5 Great Ways to Ensure You Play Your Musical Instrument Every Day
Your guitar will never gather dust again.
Through trial and error — a lot of error — I am constantly discovering great ways to engage myself and my kids in exploring music. Whether you are a parent or a player, I hope what I share here will light that touchpaper. I’ve written a short guide to my approach here.
1. Keep your instruments within reach.
Instrument cases are where your practice routine goes to die. Use them for travel, not storage. When your instrument is on a ground stand or hanging on a wall, you’ll take it and play even in those times you haven’t set aside for your meticulously planned regimen. If living space is constrained, be prepared for some robust negotiations with your significant other; but sometimes in life there’s a hill it’s worth planting your flag in and defending to the last. This is one of them.
2. Dings are an occupational hazard. Roll with it.
Embrace the knocks and scratches your instrument picks up along its musical journey. Sure, unless you have the very Strat Hendrix set alight at Monterey in ’67, that’s not going to do much for its reserve price at Sotheby’s. But you’re a player, not a collector, right? And as for humidity-regulated cabinets — just don’t. All those Gibson L-5 acoustics from the 30s that are periodically advertised on Reverb.com never had that kind of treatment in their working lives. Are you regularly commuting from Saudi to Singapore, with their two extremes of humidity? No. The only time you might really want to have control over moisture levels is when playing instruments with animal skin, like tablas. Even then, do what Shankar did at a concert in the States: style it out, garner rapturous applause, and only then tell your listeners you were merely tuning up.
3. Always play for an audience.
OK — there won’t always be an audience. But always play as if there was one. Far too many bedsit solo players and singers practice at the lowest possible volume and develop any number of bad habits: bad posture around the instrument, sloppy picking or embouchure, singing from the head rather than the diaphragm, you name it. Of course, there are times — for example, when you’re starting out on a wind instrument like the saxophone or a fretless stringed instrument like the violin — when not only you, but everyone else in earshot wishes you never had. When I took the plunge on the clarinet a year or two back, even my faithful dog walked out and told me she’d rather have a high-pressure cold shower and spend an afternoon in the company of the vacuum cleaner than endure another second of my vulture-with-its-nuts-caught-in-a-vice caterwauling. The thing is, the painful period lasts a lot less time if you commit to producing a moderately loud, full tone from the start.
4. The best way to use a metronome? Abuse it.
There’s a legendary scene in 80s cult horror spoof An American Werewolf In London in which the protagonists enter a spit-and-sawdust East End pub. Silence. You can’t hear the proverbial pin drop, because it’s trapped in mid-air, frozen in time like the column of beer from the tap, the pool ball hovering in the void above the pocket, and the threatening grimaces on the locals’ faces.
This was the response I got as an over-confident 13-year-old when, in my first lesson with my new secondary school piano teacher, I told him: “oh, I never use a metronome.” Not a comfortable confession for a musical dad to make, but own your mistakes, and all that.
Metronomes are great, as long as you can find ways to work with them that aren’t boring. Armed with a few tricks, you can even make the boring stuff fun. Whatever you do, the metronome, like the microphone, does not lie. It’s a great measure of success — and a great feeling — when you lock that groove in. Once you’ve locked it in, then by all means unlock it with rubato and so forth, but first things first.
So what about those tricks, then? Here are five I use regularly:
- Slow right down. Play that tricksy fast passage at 40 bpm, not 240. Are the syncopations closer to the main pulse than they should be? Are you rushing the easier bits and slowing in the more involved ones, even though you’re getting all the notes? If the answer to even one of these questions is yes, it’s time to sweat the detail.
- Multiply the tempo; don’t increment. Keep the pulse at 40 bpm. When you’ve got something down at that tempo, practice it double-time, at 80. Your cue from the metronome is now only every other beat. If you double again, your cue from the metronome is only every fourth beat. You are now taking more responsibility for the pulse.
- Have the metronome play everywhere but the main beat. A simple example: set the metronome to play on beats 2 and 4. Firstly, count 2 and 4 out loud with the metronome, then insert beats 1 and 3 into the space. Then play over your new pulse. More sophisticated variants place the metronome pulse on offbeats (“here’s the syncopation, you find the main beat”). Drummers, in particular, love that stuff.
- Improvise over a metronome backing such that the harmony of the tune is implied in your single-note lines. If you play in a trio with bass and drums and your instrument doesn’t allow single-note soloing with chords, your instrument is the chordal instrument by default. Sure, at times you will want to play outside the changes, but the ‘out’ playing is only perceptible in relation to the norm.
- Toggle the metronome volume. Start playing with 4 bars of metronome at 100% volume. Kill the metronome volume and play on for another 4 bars. Whack the metronome volume back up to 100%. Are you still in time?
5. If you don’t read music, read some. If you do — read less.
Nothing quite kills the vibe at a jazz gig than seeing music stands everywhere about the stage. “Jazz,” a European critic once wrote in the interwar years, “abhors Vienna.” By this, he meant the formal regimentation of the conservatory. By the 1950s, however, conservatories began to offer jazz classes, and the cold, dead hand of academe tightened its grip.
Despite this, reading music still has its place — even in jazz. If you are rehearsing with others, musical notation is the best shorthand there is for exchanging compositional ideas. It doesn’t have to be a full-blown arrangement; it could be as simple as a chord chart: D — Dm7 — E7#9 — D#9 — D. Practice reading little and often. Unless you are Buddy Rich or Bireli Lagrene, don’t be the one guy on the bandstand who doesn’t.
What are your go-to musical hacks to ensure you keep on keeping on playing your instrument? It would be great to hear from you in the comments section below. If you’re new to Medium, do consider subscribing.