Well: I said I’d do it, and I’ve started – making products available on-line, that is. One of my best-selling books has been The Practice Handbook, which explains the difference between playing and practice. Playing a piece through, even repeatedly, can be fun but does little to eliminate errors from a performance or improve ones technique. Only perfect practice makes perfect performances. And it can be exciting, efficient and highly beneficial.
Like many things, I learned how to practice effectively by teaching others to do so. I’ve experienced all the pitfalls, and worked out ways of overcoming them. By sharpening our reading, listening, theory and problem-solving skills, we can all make progress as musicians which we only dreamed of before. We can pinpoint our problems and work out little exercises to overcome them. In fact, we can be our own teachers, and achieve huge satisfaction from our own progress.
The Practice Handbook is now available on Kindle. At £2.75 it’s not a lot of notes for a lot of notes. I hope you will enjoy using it, and would really value your reviews. I shall shortly be making it available for download as a PDF as well, and I’ll let you know when that is ready.
