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Best Practice-Survey
Topic Rating: 5 Topic Rating: 5 Topic Rating: 5 Topic Rating: 5 Topic Rating: 5 Topic Rating: 5 (1 votes) 
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Oliver
NC

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April 22, 2011 - 8:45 am
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Do you have a time of day when you believe that your practice time is more productive ?
Can you jump out of bed in the morning right into a good practice session ?
Does your practice routine change a lot over the weekend ?
Do you basically practice the same music as a work in progress or do you intentionally mix for variety ?
Do you have a teacher ?

 

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

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Fiddlerman
Fort Lauderdale
April 22, 2011 - 11:14 pm
Member Since: September 26, 2010
Forum Posts: 16429

This is a good survey.

I'll be happy to start.

I am most productive in the evening as long as I am not too tired. Going to bed right after a great practice session also seems to enforce achievements in my sleep.

I can pick up the violin and play early in the morning fine but my left fingers need five minutes or so to loosen up. My bow arm needs about 15 to be smoother.

My weekend is different from day to day so the answer to that one is no.

It is very difficult for me to play the same thing too long. I have to mix it up BIG time. If you take the time to perfect your work you should however stick to it as long as you can bare it. Increasing repertoire is also important as long as you don't sabotage the pieces too much.

Everyone is my teacher.

"The richest person is not the one who has the most,
but the one who needs the least."

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Oliver
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April 23, 2011 - 8:46 am
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I find that I have better practices in the evening.  I think this is because I can dismiss the other cares of the day.
I have a lot of music in loose leaf notebooks by subject. "Etudes", "Country", etc.  I usually just grab a book to suit my mood unless I have some church "gig"  (where the choir director has come up with some "impossible" violin part !).  I always will include something to remedy my current weakness.
I only had a teacher for a few months.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

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fiddlefaddle

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April 25, 2011 - 7:14 am
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Me too,

Best work gets done in the evening till I can't stand up anymore.

I play anything my heart desires, or that I am able too. Embarassed

No teacher. Trying to be my own for lack of money.

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Oliver
NC

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April 25, 2011 - 8:45 am
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How long are your practice sessions ? 

I can play about three 15 to 20 minute periods with breaks so it is usually all over in 1 1/2 hours at most.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

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fiddlefaddle

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April 27, 2011 - 11:40 am
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Not much better here Oliver. I just try to squeeze in as much practice as I can.

Maybe 30 minutes twice. Once in the morning and once in the evening when I am not too dead tired.

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Oliver
NC

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April 27, 2011 - 12:34 pm
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P.S.  If you ever need very good free lesson/tutorial sites just say so.  I have a few really good ones.  (Not as good as the FIDDLERMAN videos but maybe more detailed Laugh

 

 

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

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suresh
Tuticorin, India

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June 7, 2012 - 5:59 am
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I practice for one hour from 7 am to 8 am and from 6.30pm to 7.15pm.  And here and there for another 1hr.

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it ..(William Shakespeare in Twelfth Night)

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cpiasminc

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June 7, 2012 - 3:39 pm
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I'm generally not a morning person at all, and not only do my fingers need time to warm up -- even my eyesight and hearing are fuzzy prior to my daily dose of coffee.  I tend to prefer evenings and afternoons.  Practicing right before bed is usually the only chance I really get, anyway.  I have a job that puts really crazy irregular hours on me, sometimes working until only 6 pm, and sometimes, staying at my office for more than one day continuously.  What can you do?  That's movies for you.

 

I don't really have any structured practice per se.  I typically do a few basic patterns, plus a few practice exercises I wrote, but that only occupies a short warm-up in practice.  More often than not, though, I identify issues that I know I need to work on, and focus specifically on addressing those problems.  I get around to the more "structured" practice exercises when my focus is on being able to integrate the other stuff I worked on together with actually being able to apply it in rhythm and on various ragas.

 

I originally had a teacher when I was younger, but not right now.  I still keep in mind everything I learned from her as well as taking in what I can from the training videos online.

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NoirVelours
Quebec

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June 7, 2012 - 3:53 pm
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I check the forum while drinking my morning coffee then at 9am I pick the violin and dive straight into the latest 2-3 songs I'm practicing for about 20 min. The last 10 min I usually do an étude. So no warm up, it's boring wink

After dinner I pick the violin again for 30 min of songs before helping my son with his lessons and homeworks.

I was more inspired at night when I started (lol feels weird to say that, only 2 months ago) but now I realize that my best practice is in the morning! The one in the evening is always a bit meh, maybe because I'm tired.

"It can sing like a bird, it can cry like a human being, it can be very angry, it can be all that humans are" Maxim Vengerov

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Mad_Wed
Russia, Tatarstan rep. Kazan city
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June 7, 2012 - 5:54 pm
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I practice whenever i can. Depends of my working shedule. Sometimes not every day even (when i work from 8 am to 8 pm for example...). So i can't say that there's the best time to learn. If i put my hands on fiddle- i'm already happy. But prefer to have practice somewhere between 16:00 and 21:00. If i had no neighbours and homers i'd prefer to practice late at night. Now it's 2 am here and i feel itch to play facepalm

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KindaScratchy
Massachusetts
June 7, 2012 - 8:53 pm
Member Since: March 14, 2012
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Most days, I practice in the evening. No time for practice on weekday mornings...in a rush to get to work. Plus, it's a nice way to wind down at the end of the day. I think that I'm more relaxed at night, too, so it's more productive, unless I'm really tired.

On weekdays, I usually practice about 30 minutes. On the weekends, I sometimes practice longer and wrap up with some guitar practice.

I warm up with scales. Then I launch into what I think of as my "scale medley," which consists of songs that I've memorized. I start with the lowest starting-note tune (Oh, Shenandoah, which starts on a low A), then move onto tunes that start with progressively higher notes.

That may be weird, but it works for me.

I do have a teacher and I spend some time working on the exercises in the lesson book, but the routine I described above, I developed on my own.

When the work's all done and the sun's settin' low,

I pull out my fiddle and I rosin up the bow.

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springer

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June 7, 2012 - 9:16 pm
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I usually practice in the mid afternoon. Some times around 7:00 - 8:00pm for a short time.dancingdancingserenadebananabanana

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Crazymotive

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I practice daily. I generally try to pout inb at least a half an hour but usually more like an hour or two. Some nights longer if I am really feeling into it. I mostly practice in the evenings, from 6:00pm onward.  Warmup , I usually start with something simple like "Fiddlerman's Easy Pieces in C" or, some of the Etude's from "Wohlfahrt (Book 1)" or maybe a few simple Christmas tunes.   After that I try and spend an hour or so learning  a new piece or etude, or working on a new technique  such as double stops, or just trying to work on playing something harder that I need to improve on.

 

I currently don't have a teacher. I am planning on joining a local community orchestra and hopefully they will help me find a good teacher.  I have also been playing since I was about 10 or 11 years old (back then I had a teacher) but I didn't play much for decades following so over the past few months I've picked up from where I left of and seem to be getting better and making some good progress.

 

BTW even as a youngster I was never forced to learn the violin. It was always something I did by choice. It is something I wanted to do even from a very young age.  My Mom tells me that even when I was as young as 2 or 3 someone asked if I was going to learn to play the piano and I said that I want to learn to play a violin. So it seems like the desire was always with me.

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DanielB
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June 27, 2012 - 3:28 pm
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I usually practice twice a day at minimum.  Once for about a half hour as soon as possible after I wake up, and then another half hour after I've had some coffee and done whatever needed to get done after I woke.  That is scales and "etudes" (for lack of a better word).

Then during the course of the day, I'll find time to do four 5 minute sessions of practising on whatever current song or two I am working on.

After that, I have "paid my dues" for the day and we go into "collect on the dues" mode and I just play whatever song or piece a feel like here and there throughout the day.  But that is technically playing rather than practising.

"This young wine may have a lot of tannins now, but in 5 or 10 years it is going to be spectacular, despite the fact that right now it tastes like crude oil. You know this is how it is supposed to taste at this stage of development." ~ Itzhak Perlman

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Picklefish
Merritt Island, Fla

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June 27, 2012 - 6:34 pm
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Oliver said
Do you have a time of day when you believe that your practice time is more productive ? I am most focused and have the energy about midnight most days, I practice until about 2 am. My work schedule makes for a pretty weird timetable. Its supposed to change, and then what will I do?
Can you jump out of bed in the morning right into a good practice session ? I can, after breakfast and some coffee. just depends on quality of sleep night before.
Does your practice routine change a lot over the weekend ? um no, Intonation, etudes, several songs.
Do you basically practice the same music as a work in progress or do you intentionally mix for variety ? I mix n match cause Im in no hurry and I believe your brain needs a brake.
Do you have a teacher ? NO, I have taken in person lessons for about two months for bluegrass. I have also taken about a months worth of skype lessons for irish. The problem is my brain doesnt take to traditional lessons and I dont focus like that. Id rather have a talented individual work on a specific song with me and show me the tricks, rather than just lessons. too random i guess.

 

"Please play some wrong notes, so that we know that you are human" - said to Jascha Heifetz.

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