Practice Regime

[make_fast]

All right, just hoping to get some input on structuring practice a bit more. I can usually squeeze 20-40 minutes of practice time in a day (some days longer, maybe miss 1 day a week) so just trying to maximize.

I usually have a couple of tunes I'm working on so I will try to give them a listen before I start. I'll warm up with a couple of tunes I know well (maybe 3-5 min, but they tend to be the same few tunes) and then work on the new tunes for ~15-25 min. That's about it. As a result, I feel like I'm losing my memory of old tunes since I do not go over them that often. So I am trying to organize my time a bit better (of course I'd love to have more time, wouldn't we all!).

My tentative plan is to make a list of all/most of the tunes that I know so that I'm cycling through the full list in my warm-up times and set a timer to run through 2 of them a day for 5 min and then move to another couple the next day. Then move to one new tune for 15 min. Then leave 5-10 min to work on techniques (triplets, popping, etc.) that I want to incorporate. And then maybe end with those 2 beginning tunes and a last run through of the new tune (that's probably just a couple minutes).

Anyway, if anyone has tips/tricks/recommendations I'd love to hear them! Also trying to figure out a way to remember all the tunes - once I get the first few notes I'm off and running, but it is hard for me to remember how a tune goes just from the name.

[Mr.Gumby]

The book Best practice by Judy Minot is a good resource that can help with your questions.

See Best practice

[elbowmusic]

This isn't a direct answer to your question, but have you checked out Irishtune.info? An amazing website for keeping track of your tunes and when you've practiced them. There's a practice machine for helping with expanding and keeping your repertoire going. Here's from them website:

"The Practice Machine is a useful tool for a player to maintain their repertoire over the long term. It does not teach tunes. It assumes you are a traditional musician who knows the tunes in your head. What I find it very helpful for is that it selects which tunes I need to practice, at just the right time. It uses a formula based on research on how humans learn most efficiently, on how humans can best remember lots of information, and on the general goals of most Irish session players.

The formula is designed (and polished and verified by many years of daily use) to help you efficiently achieve the following goals:

You want to have a lot of tunes ready to start on your own, purely from memory.
You want to be able to start a tune right on time if someone calls out a tune title at the last second.
You want to be able to join in with someone else starting a tune based only on hearing the first bar or two of a tune.
You want the professional trad-band musicianship skills of talking about and performing new sets and combinations of your tunes "on the fly."
You don't want to spend more time practicing than necessary.
You want to improve the quality of your playing, not just the quantity of tunes you know."

[make_fast]

Thanks to both of you for the resources! I just plugged my meager tune list into irishtune.info - that seems super cool. And I'll probably pick that book up if I can't find a library copy.

[m4malious]

Some free - and potentially useful - podcasts relating to practice and development exist at - https://www.brainjo.academy/

M

[Roger O'Keeffe]

A slightly different approach to the question.

This is something I put together early in Covid lockdown to try to discipline myself to practise specific techniques and loosen up before i start practising tunes. The funny thing is that, shortly before it happened, I had resolved to concentrate on "more music and less piping" that year. I realised that it's easy for pipers to lose the music, as we tend to put in a lot of pipes-specific ornamentation wherever it fits, without really thinking about whether it improves the musical experience of any non-piper listener. However, NPU offered me an opportunity to join a pilot programme of distance classes with Leonard Barry, and we ended up focusing on some additional techniques rather than just learning more tunes.

I don't stick to it rigidly, but you might find at least some of it useful. Note names in brackets are grace notes - mosly cuts, but there may be some taps.

If anything in it isn't clear, I'll try to remember what I meant when I wrote it.

Piping technique exercises

1. Tight AB^Cd2
2. Tight gfed as full notes then played as full-length g followed by tight doublet (to avoid losing the g in the gfe triplet)
3. 1 and 2 as first few bars of The Sailor’s Cravat
4. Tight A^cAA A3
5. Tight B^cBB B3
6. 3&2 as first few bars of Coppers and Brass
7. Tight d followed by one-finger g then dg_ag (all notes tight except transition g-a)
8. Backstitching tight g^cag f^caf
9. Tight gfg(a)g2
10. Tight cuts
11. (Leonard Barry)
a. c nat. roll: cut and tap with d and c fingers only, keeping lower g hole open
b. Tight gagg in AcAA rhythm
c. E crans (i) (A)E2 (G)E (F)E (G)E (A)E3
(ii)
d. D crans (i) (A)D2 (G)D (F)D (G)D (A)D3
(ii)
e. D crans (front-loaded) (A)D (G)D (F)D (G)D (A)D3
f. Cutting with ^c finger

[PadrePioPress]

I'm brand new here and am no one to suggest how one ought to practice this or any other instrument. Nonetheless, a principle I wish I had learned a long time ago was to distinguish between practice and rehearsal. Practice regards the often tedious going over of trouble spots and challenging movements without falling into so much repetition that it results in focal dystonia. I find that, on the GHB at least, beginning with an aire is a good way to let my reeds settle for better tuning a bit later. Then I go over the areas mentioned above. I end my practice with rehearsal: full pieces played as if it were a competition.

I wasted lots of time beginning what i thought was practice by playing full tunes and wondered why my progress was so slow - if at all. Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. And that only come after much tedious work at the start.