Practicing your instrument is a necessary action in order to improve your skill level. This applies to almost everything, not just music. Failure to practice results in no forward progress. If you never practice, how can you expect to ever get any better? If anything, you will probably get worse.
However, it is very hard to force yourself to practice sometimes. It is very tedious work. Playing the same passage over and over again is not very appealing to most people. Practicing can also be very frustrating. Some days, everything seems to go wrong. You can't concentrate, your fingers absolutely will not cooperate, and you just sound terrible. Days like these are very tough and test you both mentally and physically.
Despite having these days sometimes, practicing can be very fun and rewarding. The feeling of accomplishment after nailing a particularly hard section is outstanding. It feels great knowing you have made improvement. The problem is, most people do not improve as much as they would like due to ineffective practicing.
The first step of improving the way you practice is to understand the difference between practicing and playing. Many people like to go and sit in a practice room to play their instrument. They may pull out a song and play through it a few times and call it good. This is not the same as practicing. Practicing involves breaking tunes up into smaller sections and working through them until they are rock solid. Once you have mastered a small section, you may move on to the next section. Once that is finished, it is time to put the two sections together and work out the transitions between them. This is often challenging and may force you to break the pieces down into even smaller sections to drill those into your memory. It is an extremely boring and annoying process. However, this is how you truly master a piece of music. Playing through a song over and over and repeating the same mistakes is not going to get you anywhere. Breaking a passage down and finding out where it is weak is what really helps.
Another way to improve your practicing is to change things up. Sometimes a passage has been broken up into the smallest possible sections and you still cannot get it right. When this happens, it is a good idea to play something other than what is written on the page. It helps to change articulations and rhythms while keeping the notes the same. For example, if there are four slurred notes that you are struggling with, it would benefit to instead play the first two notes slurred and the second two tongued. You might do it that way once or twice and then switch it and play the first two notes tongued and the second two slurred. Similarly, you can change the rhythms while keeping the notes and articulations the same. It is very important to always do the opposite of something you change. With my previous example, I would not change the articulation to slurring the first two notes and tonguing the second two notes without following it with the opposite. Once you have changed a passage and played it and its opposite, try going back and playing the original passage as written. By modifying the section, it makes it stronger when you return to the original.
Dr. Christine Carter, a clarinet professor at the Manhattan School of Music, also suggests changing your practice schedule. An article titled Why the Progress You Make in the Practice Room Seems to Disappear Overnight features her in The Bulletproof Musician. I have not tested this method out yet, but I plan to and I expect to see good results!
By incorporating these changes into your practice routine, you will improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of your practicing.
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