FITNESS TRAINING
Behind-the-scenes practice to help all your pieces
Casey has a special sort of preparation that she does - in addition to her regular practice.
None of it is on her teacher's Please Cover This Week list, but it's helping Casey to play better, practice less, and learn pieces faster - than most other students.
What's her secret? What is this special training that she does? And how can you do it too...?
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If you were a professional footballer, your training would consist of much more than just practicing the elements of your game.
You would expect the soccer player to run plenty of drills on passing, dribbling, shooting, tackling, heading and taking penalty kicks. These are the elements that are on show in each game, and any football player obviously needs to have first rate skills for these areas.
However, what's not so obvious is some of the other work that the fans in the stadium never directly get to see.
This training happens behind closed doors, and most of it wouldn't seem to resemble soccer.
There's work on flexibility, endurance, sprint training, strength and conditioning. They'll work on their nutrition, their sleep habits, and their mental preparation. They'll study tactics, create strategies, scrutinize opposing teams and players, and review past performances of their own.
The fans will never know. But the player will, and it will have a positive impact on every game they play.
The invisible advantage
All of this behind the scene work is part of the soccer player's "fitness" - a term that goes well beyond how puffed they get if they're running to catch a bus. The soccer players never get a chance to directly show all this work - it's not likely they're going to have to run five laps on the field and then drop for 30 push-ups as part of Saturday's big match.
But the entire regimen means they come into each game as a fully prepared and well-rounded player.
Fitness training for musicians
What's this got to do with music? When you're practicing, it's tempting to spend all your time on the "visible" items. The pieces for your recital. The passage your teacher asked you to polish.
That's a bit like the soccer player only working on kicking and passing. Just as there is essential behind-the-scenes training for the soccer player, musicians have their own fitness work they need to do too.
This fitness work won't directly get you ready for your next lesson or recital. In fact, you won't ever get a chance to show this training to an audience.
But increasing your musical fitness levels will have a huge impact on your playing - and perhaps most importantly, on your practicing too. Let's take a look at three of the most common fitness training elements you'll face, and just why they're so important.
1. Scales and technical work
You'll never see "D major scale" scheduled as the opening item in your recital. But your scale fitness work will have had an enormous impact on whatever piece you actually do play - from the time you first read through the piece, to the performance itself.
Scales and technical work are an example of prepractice - developing skills now that you can call on in pieces later. So how does all that prepractice help?
Learn new pieces faster
If you already know D major scale, the fact that your piece is also in D major means that you have a huge head start when you are learning it. You will be expecting particular notes and particular fingerings, and you will be right most of the time - saving you plenty of reading time.
What if you were that comfortable with every key? You'd have a head start for every tonal piece you ever play.
Instant expertise at scale-based passages
Those big runs at the beginning and at the end of your piece? No need to practice those if they're in D major - you had done the practice in advance by becoming good at the scale behind the scenes.
Which means that the runs can sound great on concert day, even though you may have spent almost no time working on them directly.
More precise and powerful passage work
Of course, not everything in your pieces is going to appear as a straight scale. There might be a tricky run on page 3 that doesn't directly quote a scale you've worked on, but the time you had spent on scales in general meant that your "chops" are in good shape.
End result? You would have been able to master that passage with much less practice than somebody who didn't have the scales background - again, because the scales work you did a year ago ended up being prepractice for the piece you're doing now.
Help with memory lapses
That horrible moment at the end of your performance - when you couldn't remember whether the C's in the final run were sharp or not - was saved by the fact that you knew the whole run was based on a D major scale.
So you thought of that single fact, and just let the passage happen. The C#s would tumble out automatically, because they were always there in your scales work too.
The more figurations your fitness training includes, the better
Part of the aim of scales work is so you can look at a brand new passage and say "I've done that before." Or at least something very like it.
Obviously then the greater the variety of figurations you've covered in your scales fitness work, the more often you're going to be able to say "I've done that before" when you tackle new pieces.
For that reason, you don't want to limit your scales practice to always delivering the same scales in the same way. Start on different notes, with different rhythms, at different speeds. Work on broken chords and arpeggios as well as scales. And factor in sudden direction changes, so that your scales are not always just up or down.
All this variety will help mirror what you're likely to encounter in reality.
2. Sightreading
Scales aside for a moment, every piece you ever learn to play will be new at some stage. When your piece is a newborn like this, how fast things progress is limited by how well you read.
For this reason, good sightreading is a discount voucher, that promises big savings of your most precious asset: Time.
In fact, it can enable you not just to minimize, but to eliminate the 'figuring-out-how-to-play-this' stage of practice, allowing you to concentrate straight away on actually polishing your performance.
So while other students are still busy slogging through new notes, you'll already be speeding the piece up, injecting dynamics and adding your own performance stamp.
3. Theory
Theory is not just about filling in worksheets and causing yourself pain. Similar to solid scales, a good understanding of theory will allow you to make assumptions about what's coming up in scores you've never met - and be right.
So if I'm learning the first movement of a Classical Sonata, I know that the centre section is likely to be built from short snippets of the opening theme, running through a bunch of different keys.
Why? Because I know what a development section is. I know when in the piece it's likely to appear, how long it's likely to last and how busy things are going to get - even though I've never played or heard the piece before. All I really need is confirmation that it's a sonata, and the name of the composer. My theory knowledge will usually do the rest.
But there's more. Not only can theory help you solidify pieces you already know, it will allow you to neatly describe what's already in your piece, making it much easier to remember otherwise complicated passages.
So instead of a passage just being masses of flats that you have to wade through, a little theory knowledge can go a long way:
Ah! It's inversion Gb major broken chord - then same again in the relative minor :-)
You won't have to read those notes after that. Nor will you have to remember them. Armed with that description, you could re-create the entire passage.
Don't wait to be asked
The students who are the most musically "fit" are not always those with the most demanding teachers. It's those students who demand the most of themselves.
Because you won't always be asked to show these fitness elements in lessons, you won't get extra credit for working on them. As a result, it can be very tempting not to work on them at all - after all, who will know?
You'll know. Music fitness is prepractice for thousands of pieces you haven't even met yet, and it will help lift your playing to heights that regular practice alone could never reach. You'll also be able to learn new pieces much faster than you ever thought possible.
In short, if you do the training, you'll be armed with the equivalent of brand new musical super-powers.
Still not convinced? If nothing else, remember this:
Fitness Training - a ticket to less practice.
Every minute you spend now on musical fitness training will save you an hour in the future.
I'm sure you'll think of good things to do with all that time you save! :-)
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