Goal-oriented practice for violin lessons is for students taking violin lessons and is a method we like to teach for music mindset when it comes to practicing the violin. Without deciding our practice goals before we touch our instrument, we will not make as much progress with our time as we could. Success in anything comes with a plan. Without a plan, there’s little or no progress. The last thing we want is to approach our practice for violin lessons mindlessly.
What does it mean to approach our violin lessons mindlessly?
Let’s start with the definition of “mindless”.
Mindless: Thinking, acting, or doing without concern for the consequences, good or bad. OR the doing (of an activity) so simple or repetitive that it’s performed automatically without thought or applied skill.
Now let’s look at some synonyms for “mindless”.
Synonyms: brainless, mechanical, automatic, routine, robotic…
Therefore, approaching the practice of violin lessons “mindlessly” essentially means that we aren’t thinking very much when we play. In other words, it means turning our brain off or partially off. Mindless music practice happens when we are tired. Or it can happen when we force ourselves to pick up our instruments to practice because we feel guilty for not practicing. In these situations, it’s easy to just play the notes printed on paper, placing fingers in familiar places on our instrument and playing through from beginning to end. And doing so doesn’t require much thinking.
This is what we don’t want! We can’t let our mind slack while playing. We need to maintain the discipline of having our minds fully active while playing. Otherwise, we won’t allow ourselves to make much progress with our violin lessons.
Goals We Should Be Aware of With Goal-Oriented Practice for Violin Lessons
However, if instead of mindless playing, we are actively thinking about our bow stroke, hand gestures, intonation, phrasing, and dynamics, we are requiring lots of energy from our brain. Consequentially, this kind of active thinking during practice sessions is what helps us grow and improve.
Engage Active Thinking
Active thinking of the little details of our violin playing is equal to programming our brain to make our weaker technics, stronger. That being said, if we play our violin mindlessly, we are reinforcing hiccups, snags, and sloppy technic. And reinforcing these along with our stronger points of playing too. Reinforcing our weaker points means it will be harder to change those habits later on. This is why it’s also so important to engage active thinking with our violin practice every single time we play!
Set One Goal Per Time Block
Cutting up our practice time into smaller blocks of time is a great way to start structuring our goal-oriented practice method. It’s better to have 30-minute goal-oriented practice sessions than playing two hours with no clear, specific goal.
Let’s break this down: If we have a set block of time for practice during our day, follow this process:
Select the Piece of Music to Work On
Identify a piece we’re currently working on with our violin teacher or an orchestral excerpt.
Choose a Goal and a Timeframe
Look at the notes written down from the last lesson. Once we’ve looked over the notes and comments from our teacher, set a goal that tackles one of the items. We should aim to reach the goal in the block of time we have set.
It can be something simple and small. For example, if there are intonation problems in a particular measure, we set a goal that for the next 10 minutes we will work. And we will work slowly and patiently on fixing it. We need to set that clear goal for ourselves and say: I will practice and drill this measure to get it in tune before the 10 minutes is up.
Engage Active Analyzation and Listening of your Music
Once we have chosen our goal and timeframe, we practice playing while actively analyzing, thinking, and listening. Therefore, we try to listen and train our ear to hear the subtilties of the sounds we create. And we see if we like them or if we need to adjust them so that we do like them!
For example, we try to listen to the sound that bounces off from the walls and comes back at us. Do we like those sounds? Do they inspire us? If our music inspires us, it will inspire others. Therefore, if our sounds do not inspire us and we don’t love how we accomplished our section of music, what can we try differently to get the effect that we are looking for? Or can we challenge ourselves to get an even better sound that we already have?
We can try recording ourselves and listening to where we can improve versus what is already at the level we want. That being said, actively engaging in our thinking and analyzing of what we’re playing, setting small goals, and aiming for them will help us slowly but surely take those small steps toward improvement.
All this to say, it is important to have a clear mind and a laser focus when we’re practicing.
Learning to Structure Goal-Oriented Practice for Violin Lessons
At first, the goal-oriented practicing method may seem a little much. Planning for each goal and block of time may seem like quite the process. However, with time and practice of doing this process, we all become faster and more fluid with it. It will become second nature. similarly, we can train our minds to master this way of approaching our violin practice time through repetitive use of the approach. Soon our minds will be trained to think in this way without much effort at all.
We hope that we have been able to enlighten violin students to use this method in order to become even better at their instrument. It has proven itself to be a method and system extremely beneficial to the success of many of our students as well as many professionals. So, in those moments when we feel uninspired to practice our violins, use this as a structure. Eliminate spending too much energy in the planning and thinking that would take away from active practicing!
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