Clarinet Practice - What’s the most important thing?

That’s a pretty big and general question. My answer is specific and general all at the same time: The most important thing about practicing is that everything we play during a practice session has a purpose. The purpose is one of four things:

1) put us in our best position to practice/rehearse

2) identify what we want to improve/change

3) implement concepts/techniques and assess the success of efforts 

4) practice for successful performance.

I have some methods within each category that have been tested over time in my journey as well as the journeys of countless students. My primary method is a pretty standard ordering of events that allows the general idea of “always having a purpose” to be baked into my process without taking a lot from me on a day-to-day basis (after enough time creating the positive practice routine):

Warm-up - A warm-up should put us in the best place for a useful practice session/rehearsal. We need an accurate representation of our playing to accurately assess what we want to work on/change. We should not be actively trying to get better during our warm-up. Certainly, we should be playing the best we can, but the time to make improvements comes in the next stages of practicing.

Skill Development - The skill development part of our practice includes tone, scales, and articulation. Within each of those activities, we implement ideas 2 and 3. This is where we begin to assess what we can do and what we want to change/improve. We then seamlessly employ practice techniques that address the issue(s) we have chosen to engage with.

Etude/Studies - At this point, we utilize ideas 2 and 3 again.

Literature/Solo Piece - Again, we use ideas 2 and 3. Additionally, this depends on the timing of our next performance, when we would use idea 4 and practice performing the piece from beginning to end. Normally, in our pursuit of developing skills and/or command of an etude or literature, we would not play from beginning to end. This is reserved for practicing the performance of a piece. That is crucial for our best performance. Essentially, when we are practicing for a performance, we have to accept that the skills we have now are the skills we are going to have for the performance. We need to make the most of what we have at that point. 

Very important things to keep in mind:

All of this needs to have long-range, short-range, and immediate goals in mind AND serve all three.

What happened yesterday (and in the days before yesterday) should influence our choices on exactly what tone, scale, and articulation exercises we choose to work on.

We should use the information from yesterday as our launchpad for what we are working on today as well as how we are working on it.

In addition to this highly structured approach, it is important (and fun) to engage in some unstructured time with your clarinet. There is a lot to be learned from messing around and “bumping into” challenges (or successes for that matter) without this tight framework.

Let’s pretend for a minute - what if somebody stopped you in the middle of your practicing and asked:

• What challenges are you trying to overcome?
• How is what you are doing right now going to help you?
• Are you identifying a challenge or solving one?
• How are you deciding whether you have made the changes you want to make?

There are many iterations of these questions. You should be able to answer all of them (in the unlikely event a crazy person comes up and asks you - or maybe we need to be our own crazy person and ask them ourselves).

Within each of these ideas, there are a multitude of techniques to use to enhance the quality and speed of your learning. The Clarinet Ninja Dojo is here to support and help you make the most of your time with the clarinet. I will tell you everything I know (or at least the stuff that will help you) and make sure you are getting the most out of your time practicing and loving the clarinet.

Happy Practicing!

Jay