Four Easy Ways to Practice Without Your Instrument
Summer time is upon us! With the last of my students finally on summer break I’m starting to see the shift from school year routine to summer relaxation take place for my studio families. Many of my students participate in summer camps, travel to see family and friends throughout the world and are generally out of their set schedules. Practice time can be particularly difficult for my traveling students as they board planes, trains and automobiles so I wanted to help give students and their families some ideas to support their music goals while still fitting in their summer fun.
In addition to these four tips I’ve included a new tool I made for students and teachers to use this summer to generate some fun and different ways to practice at the end of this post! You’ll find three bingo cards with 24 practice ideas and variations ready for a studio practice challenge or perfect to use at home as a complement to summer chore charts. I hope you find these ideas useful!
Now on to my four recommendations for summer practice while away from your instrument!
Listen, listen, listen!
While we talk about this in lessons on a fairly regular basis, I can’t stress enough how valuable regular listening is for any musician! When students are away from home (and their instrument!) this is one of the easiest ways to keep working on their skills until they get back to playing. It is amazing how much easier this is today than even ten years ago and students have a variety of resources they can use to give themselves some variety and inspiration through their listening practice. YouTube, Spotify and Amazon Music are some of the most accessible ways for students to listen, but a free library card to your local library can get a plethora of CD’s in your hands for your listening pleasure. Here are some of my favorite playlists to keep in my rotation.
Suzuki Violin Music from Spotify – This is a large playlist of the Suzuki violin repertoire available to all! Take a listen to songs from book 1 all the way up to book 8. This is a great opportunity to get students excited about what is coming.
Composer Weekly from Spotify – This is another favorite of mine from Spotify that updates on a weekly basis. Featuring well known to obscure composers, this is a great way to introduce some variety into a student’s listening library without much effort. Just tune in once a week to hear something new! Spotify also includes a short biography of each week’s composer, which can serve as a great mini music history lesson. Check it out!
Live Violinist Performances on YouTube – I love this playlist because it features accomplished violinists performing a variety of repertoire in a live setting. If you have the time to not just listen, but also watch, this is a great way to see musicians in action! Check it out to see for yourself.
Mental Practice
Just being without your instrument doesn’t mean you can’t practice air violin or viola! So try encouraging your students to just run through a scale or two in the morning, while maintaining a perfect playing position with an invisible instrument. Ask them to present a short performance for their recent song, you can play the recording in the background while they complete the motions. Are some of these ideas a little silly? Sure! But what young student doesn’t enjoy a little bit of goofiness now and then? Studies show imagining the process of playing an instrument down the sensation in your fingertips and the sound you want to make can be comparable to a normal practice session at home. This can help with retention of information when your options are limited and you are traveling for an extended period of time. Parents can assist with this by continuing to help students remember specific bow placement and directions, which are fairly easy to notice even during a shadow practice session. Other things they can help students remember are left hand positions, keeping an eye on the wrist and watching for shifts or vibrato… Even a little bit is better than nothing and students who have used this supplement their practice time while away from their instrument have jumped back into regular lesson time more smoothly. Here are a couple more interesting studies with some thoughts on mental practice:
“Mental Practice: What It Is and How You Can Use It” from Effectiviology.com
“Does Mental Practice Work?” by Noa Kageyama, Ph.D.
Score Study
Similar to shadow practicing, bringing along a copy of our current repertoire to study is a great way to keep our music studies on the brain without taking up much cargo space. While necessary to bring along if you want to do the mental practice above this is also a great way to keep students engaged with their material in a visual way. Students can work on committing to memory specifics like key and time signatures, bowings, shifts, accidentals… You name it! This is a great chance for students who rely too much on their ear or regularly miss details to go through with a fine-tooth comb and catch these often-made mistakes. Using a copy of their song students can also take some time to do a scavenger hunt for any dynamic changes, shifts and more and color code where each change is made with the hope that it will help the student solidify the location of any areas that might need more attention.
Music History
As mentioned above, books are much easier to travel with than instruments! Even better might be multiple books loaded onto a Kindle or iPad. Whether you are an older or younger student, there are plenty of resources available to learn more about the major (and not so major) players in music history. Other areas that could provide some interesting reading material would be books about the violin, different time periods in music, focusing on music from a specific area of the world and more! Here are a couple titles to get you started with recommendations for younger readers to adults:
Looking at the list above, I hope you find at least one of these skills will help you or your student continue to practice during times when you are away from your instrument! As I finished this post I realized each of these ideas appeals to a different learning style. Listening would work well for auditory learners, while mental practice would work well for those who are kinesthetic learners. Score study and reading up on your music history can be a great way for visual learners to use their primary learning style while away from their instrument. Check out this great article on all the learning styles that includes some diagnostic tools for you to see what style is dominant for you or your child! This can help you get started with the best practice technique for your situation and then you can start incorporating other ideas as time goes on.
As promised I’ve also created four practice bingo cards designed for young and old students alike – If you’re like me, you love crossing things off any check list! Take a look at the sample below and if you sign up with your name and email address below, I’ll send all four cards directly to your inbow
Feel free to share with other teachers or students and tag me as you use them in your homes! I’d love to see these put to use. Practice is something few always have the motivation for but all can benefit from regardless of what time of year it is or where you are. I hope these tips and tools help your musical goals!
Happy practicing!