Increasing Your Practice Time
Unless you’re a superhuman discipline machine, virtually every instrumentalist can relate to not being able to find nearly enough time in the day to practice. What’s especially frustrating are those days where you do find the time, but you waste a good 30 minutes 5 minutes staring at your instrument case before you finally open it. Finding the motivation to practice on many days can be difficult, so here are a bunch of small things you can do to help you get in a little extra practice time.
Have multiple mouthpieces- While I personally believe that playing your instrument is better than buzzing on the mouthpiece (a post for another time), buzzing on your mouthpiece is better than nothing. Buy yourself several extra mouthpieces, and put them in places where you know you’ll see them (on a bookshelf, the kitchen counter, the toilet, next to your bed, etc.). Buzz on them whenever you pass by them. They don’t even have to be expensive mouthpieces; buy some cheap ones from Amazon.
Have multiple instruments - One thing that really surprised me when I started playing with retired musicians was just how many instruments they owned. In particular, a really good trumpet player and singer by the name of Rick Evans owns countless trumpets. To give you an idea as to what he uses them for: one of them lives in his car so he can practice a bit whenever he parks his car; one lives right next to his front door so he can take it with him to gigs; another one lives at home outside the case so he can just pick it up and practice whenever he feels like it.
If you ever look into the study of productivity, this is something that some people refer to as “frontloading”. You purposefully do certain steps of a particular task to make the completion of said task easier. If your instrument is already out of the case, it makes actually picking it up and practicing it just a little bit easier, and because of “decision fatigue”, sometimes that small task of having to take the instrument out of the case can make the difference between practicing and not practicing for the day. I wish more people talked about this, because it’s such an underrated piece of advice. The only musician I’ve heard talk about this on a regular basis is a trombonist by the name of Sean Reusch.
I understand that having multiple instruments isn’t a cheap endeavour, but a cheap, beaten up student model instrument will work just fine for this. Buy a cheap version of your instrument off of eBay and keep that one at home out of it’s case. Keep your nice, expensive instrument in its case so it won’t go bad, and use that one for whenever you have to play somewhere else besides at home.
Join an ensemble (or another one) - It tends to be very hard to stay motivated if you’re not playing your instrument with other musicians. It’s not impossible, but from what I’ve seen, the average musician just can’t do it. Join an ensemble so you have another reason to practice; if the current ensemble you’re in doesn’t motivate you, try joining another one that plays more challenging music.
Take private lessons and tell your teacher why you’re doing so - I know people who take private lessons because, like a personal trainer, they want their teacher to force them to practice. This is good, but there’s one important caveat: make sure you tell your teacher that you want them to force you to practice. If you and the teacher are on the same page about that, then it should be smooth sailing from there (unless the teacher sucks). I will regularly ask students if they want me to be their “personal trainer” for the day, and I’ll also ask them what parts of their music they’ve been procrastinating on so that I can make them play it over and over again.
Try teaching someone - I’m a little hesitant on this one. Something that you’ll hear a lot of people who work in music education say is that when they started teaching, that started encouraging them to practice more. The reason why I mention my hesitancy on this one is because I generally believe that you should only teach at a level that’s appropriate to your playing ability. If you’re teaching players who are better than you at something, YOU NEED TO BE HONEST ABOUT THAT. I despise how many teachers will lie about a particular student being better than them in an area because their ego is so fragile and they will do anything to protect it. If you can put your ego aside, then I’m all for this.
There are probably other things that I’m forgetting, but these points are great places to start. Try these out, and you should see your practice time increase.
