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 Practice Tips: General Tips and Instructions   |   Practice Tips:  How Do You Know If You Are Playing Correctly?   |   Practice Tips - Divide and Conquer   |   Practice Tips:  How Do You Know If You Are Playing Correctly?   |   Practicing Scales and Rudiments   |   Practice Tips:  Practice Daily as Part of Your Homework   |   Practicing Scales and Rudiments   |   Practice Tips - Divide and Conquer   |   Practice Tips:  Setup a Practice Routine   |   Practice Tips:  You Need To Be The Teacher At Home

Setup A Practice Routine As Follows:

When practicing, set up a practice routine.  One suggested routine would be to:

     1.  Do a good warm-up including tone production exercises, long tones, lip slurs, harmonics, rhythm charts, rudiments for drummers, and scales.  A good warm-up should take about 10 minutes and is very important.

     2.  Practice your assignment from your lesson book after the warm-up.  If you have a page assigned to you, sight-read through each exercise and identify the exercises or songs that give you the most difficulty.  Go back and practice those difficult spots over and over again until you get them correct.  Then play the entire exercise to see if you have improved.  When practicing, you need to be the teacher!  Listen carefully to what you play and if it doesn't sound or feel right, then it probably is not right.   If it sounds right then it probably is right.  Spend enough time on you book assignment so that you sound better than you did yesterday.  If each day you are better then the day before, in a week you will have made great progress and in a year there's no telling how great you will be playing.  

     3.  After you have done your warm-ups and assignment in your book, then practice your band music and any other music that you like to play.  

The important thing when you practice is to have a purpose when you do it.  You'll be surprised how fast the time goes when you do it that way.  I know that practicing isn't always convenient or fun, but it is very important if you want to get good at playing your instrument, increasing your musical knowledge and expressing the language of music.  I think you'll find that the better you play, the more you'll enjoy playing.  So get on the practice wagon and let's have a great year!