Has this ever happened to you guys? And what should I do? Take a break? Practice even more?
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fchu
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I've hit a wall and stopped improving |
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Hey, I'm a freshman undergrad cello major. I started this piece about 3 weeks ago and I have a performance of it next week. I've been improving
steadily for the past 3 weeks and I've been practicing 4-5 hrs a day. But today I hit this wall and not only did I not improve, I feel like the more I
practiced the worse I got. I felt like I played it worse today than I did when I first started the piece.
Has this ever happened to you guys? And what should I do? Take a break? Practice even more? |
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crikwalker |
#1 | |||
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Sometimes I can get out of a funk by practicing some etudes that are a lot harder than the solo I am working on. Usually, when i come back to the piece, it all
comes more naturally and relaxed...Good luck on your performance
-Sam |
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olly |
#2 | |||
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This is going to sound weird but...
1) go for a walk 2) sing the piece (as best you can!) the first to alleviate frustration, the second to restore your focus on the melodic line of the piece (sometimes that gets lost if you practice too much). Good luck! |
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wrestlncello |
#3 | |||
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I had a Richard Aaron student as a teacher last summer, and she swore by his method of practice. Whenever you have a change in your physical equilibrium
(pressuming you have it to start with when you're sitting in your chair, an absence of which could explain a dead end) you have to stop and prepare
yourself for what's next. What she said is good is to try stopping with every bow change and make sure your bow changes are good enough and do everything
else normally, then do the same stopping at every string change, and finally do it for shifts. If you retain even 50% of what you did, you'll be bound to
see at least some improvement. Also another thing she recommended was playing everything in parts. For example, if you have sequences or ascending/descending
runs or anything fast/repetitive, you pick anchor notes starting off very close to one another. You play from one anchor to the next, reset the bow and plan
the set so every aspect of it is under your control, and do next section for whatever section is particularly irksome (it works for the whole song, but it gets
to be too much sometimes). Then you start to both gradually space the anchors farther apart and shorten up the planning phases.
Hope these help, Zach M. |
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baroquecello |
slow practising? | #4 | ||
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Not knowing your practising habits heres one that works for me, most of the time, depending on the piece. Practise in a ridicilously slow tempo, with
metronome, but do everything right. Don't speed up much on the day you practise like this. It seems to work well when done a couple of days successively.
Very important is to not play the piece up to tempo, since by doing that even only once you ruin the work you did when practising slowly. I don't
understand why, but I imagine it may have something to do with the way the brain stores information during our sleep. If you mess around with it before you
slept a night, the brain will have erronous info to store.
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fchu |
#5 | |||
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hey, thanks everyone for all the advice! what ended up happening was that i played (the 3rd movement of brahms e minor) horribly due to frustration and
tension. i ended up crushing the sound and whatnot. but the next week i played the first movement in studio class but i was much more relaxed before i
performed. (i warmed up for an hour w/ simple scales and things and fifteen minutes before the performance my accompanist and i ate apple pie and ice cream). i
guess it all turned out to be a frustration/anxiety thing (as olly mentioned) and a mental block.
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| I've hit a wall and stopped improving | 11/05/09 22:41:14 | fchu |
| Re: I've hit a wall and stopped improving | 11/06/09 05:36:02 | crikwalker |
| Re: I've hit a wall and stopped improving | 11/10/09 12:17:48 | olly |
| Re: I've hit a wall and stopped improving | 11/10/09 20:33:45 | wrestlncello |
| slow practising? | 12/04/09 03:35:43 | baroquecello |
| Re: I've hit a wall and stopped improving | 12/09/09 14:09:55 | fchu |