We know that this time of year is the most stressful for a lot of musicians. We also know that sometimes it is difficult to find the time to practice, sometimes we have the time but not the focus, sometimes we have the wishes but not the technique. We believe that a five minute moment of mindful practice will help us all with these issues. Mindfulness is defined as the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something, a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. This is a difficult thing to do but here are five tips that we find help us get in the groove.
1) Feel your fingers, literally press your hands to a desk or your legs and feel the contact they are making. Once you feel the contact of each finger and the palms of your hands simultaneously lift your fingers off the surface one at a time, both index fingers at once and tap out the rhythm you are working on with them, cycling through index to middle to ring to pinky and finally back to your thumb. This will help you internalize the motion. Some fingers will be easier to move independently than others, if you keep your practice up soon they will all be possible (though I do still find my ring fingers tricky to move independently) You may want to do this for the melody or the bass rhythm or both.
2) Play the scale of the key your song is in. Play it with a metronome. Play it in quarter notes, eighth notes and then sixteenths with the metronome, pay attention to your fingering. You can start slow but try to get the tempo up to the tempo your song is in.
3) Read the melody of the song, just read it. Take a moment to internalize the intervals and hear it in your head, before you start playing.
4) Play through the song, do not stop when you make a mistake but take a mental note of where you stumble. Do this three times.
5) Now, go back to those spots where you stumbled, the trickier passages, and practice the rhythm
with each finger (as in tip one) play the scale again (as in tip two) read the melody (as in tip three) and then play the passage five times. Repeat this for each passage which was giving you issues. Finish up your practice by playing the song in its entirety through three more times.
We know that you might not have time to do all of these for every song every day but it will help even if you do some of them some of the time. As Steven Covey says “Begin with the end in mind”