Practice! Heidi Muller

How much time to devote to practice
Many students make progress by practicing daily or several times a week for relatively short periods of time like 20 minutes to a half-hour.  An hour a day is great, but unrealistic for most people to stick to.  Marathon sessions once a week aren't really recommended.  There's too much cramming and too much time off between sessions to forget what you just worked out.  Easy, gradual learning will take you where you want to go.  Practice and sleep on it.

Memorizing and working out mistakes
It will help your playing to memorize a tune as soon as you can. If you're working from tablature at first, you may feel dependent upon the paper. Just play the tune again and again until it sticks in your mind.  Turn the page over and try to play the tune without looking.  Check it if you go blank. Work out just the part that you missed and then fit it back into the tune again. You'll find that you can really enjoy listening to yourself play when you can put away the page.

When working out mistakes or forgotten phrases, try doing it in small sections.  Isolate the hard part and get it right, then go back and play through the whole line, then the whole verse or part.  Finally, take the tune from the top and see if you can play it through.

How to bring a tune up to speed
First of all, you'll want to memorize the tune.  Get it down accurately and slowly at first.  Start playing it faster until you make mistakes, then isolate those and work them out.  You'll want to aim toward playing both fast and accurately, articulating all the notes as best you can.  If certain parts are just too complicated, it might be possible to leave out certain passing notes but keep the ones that seem most important to the tune.  This is one way to speed up a fiddle tune. 

For clean playing, let your accuracy determine your speed.  Don't play faster than you can get through the whole song without falling apart.  With regular practice, you'll naturally improve your speed as your fingers get used to the movements.  Every so often you might want to just rip through the tune for fun and see how it holds together. You might surprise yourself at how good you are!

Heidi Muller is a musician and performer living in Seattle, Washington. Do you have comments or questions about her article? Contact Ms. Muller directly by e-mail. To learn more about her, see the Contributors section of Sweet Music Index.