance, Indian music is based on ragas - scale patterns which can include intervals even smaller than our semitone.

Why do I need to learn scales and arpeggios?

This is a cry many teachers have heard from their students in frustration! While they may not seem terribly exciting, learning scales and arpeggios helps your music making in many different ways. Let’s look at some of them…

They help you gain fluency

If we’re to play music with ease and speed, fluency is vital. Getting to the point where your fingers automatically find the patterns needed for each note at speed will allow you to tackle ever more challenging repertoire. If you have to stop and think about which fingers to move before each note (as a total beginner might) your musical lines will lack a sense of flow.

Improve your sight reading skills

Because music is made up of scale and arpeggio patterns, being able to recognise and fluently play these combinations of notes helps you read unfamiliar music more easily. If you want a comparison, it’s a bit like learning to read text. When we first learn to read we recognise the individual letters. Gradually we learn that these letters often appear together in particular combinations so we begin to recognise syllables and ultimately whole words and sentences. The notes of a scale are like the individual letters, while a scale is a long word or sentence which we take in at a glance through familiarity.

Coordinating finger movements

One of the big challenges of recorder playing is the complexity of the fingerings. Modern wind instruments have keywork to help simplify the finger patterns. Recorders lack these, so instead we have to play complex forked fingerings (for instance B flat on the descant or E flat on treble recorder). Shifting between neighbouring notes can often involve moving multiple fingers up and down simultaneously. We can use scales and arpeggios to practise this and make our finger changes neater and quicker.

Coordinating tongue and fingers

Not only do we have to coordinate our fingers, but our tongue needs to match the speed of our finger movements too if we’re to play a genuinely legato melody. Once again, scales can be a useful tool to help achieve this.

Building up speed

Want to play faster? In that case you need to practise the patterns which occur most often in music and gradually learn to negotiate them more quickly. What’s the best way to do this? Yes, you’ve guessed it - scales and arpeggios!

Practising double tonguing

Once you’ve built up some velocity, you might need to explore double tonguing so your articulation can match the speed of your fingers. Again, using simple scale patterns are a great way to work on this without having to think about reading complex music at the same time.

For music exams

Most adult recorder players have no interest in working for exams, but if you’re someone who’s motivated by exams, you’ll need to learn some scales and arpeggios as well as pieces of music. The syllabus for the lower grades may only include a few different keys, but by grade 8 you’ll need to know all the major and minor keys.

Have I convinced you yet?

Assuming I have, you might well be asking some of the following questions…

Do I need to learn all of them?

In an ideal world, knowing all the major and minor scales and arpeggios (plus chromatic and other patterns) is a desirable aim. But this doesn’t mean you have to learn all of them! For anyone even learning a carefully chosen selection is immensely useful.

If you’re not sure where to begin, start by looking at the music you’re currently working on. What key is the piece in? For instance, if you’re playing a sonata with a key signature of two flats, try learning B flat major and G minor - the two scales with the same key signature. The music is likely to work through both of these keys at some point and if you can play these fluently the patterns you encounter in the piece will come more easily too.

Realistically, unless you choose to play Schickhardt’s set of recorder sonatas in every key, most music for our instrument explores a limited range of key signatures. It’s unusual to see recorder music in more than three sharps or flats, so I would recommend aiming for fluency in these keys before you worry about the exotic realms of D flat major or G sharp minor.

Do I have to learn them from memory?

This is a much debated topic among students and teachers. For music exams you’re expected to learn the prescribed scales and arpeggios from memory, but as we’ve already noted, many adult learners have no interest in testing themselves in this way.

In order to play scales fluently from memory you need to be completely on top of the finger patterns, knowing precisely which fingers to move between each note. This requires what is often called ‘muscle memory’, although in reality our muscles don’t have memories. This process is actually achieved by generating strong connections between our brains and the nerve pathways used to send instructions to the fingers. To achieve that (I plan to explore this more in a future blog post) requires lots of repetition, and in my experience, the process of memorising such patterns definitely seems to be harder for some people than others.

Memorising scale and arpeggio patterns presents a particular challenge for players of wind instruments. With the piano or a string instrument, there’s a logical visual pattern as you work your way up and down the keyboard or fingerboard. In contrast, each note on a wind instrument of any type requires a different combination of fingers. Yes, moving between some of these is fairly logical. But I’m sure you’ve noticed how that logic disappears when it comes to cross fingers (particularly flat and sharp notes) or the upper extremities of the recorder!

An additional challenge we face as recorder players is the limited range of our instrument. Most woodwind instruments can play scales covering at least a two, and sometimes three, octave range in all keys. In contrast, the recorder can comfortably manage a handful of scales at two octaves, but for most intermediate level players an octave and a half is the limit. This means scales come in different shapes to maximise the range we cover, either turning at the top or the bottom of the instrument. Remembering which scale follows which pattern is an additional thing to learn and can add extra stress to the process.

For my Score Lines subscribers I created scale sheets showing some of these patterns, which can be downloaded from your Members’ Area. I’ve linked to the treble recorder sheet here, but if you’d like access to all of them please feel free to subscribe here - it’s free and there are lots of other exclusive goodies for you to download besides the scales!

While learning scales and arpeggios from memory is undoubtedly desirable, I would argue that playing them from music is probably just as useful for most amateur recorder players. One of the most important skills to develop is sight reading (I’ve written a blog about this here) and being able to recognise scale patterns and convert them into fluent playing is a great way to achieve this. As with most skills, do this by starting slowly and gradually building up some speed.

How fast should I play them?

As with so many things, it depends! If you’re using a scale to develop your tone you might do best to play it very slowly - perhaps four beats on each note. But if fast playing is your aim you’ll need to take a different approach.

When I first started having lessons with Philip Thorby, I spent about three months solely working on slow scales and other exercises as we focused on developing my tone and legato playing. Ok, this may sound rather extreme, but I was aiming for a career as a professional player so it was absolutely necessary. My technique certainly benefitted from this approach and I finally began to understand scales and arpeggios in a way that set firm foundations for everything I was to learn later. Taking this approach with even just one scale and arpeggio can be hugely beneficial if it helps you focus on the foundations of your technique.

The most important thing is to play your chosen scale or arpeggio correctly from the very beginning. If that means you start out playing each note at a metronome speed of just 60 that’s absolutely fine, as long as the notes are 100% right. When you can consistently play all the notes fluently and cleanly at that speed, gradually increase the tempo until you reach your desired tempo, checking at every point that you’re still maintaining the same consistency and precision. A metronome is a really useful tool here to hold you at one speed.

How often should I practise my scales?

I’m a big advocate of little and often. Having a huge practising splurge on your scales just once a week makes it difficult to achieve consistent results. A much better way is to programme in short, frequent practice times - maybe five or ten minutes every day. This way you remind your fingers of the correct patterns at regular intervals so they become habitual more quickly. Perhaps even keep a recorder out at all times (a plastic instrument can be handy if you prefer to put away your wooden recorders) so you can pick it up and play a scale for a minute or two every time you walk by.

Which variety of minor scale should I practise?

Minor scales come in two different species - harmonic and melodic. Harmonic minors use the same notes whether you’re ascending or descending, so they’re slightly easier to memorise. However, they also include an augmented second interval (the 6th and 7th notes, which sound vaguely reminiscent of a snake charmer’s flute), circled in red below, which is less commonly used in western music.

A Harmonic Minor

In contrast, a melodic minor scale raises the 6th and 7th notes by a semitone on the way up and returns them to their original pitch on the way back down. This is an added complexity to memorise, but these melodic shapes (hence the name) are more frequently found in the music we play. For this reason, if your plan is to practise them with music and you only have time to work on one type of minor scale I’d recommend the melodics as a priority.

A Melodic Minor

Using scales and arpeggios creatively

Most readers of this blog won’t be looking to become professional recorder players, so being able to play in every key with total fluency and at high speed is probably not your aim in life! But you can still use these patterns to improve your playing and have some fun along the way. Here are a few ways you could use them…

Vary your tempo according to your intention

If you want to improve your tone you need to focus on quality rather than speed. For this I would pick an easy scale (perhaps no more than one sharp or flat in the key signature) and play it really slowly. By simplifying the notes you free up your brain to think about breathing deeply and blowing freely, producing the best possible tone on each note. Perhaps spend four slow beats on every note before moving on to the next, breathing as often as you need to, always focusing on using the optimum breath speed for each fingering.

If speed is your motivation, again begin at a modest tempo but focus on keeping your fingering even and well coordinated with your tonguing. Perhaps use a metronome to ensure you maintain a consistent tempo. As you perfect each speed setting, switch up the tempo by a small amount and repeat the exercise several times. If you begin to stumble, take the metronome down by a couple of notches and refine your playing before moving on. Be methodical in your approach and you’ll be surprised how much progress you can make in a fairly short space of time. If you’ve built up a good turn of speed with an easy scale why not take the tempo back down again and try it with a more complex key signature?

Experiment with different articulation patterns

The music we play often contains a wide variety of articulation, from long tongued passages to intricate patterns, where small groups of notes need to be slurred here and there. It’s a good idea to begin by practising scales and arpeggios smoothly tongued, staccato and in long slurs as these all demand different technical skills.

Alongside these single technique scales I recommend you also practise patterns that require you to mix slurring and tonguing - you can see some of my suggested patterns below. These are the sort of patterns you’ll encounter in the real world and if you can apply them to your scales they’ll seem less scary in context. These are just a few of my ideas, but don’t be afraid to come up with your own variations.

Four varied articulation patterns you could try out

Be playful

There’s no reason why you must always play complete scales. Don’t be afraid to be playful and creative. Breaking a scale down into groups of four or five notes, running up and down, may help you really master the transition between specific fingerings more quickly. Once you’ve got that fluency you can then glue these small groups back together into complete scales. For instance, you could break up the F major scale shown below like this:

Breaking an exercise like this down into bitesize pieces is a recognised technique, called chunking. It’s immensely useful as a means of building up fluency and consistency, allowing our brain to focus more efficiently on small amounts of information.

Explore different note patterns

Bored with just whizzing up and down your scales as printed? Why not add some variety and explore them by playing the notes in a different order? For instance you could play each one in thirds like this…

You could follow the same principle with fourths and fifths too, although these are harder….

If you’ve learnt every key how about mixing them all up together? One of my favourite challenges is to go up one scale, then move up a semitone and come back down the next one - for instance upwards through F major, down via F sharp major, up via G major, down via A flat and so forth. The same exercise is possible with the minor keys too. If you can play both of these fluently you can award yourself a generous gold star!

Major keys

Minor keys

Finally, look for the satisfaction in a scale played really well!

You may not feel the need to learn scales in every key, and for less experienced players such an aim may be too ambitious anyway. However, there’s a satisfaction to be gained from playing even one or two of them really well, even at a slow tempo.

Scales and arpeggios can be a valuable opportunity to find a contemplative zone, focusing on a simple task done to the best of your abilities. I enjoy spending a few minutes at the start of a practice session playing scales really slowly, closing my eyes and listening to my tone. I focus on the quality of my sound, tailoring the speed of my breath and the strength of my articulation to suit each individual note. By doing this I reinforce the good habits I’ve learnt over the years, as well as warming up mind, fingers, tongue and lungs before I move onto more demanding music.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about scales and arpeggios. Are they something you avoid at all costs, or have you cultivated a love for them? Perhaps you’re still on your journey to becoming a zen scale-master? If you have tips you want to share with others or experiences you’ve found useful over the years please do leave a comment below.

The practice files – preparing for action

What’s your strategy when it comes to recorder playing? Do you arrive at your rehearsal with seconds to spare, throw together your music stand and just get on with it? Or maybe you arrive early and spend some time mentally and physically preparing for the music to come? I’m sure we’ve all employed both these strategies at times, but I think the whole concept of preparing and warming up is one we frequently should take more seriously.

 

Why warm up?

Picture for a moment the athletes we see competing at the Olympics. Do they pitch up at the stadium and immediately line up for the 100m sprint? Of course not! They know from years of training, that their bodies work better when they’ve warmed up. A warm up prepares you physically and mentally, and means you’re much less likely to injure yourself.

Now picture yourself when you’re practising at home, or during rehearsals. Do you consider yourself an athlete? No? You really should do! Like sportsmen and women we do the same repetitive task over and over again. Yes, we may often do this sitting down, but we’re still making heavy demands of our bodies over long periods of time.

 

There are different ways to warm up

Let’s look at the different types of warm up you might consider…

Physically preparing for work

Like an athlete, it’s a good idea to do some stretches, to prepare your muscles for the work ahead of them. These needn’t take a long while, but a few simple exercises before playing (and during breaks too if you wish) can be enormously beneficial. Warm muscles will be more relaxed and less prone to injury too. If there’s one thing that’ll stop you playing it’s pain from an injury or overworked muscles and joints. Anything you can do to prevent this is good.

When we’re young we feel invincible and take it for granted that our bodies will bounce back if we overwork or neglect them. As we age we recover less quickly and develop more aches and pains. This is something I’ve become more aware of myself in recent years, with more frequent pains in my hands. No doubt there’s a little arthritis in some of my finger joints (not uncommon in any joint you use repetitively for years) but I help mitigate that by using some simple exercises given to me by my physio. I now better understand how my hands and arms work together. Doing some stretches and a little self massage of the muscles in my forearms before and after playing make a huge difference to my comfort and recovery time.

These are two stretches I find particularly useful, which aren’t included in the other resources below:

The British Association for Performing Arts Medicine have created a handy sheet of warm ups for musicians, which I’ve shared before. It’s available to download in your Members’ Area or by clicking here

If you prefer to see a real human being demonstrating exercises like these, so you can join in with them, I also recommend this video by Sarah Jeffery. Sarah’s amazing Team Recorder YouTube channel is an excellent resource and if you don’t already subscribe to it I recommend you go and explore her videos - they’re an absolute treasure trove!

Mental preparation

Don’t underestimate the benefit of thinking about your music before you begin. It’s easy to be impatient, leaping straight in to play. Instead, take time to look at your music and think it through first. Imagine how it’ll feel to play the long notes, with a relaxed, open sound. Then mentally play through the fast passages, focusing on the speed you’ll play and how you can make it easier by keeping fingers and tongue relaxed. A few moments of preparation will immediately give you a better chance of playing the music well.

Breathe well

Before you play, take a few moments to concentrate on your breathing.

We take breathing for granted as it happens instinctively, but playing the recorder makes greater demands than everyday life. Air is the life blood of our tone – without a well controlled breathing technique we compromise the quality of our sound.

Take a few moments to close your eyes and breathe in deeply. Not a quick gulp, but a leisurely, relaxed inhalation where you can really feel your stomach and ribcage expanding to accommodate the incoming air. Breathe in and out in this relaxed way for a minute or so. Then repeat again with pursed lips so you have some resistance to exhale against. This more closely replicates the resistance you feel from your recorder’s windway. As you do this, count slowly to four on each inhalation and exhalation to help you control your speed. This simple exercise will make you more aware of how you breathe. As this technique becomes instinctive it’ll help you develop your tone. There’s lots more information about breathing well in my blog post about developing your tone.

Now pick up a recorder and play some long notes, breathing in the same way. Focus on making a full, well supported tone, keeping the same quality of sound throughout the entire length of the note. Try playing your long notes with a metronome set to 60 and keep a record of how many beats you can maintain that beautiful tone in different parts of the instrument. With regular practice you’ll gradually be able to extend your long notes as you gain better control of your lungs and diaphragm.

Another useful exercise is to play slow scales to help you develop your tone and breathing throughout the recorder’s range. Once again, set your metronome to 60 and play four beats on every note, focusing on breathing and tone. Speed is not required here, so the metronome will help you control things, especially if you’re naturally one of those people who’s prone to rushing! Most importantly, breathe as often as you need to rather than compromising your tone by running out of air.

Sit well

We spend a lot of time seated when we play so it’s important to cultivate a good posture. Adopting a balanced posture will help you play better and combat tension. Remember, tension has a habit of spreading. If your back is uncomfortable you’ll gradually find your shoulders tense up and before you know it your tone becomes tight and thin.

While you’re doing your breathing warm up, take the time to find a really good seated position. I’ve written about the art of finding the ideal playing posture in more detail here.

Warm up your fingers

As with other warm ups, begin slowly, focusing on the quality of your finger movements. Working in front of a mirror is really helpful because you can objectively check if your fingers are working well.  

Start with pairs of notes, maybe using your metronome set to 60 to control your speed. Really watch what your fingers are doing. Their movements should be small – no flapping! No matter how slow the music, fingers should always move quickly to create clean transitions. Aim to remain as relaxed as possible and use your mirror to check that when you’re moving several fingers at once, they move exactly together.

Now try this exercise, working your way up gradually from the bottom of your instrument. Don’t be afraid to use your metronome to regulate your tempo if that helps. Begin with an easy key, but perhaps also try it with a scale with three sharps or flats. The keys of E flat and A major require more cross fingerings (B flat and G sharp for instance) and this’ll help you improve the clarity of your finger movements when you’re moving several of them at the same time.

Warming up for speed

Once you’ve got your fingers moving efficiently at slow speeds, it’s time to get them moving more quickly. The following exercise will work your right and left hand fingers, with small groups of notes to keep things simple. Begin at a speed where you can maintain complete control and evenness while slurring and then gradually increase your tempo. Again, a metronome can be a really powerful tool here.

You can use a similar pattern to cover an entire scale, gradually working your way upwards or downwards. Start slowly and steadily increase your speed, always keeping the finger movements even and efficient.

Awaken your tongue!

Articulation is the voice of our instrument, creating light and shade in our playing. The tongue is a muscle too, so it also needs warming up! Begin smoothly with some of your scale patterns, making a full tone and using a gentle ‘doo’ tonguing to create a connected line of notes.

Now try the same thing with staccato notes. Listen critically to the shortness of your notes. Are they truly detached (but not accented!) and all exactly the same length? Remember, your tongue must remain as relaxed for staccato as for legato articulation – don’t let it become like a pile driver!

Finally, mix things up and combine legato and staccato. Here are some patterns you could try using the same five note pattern:

Do remember, all the warm ups I’ve shared here are just ideas to get you started. Don’t be afraid to make up your own warm ups, especially for fingers and tongue – be creative and have fun!

Five quick tips

  1. Begin gently. Don’t leap in to practise your most challenging piece of music first. Instead, begin with something simple which allows you spare mental capacity to focus on awareness of your body and the basics of technique.

  2. Be in harmony with your instrument. Use a thumb rest or sling (especially with larger recorders) to provide support or your instrument and reduce strain on your body. Set yourself up with a good posture and then make the recorder come to you, rather than the opposite, and you’ll remain relaxed for longer.

  3. Don’t underestimate the stresses travel puts on your body. Sitting in the car in one position for a long while, hands gripping the steering wheel, can create tension in your arms and fingers. If you travel by train or bus you may be limited in how much you can move about and relax, and you may be carrying heavy bags and instrument cases. Be sure to stretch and relax after you’ve finished travelling and before you begin playing.

  4. Don’t arrive at the last minute in a panic! Instead, aim to get to your rehearsal venue early so you can spend a few minutes breathing deeply and doing some stretches. You’ll feel the benefit in terms of relaxation and concentration levels. You could do these warm ups together as a group.

  5. Listen to your body and never ignore pain. Discomfort and pain is your body’s way of telling you something is wrong. Rather than playing through the pain, stop for a few minutes. Take a stroll, gently stretch the muscles and regain your focus and relaxation. If the pain persists don’t be afraid to seek advice from a doctor or physiotherapist. I’ve built up a good relationship with a local physiotherapist over the years who’s helped me understand my body better. The knowledge I’ve gained helps me avoid injuries by using my muscles more effectively. If and when things do go wrong I seek help swiftly and one treatment usually sorts me out again!

 

Do you need to do everything?

After reading all of this you’re probably thinking, '“How am I going to fit in my practice when I need to do all these warm ups?!”

All of the ideas I’ve shared here are intended as a basis for healthy practising and rehearsal. You don’t need to do all of them every time you play - after all, there are only so many hours in a day! I would always recommend doing a few minutes of stretches before you play, simply to warm up your muscles for the work ahead. Beyond that, you can tailor the rest to the work you plan to do in that particular session.

Playing a slow melody? Then focus your warming up on efficient breathing and beautiful tone production. Likewise, if you’re embarking on a whizzy piece of Vivaldi, some finger warm ups might be more appropriate. Be selective and do what works for you, and don’t be afraid to change things up from time to time. Boredom can be the enemy of learning, especially if you end up doing things by rote and not really paying attention to your actions. A change of routine every now and then is always a good thing, if only to keep you concentrating!

Do you have some favourite warm ups?

We all develop our own strategies over the years and I’d love to hear what sort of things you do to prepare for playing. Please do share a comment below so we can pool our ideas and create a killer warm up routine!

The Practice Files

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a love/hate relationship with practising at various times in my musical life. It’d be wonderful if we came fully formed to our chosen instrument, but the simple fact is it takes time to build up skills. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the concept of needing 10,000 hours of practice at anything to become world class in that skill. He offers examples as diverse as Bill Gates’ computer programming skills and the Beatles’ time spent performing hundreds of concerts in Hamburg. This theory doesn’t take into account natural talent (which Gladwell notes is undoubtedly useful) but does reveal the importance of repetition in the process of honing any skill.

For most musicians the motivation behind practising isn’t to become world class. For some this is the aim, but the rest of us have other ideas…. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Why do we practise?

It’s important to have an understanding of your motivation when it comes to practising. After all, it’s usually a means to an end rather than practising for its own sake. These are some of the reasons I practise, but no doubt you’ll have your own motivations:

  • Improving my technique - for instance, speeding up a difficult passage or expanding my breath control.

  • To learn new repertoire - this one’s a big motivator. Life gets very dull when you perpetually stick with the same pieces of music.

  • Working on new skills. When I first went to music college I spent many hours improving my legato articulation, which in turn helped me to master double tonguing.

  • Preparing for a performance - this one’s uppermost in my mind right now, as I polish up tricky passages in readiness for a concert next week.

  • For fun! Yes, even practising can be fun and there are times when I’ll rip through unfamiliar repertoire just for the heck of it.

Always have a pencil handy when you’re practising and don’t be afraid to use it!

How to practise well

There are endless elements to practising, but if you want to make real progress the most important thing is the quality of your practice. It’s all very well endlessly repeating a passage, but if you’re not taking care to listen to what you’re doing with self awareness it becomes rather pointless. It’s easy for practice to be counterproductive if done in the wrong way.

Let’s look at a few of the strategies you can use to ensure your practice is of the highest quality:

How much practice is enough?

The simple answer is, it depends! A budding professional pianist, studying at a conservatoire, may need to do six hours a day - partly to learn the large scale repertoire, but also to build up the stamina necessary to perform big pieces by Rachmaninov, Brahms and others.

For an amateur recorder player, practising for six hours will probably leave you with very soggy instruments and diminishing returns! While at music college I regularly did 3-4 hours practice each day but, looking back, I realise I didn’t always practise efficiently and could probably achieve the same results in less time now. If you reach the end of an hour’s practice and can see improvement in the piece you’re playing that’s a good result. Quality of practice is just as important as quantity.

Practise efficiently

If you’re juggling working life with recorder practice it can be difficult to achieve everything you hope for. If you find you run out of time, try to practise in a more focused way. On days when you’re short of time, perhaps zoom straight in on the bits you find difficult and save longer run throughs for days when you have more time.

Don’t try to take on the whole world at once

Always listen critically as you play and be sure to stop and sort problems out as soon as possible. Rather than trying to work on huge quantities of repertoire, sometimes challenge yourself to really master just a bar or two with polish so the gains you make really last. Then you can return with confidence at the next practice session and add to that progress.

Are you working towards a deadline?

If you’re preparing for an exam or a performance that’s when you really need to knuckle down and practise effectively. If you don’t have a deadline in the near future don’t feel bad if you have off days - we all have practice sessions where nothing goes quite as planned!

Keeping motivated

Motivation is so important - without a clear desire and sense of direction it’s easy to get downhearted and lose your way. If you find yourself flagging, bear these points in mind:

Looking for new inspiration? Why not explore working from facsimiles of historical notation?

Don’t be afraid to try new things and explore. This might involve working on a different technical skill or reading through some unfamiliar repertoire. Have fun, trying something new and don’t be afraid to make a mess as you explore!

Don’t keep flogging a piece until you feel it’s perfect. Remember, perfection doesn’t exist - at least not for human beings! Sometimes you’ll reach a point where you have achieved all you can with the technical skills you currently have and that’s absolutely fine.

If you hit a wall with a piece of music, don’t be afraid to put it to one side for a while. Even when you stop working on something the music will continue to process in your subconscious. Countless times I’ve returned to a piece I worked on previously, only to find it’s improved in the intervening months - partly because my technique has improved through working on other things, and partly because it’s continued swilling around in my subconscious!

Ten tips for better practice

I’ll cover lots of these topics in more detail over the coming months, but here are ten quick ideas to help you focus your practice more efficiently.

  1. Warming up. Don’t neglect this element of practising. Just as an athlete warms up their muscles, you need to limber up your fingers, awaken your diaphragm for deep breathing and relax your throat to make a truly beautiful tone. A few minutes spent on the fundamentals of technique can make a huge difference to the progress you make in what follows.

  2. Scales and arpeggios. As a teenager I was a teacher’s nightmare - I hated scales with a passion and always left learning them until the last week or two before an exam! It was only as an adult I really learnt to appreciate what working on these simple patterns could do for my playing. If you’re not working towards an exam you don’t need to practise them in every key - instead pick the ones with keys which feature in the music you’re practising. Do you find them hard to memorise? Play them with music instead - at least then you’ll recognise the patterns when they appear in real music!

  3. Choose repertoire strategically to focus on specific skills. That might be reading up an octave, playing music with a minim pulse or getting to grips with a new size of recorder. Pick a piece where you can really focus on one thing rather than trying to multitask all the time.

  4. Don’t spend all your time at the bleeding edge of your capabilities. Sometimes it’s helpful to select a simple piece and focus on playing it with real polish. A slow melody gives you time to think about the beauty of your tone, or to concentrate on the quality of your finger movements.

  5. Record yourself so you hear your playing as a third party. If you have a smartphone use the voice memo app to record a piece you’ve been working on. You’ll be amazed at the things you notice which slip past unheard while you’re in the throes of playing!

  6. Keep a recorder out at all times (a plastic instrument is handy for this). If you have a particular weakness, pick the instrument up every time you pass by and spend 30 seconds working on whatever skill you’ve selected. This could be as simple as playing clean low notes, maintaining a relaxed throat or picking confident high notes out of thin air. Doing this several time a day can be a really good way to hone good habits.

  7. Find a practice buddy. Then you can share pieces and explore duet repertoire. You’ll learn a lot by bouncing ideas off each other, and responding to one another as you play together. Challenge yourselves to work on different things and be honest about flaws you see in each other’s playing. You’ll each have different strengths and weaknesses.

  8. Practise little and often. A short practice session (maybe even just a few minutes) will often be more effective than one big splurge once a week. Regular repetition of skills brings swifter progress. For many years I set myself the challenge of taking at least one new photo every day. Even on busy days, when I took just a handful of photos, this taught me something new and my photography skills improved more quickly than if I’d just got my camera out for holidays.

  9. Find a routine. Think about how you work best elsewhere in life. Do you achieve the most in the morning? Then set aside a little time at the start of the day to practise, so it’s done before you get distracted by other jobs. Or maybe you prefer your practice to come at the end of the day as a respite from the stresses of life. There’s no single correct answer.

  10. Structure your practice time. Good habits are developed through consistency and thoughtful repetition. Try building a regular pattern into your practice sessions - perhaps five minutes’ warm up, a selection of scales & arpeggios, followed by more detailed work on repertoire. This will help you build your technique efficiently.

Playing with others can be a great way to mix up your practice routine

Do you have to practise?

There’s no getting away from the fact that practice really does help you improve as a player. However, there will be times when you just want to get on and play. Many years ago a member of my class at a course boldly told me that she never practised. For her, playing with friends at her local Society of Recorder Players branch was enough and she had other ways she wanted to spend her free time at home. Who am I to say that’s wrong? Sometimes we all need some downtime, and if you have periods when you take a break from formal practice that’s fine!

Finally, remember this….

By definition, as an amateur musician you play the recorder for love rather than for a living. So your practice should also be a pleasure, not a chore! Yes, have clear aims for your practice when you want to really make progress. But equally, don’t be afraid to have fun too. Even the act of romping through some unfamiliar music in a rough and ready way will bring benefits and will blow the cobwebs away!

What are your practice conundrums?

In the coming weeks and months I’ll return to some of the points I’ve covered here, to help you become a more skilled practiser. Lots of you have already sent me suggestions and requests, but if you have a burning question please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below or drop me a line via email, and I’ll build them into my future blog posts. Equally, if you’ve got a top practice tip you want to share, please do leave a comment below - let’s see if we can all help each other!