How much do you average in actual practice time daily?

[WoodSheddin]

Just curious about how much time people are spending behind the horn. Not looking for what you think the right answer should be. Also not looking for your best day. Just wondering what your average daily practice time is right now.

[dopey]

Since our state decided to make seniors(first year this is inacted) have to go all day, regardless that some of us needed merely a english credit to graduate since we worked hard our junior sophomore year...

I have about 3-4 periods a day I can play. I try to get a couple hrs outside of band practice in on tuba since I have so much time at school. This allows me not to have to bring my horn back and forth to school during the week and just bring it home on weekends.

[Captain Sousie]

Practicing is for the insecure .

But seriously folks, the answer is 'not enough'. I never get to practice as much as I want to, usually less than an hour a day except for my day off. Those either get a lot or none, depending on where I spend 'em.

Sousie

[Arkietuba]

I'm a college freshmen majoring in music education and performance, so my life is basically devoted to music (or I'll lose my scholarship). I average about 4 hours of practice a day. I normally get in around 20-22 hours of practice a week. But, I do have a lot of free time (mainly used to write papers).

[WoodSheddin]

Keep in mind that practice is more of a "quality over quantity" thing. What they accomplished in two hours I could have done in forty-five minutes, and I would most likely have better results.

What could you have accomplished with 4 hours instead of fory-five minutes though?

I hear the "quality" argument often, but why not a larger quantity of quality practice? Are you equating high volume practice with inefficient practice? Inefficient use of one's time and devoting large amounts of time to a task are NOT one and the same. Those are apples and oranges arguments.

One could just as well have poor "quality" practice in "forty-five minutes" per day vs 6+ hours per day.

An excellent example, in my opinion, of the discipline needed to be at the top of the game is to look at Olympic athletes training schedules. I am not talking about just power lifters either. Even events like shooting require a lot of training to become the best in the world. Could an Olympic caliber marksman win gold on forty-five minutes of "quality" shooting practice?

[WoodSheddin]

I agree with El Capitan: you can never practice enough.

But you can practice too much.

But is that really a persistant problem among tubists? I have only heard of a couple of situations where someone believes he injured himself from too much playing.

Although perhaps an interesting academic argument, practicing too much is not really an issue for 99.99% of aspiring musicians. I would guess that there are as many tubists practicing too much as there are tubists who are getting more accomplished in forty-five minutes as others do in 5 hours.

[smurphius]

This particular topic has been a serious issue that I have personally dealing with this semester in my studies. I'm currently a junior studying music performance, and have had a change in tuba professors this year. In that change came a slightly differerent philosphy in the amount of practice that I was to be doing. It was at that point I had to make a decision for myself as to what I really felt about practice and what I needed to do personally.

I'm also a bass trombone player, so my trombone professor and I sat down one day and looked at this from the outside in, and he helped me come to adopt the philosphy that you really can achieve a great deal in 45 minutes as you could in 4.5 hours. If you're practicing efficiently, time should not be an issue. I'm learning that when practicing that a goal time should not be in mind, but rather goals for material you plan to learn and goals for techniques you intend to develop, etc. At that point, you're then faced with making sure you set high enough goals to work towards.

I firmly believe 45 minutes of clear-minded practice is far better than 3 hours of half-focused practice. Now if only I could get the clear-mind thing down... once i get that down, then, THEN just maybe i could get by with practicing 45 minutes a day... haha. until then, 3 hours for me.

[smurphius]

I'm not saying that anyone can just get by practicing 45 minutes a day if they want to get a job. Where I was going with that is that you can very easily accomplish the same amount in a short period of time as you can an extended period of time. In that, if the intensity is the same, then extended practice can be very fruitful.

Again though, time is not the issue. Goals are what matter. By setting yourself that time limit of practicing for however long you wish to practice, you may not accomplish everything you should. Even if you're going over just the things you've been "assigned" for the week or solos and exerpts that you wish to complete, the mindset that if I practice this solo for 40 minutes, that solo for 25 and this etude for 10, then you may be practicing but may not be getting any better either.

[WoodSheddin]

I'm not saying that anyone can just get by practicing 45 minutes a day if they want to get a job. Where I was going with that is that you can very easily accomplish the same amount in a short period of time as you can an extended period of time. In that, if the intensity is the same, then extended practice can be very fruitful.

Are you assuming that if you were to practice 45 minutes 5 times a day that you would get less accomplished that by playing 45 minutes once a day?

Here is a theoretical list of things to practice today. How would you break down the time spent to hit all these things.

Long tones
Intervals/slurs
Tongueing
Scales
Melodic etudes
Technical etudes
10 excerpts for some kind of upcoming audition
1 six page solo for upcoming jury/audition/recital
upcoming ensemble performance music
Sight-reading

Lets say you decide to forego ALL fundementals and JUST work on excerpts alone, which BTW is a plan for long term decay. You now have 45 minutes to woodshed 10 excerpts plus the solo(s). Ok, lets not work on the solo at all. Now we have 4 minutes and 30 seconds per excerpt each day to work out all the finer points. How long does it take again to read down Bruckner 4?

Let's try another scenario. Lets warm up and hit some fundementals and NOT work on our audition/jury material. Well, forty five minutes might go like this. 10 minutes of long tones. 10 minutes of intervals/slurs/intonation work. How about 10 minutes of multiple tonguing and articulation clearity. Lets run down 3 scales and then spend the next 5 minutes on melodic etudes. That gives us 10 more for a couple of run throughs of technical exercises.

It is is really difficult to even read through the material in 45 minutes let alone actually attempt to perfect the nuances. You would be forced to skip over important aspects of your preparation each day. Covering all the material might take 3-5 days. This means you only do long tones once every 5 days. You play scales once every 5 days. You work on that solo only once a week. The math is really not in your favor.

There is soooooo much to do that it is impossible to get to it all even if you spend 7 hours each day behind the horn. As several people have mentioned you must be efficient with your practice in order to fit everything into 1 day. If you plan to get everything done each day in only 5 hours then you have to be organized and set priorities in each session.

[Arkietuba]

Okay....for those of you who said I was bragging about practicing 4 hours a day and not backing it up...you don't even know. I spend at least 30 minutes warming up every time I practice. I also practice sections in my solos and etudes that give me trouble. I have to practice 4 hours a day b/c my tuba professor gives me a ton to do in a week, an average work load consists of: 5 etudes, 3-4 Arban exercises, all scales in all forms, Concerto for Double Bass by Capuzzi (all 3 movt.), and duets I'm perfoming with him, plus I just switched to CC tuba at the beginning of the semester. So there...

[smurphius]

i definately mean 45 minute sessions, several times a day. in doing so, you are able to focus more, without tiring yourself. in practicing straight for 3 hours, i don't personally see how anyone can get anything done. physically i can play for 3 or 4 hours straight, no problem. the mental force needed though is so powerful if you want to be effective, that shorter sessions are almost inevitable.

i tend to break things down like so:

Long tones
Intervals/slurs

REST

Tongueing
Technical etudes

REST

Melodic etudes
Technical etudes
5 excerpts for some kind of upcoming audition

REST

1 six page solo for upcoming jury/audition/recital
5 MORE excerpts for some kind of upcoming audition

REST

(for me) another 6 page solo

REST

upcoming ensemble performance music
Sight-reading
Scales


Starting sometime in the morning and building through this list through the day into the evening, I feel I get the most accomplished. It's always manipulatable, but stands very close to that list. At 45 minutes to up to an hour each time, I can get 4 and 5 hours of practice in a day, something I couldn't do just sitting down with the horn and ending with in 4 hours.

[djwesp]

the only thing i have to say is that...



practice makes.................(what would you usually think)

well, what most of us were taught is wrong

practice makes permanent.... not perfect... so i agree with some of the posters, practice habit is 99% how you do it and 1% time.

[MartyNeilan]

A former teacher of mine used to refer to practcing as "FACE TIME." I think that is one of the keys. Too many kids claim huge amounts of practice, but what percentage of that time is the horn actually on their face? It is amazing how much time one can waste in an hour and still say they practiced for an hour, while only ten minutes had a mouthpiece touching skin.

[elimia]

about an hour, several times a week.

[Pastor McPurvis]

Another angle to all of this that hasn’t been brought up yet is this:

At what point does the amount of time spent practicing to maintain your current level of playing and set of skills turn into improvements in playing and the acquisition of new skills?

It has been my experience that a certain amount of regular ‘horn time’ is needed just to continue to do the things you could do yesterday, so to speak. At this time in my life as an active amateur with a full time job and other responsibilities to juggle, I am definitely in ‘maintenance’ mode. A half hour here, 15 minutes playing long tones while I wait for a file to download, that sort of thing. I wonder what the relationship to time and improvement really is.

I’ll have to keep this short because I’m running out of time right now

[WoodSheddin]

At what point does the amount of time spent practicing to maintain your current level of playing and set of skills turn into improvements in playing and the acquisition of new skills?

For me the break even point is about 2 hours for maintenance. 3 hours is where growth begins. more time past that accelerates growth.