Practice Routines

Since I started this Patreon page, the question about my past and current practice routines popped up in the comments and direct messages a few times already and the reasons why I haven't adressed these things yet was that I first needed to think about which ones of my habits I would consider as such. 

As you can guess from that statement, I never really followed a strict regiment of "excercises" that I felt I needed to do and repeat in order to improve certain things. While composing is based a lot on craftmanship just like playing an instrument, I feel like it is not the perfect analogy and practice regiments from the instrumental world don't necessarily translate to composing. Without wanting to diminish the passion and dedication that goes into mastering an instrument, I feel like learning to compose is a more hollistic approach. 

Over the last years, I met quite a few musicians who are incredible sight readers and technically at mindblowing levels and yet their musical horizons ends on the edge of their instrument or section. So getting your chops up to speed when learning to compose requires in my opinion a slightly different approach than just sitting down and mechanically practicing certain routines.

I think the time that I was following a relatively strict regiment of practice routines was in music university. For four years, every Thursday morning at 9:30 I arrived at my composition professor's house for this week's 90 min solo lesson about composition. And practically every week, this lesson looked the same:

He had a shelf that had a length of several meters filled from bottom to ceiling with score sheets of 500 years of music history. Every week, he would pick out one and bring it to the piano where we both sat down and talked through the individual work, the composer and the period and context of that piece. He would show me select excerpts and the compositional approach to them and point out things that made this piece special. After a while we would move over to his living room where he usually would dig up an LP of a recording of that piece and let it play while we were reading through the score sheet. Sometimes we would go back to the piano after that and compare expectations and reality.

In retrospective, I feel that this was a regiment that shaped me the most musically. As you can expect, 90 minutes is not enough to go into the finest detail with every piece but having a new piece from a new era in front of me every week gave me a very useful broadband overview. Most often, the homework until next week was to write a short style copy of the piece that we just looked at.

My own personality is more of a "I want to figure it out on my own if I don't understand it immediately" instead of trying to find an external explanation for something. Whenever I stumbled across a musical piece that I found interesting for whatever reason, I tried to extract what fascinated me about it and tried to reconstruct it, either on piano or even in score sheet and eventually apply it in a different context.

I think it is by now common knowledge that imitation is one of the greatest teachers and just trying to write something that sounds like x but is not exactly x has taught me a lot.

What I also like doing is reading along to score sheets, either something I find on IMSLP or I just dig out a score sheet that I had for a long time either as hard copy or pdf. Also with this methodolgy, I usually focus more on small segments that I try to really dig into instead of just scratching on the surface of the whole piece.

One more thing that I find incredibly important is to consciously listen to music in a wide variety of genres. I made it a habit to sit down with a recording and put on my "analytical ear" and try to follow the structures and approaches of the piece on the go. In many cases, this strategy works well enough without needing external help of a piano but in some cases I need to try out if I think what I hear really is what the music is doing.

As I said, none of that is part of a specific routine in my day to day life, but these are the things that I am and have been doing over the last years to improve my skills.

However, I have to admit that nothing of that beats the "learning by doing" approach for me personally.

Sitting down with a few bars and really needing or wanting to get them into a specific shape and fighting all the obstacles on the way is the greatest teacher. You are forced to go into the deepest details if necessary and really carve out your intention from  the raw idea. I think it is essential to have a very critical view on your work in these phases. Does it really sound like it is on a competetive level or am I just lured in by hearing it so many times that I just feel that it is catchy enough? How do I transition between these two sections? How do I get it to that sound I'm hearing in my head? What's that next chord that I'm hearing?

I think as with every practice routine, it is more about the quality of the time that you spend improving your skills than the quantity. Sitting down for hours mindlessly practicing classical counterpoint will maybe sharpen your skills on that one very focused issue but it will not necessarily stimulate your creativity or give your brain the needed payoff-feeling of having created something other than an exercise. 

So long story short. There are and were some approaches that I use and used that I would consider as "practice routines", but you still get the most out of just sitting down and writing music, and when you're done you start again, and repeat that until you feel like the music that comes out of it is of some value. And then you start over.