Focused Practice

Before we go about talking about all the various things that can be done during our individual daily practice, let's first get our definitions right. "Practice" is defined as "the act of rehearsing a behavior over and over, or engaging in an activity again and again, for the purpose of improving or mastering it" as defined by Wikipedia. You might be thinking, this guy is nuts! I'm supposed to be read about Clarinet Practice! I'm not here for some English vocabulary lesson! But seriously, many of us do not really understand the term practice. Many of us actually "play" the Clarinet with no objective and goal in mind other than the fact that we are having fun (Disclaimer: I'm not saying that having fun is a bad thing). You might argue that you have been steadily improving by just playing and enjoying yourself every single day. Yes, you will definitely improve, but at a much slower pace. From the definition above, we can see that there is a need to rehearse a behavior over and over again for the purpose of improving or mastering it. Putting that into the context of Clarinet Practice, we need to first identify a problem or aspect to be improved, think of the solution or tools that can help us improve and really drill on it with the aim and intention of improving on that aspect. This is not your daily practice routine of long notes, scales, etc... This is a time allocated to improve a specific aspect of your playing everyday.

Possible areas you might want to tackle:

• Breathing
• Blowing
• Embouchure
  
• Posture
  
• Fingerworks
• Tongueing
• Stamina
• Score-reading
• Scales / Arpeggios
• and the list goes on....

Take note that this are very general areas. For example, Tongueing alone can be split into tongue stamina, speed, position, clarity, speed of tongue action, etc... When you are finding an aspect to improve on, always be as specific as possible. You can probably allocate half an hour a day just to improve on a certain aspect. An example would be to break the habit of keeping your tongue too far back in the mouth and just work on tongueing a single note while being conscious of the tongue's position. The possible aspects that can be practiced are endless! You'll never ever run out of things to improve on! For a starter, you might want to read the article on "Possible Aspects To Work On". If you have already indentified a possible aspect, you can see if there are any articles that talk about the aspect you are concerned with. If you are unable to find any article, drop me an email at williamlim.spd@gmail.com and I'll get back to you.

-William