Evolution

Starting today, I will drop the original music practice plan of practicing at least an hour every day. After attempting it for over 30 days, I have noticed that the plan was quite unrealistic. There are several reasons why it is unrealistic.

The first reason is that practicing music for an hour a day really mounts to a much greater time commitment than just an hour a day. To practice for an hour, I need to set up the practice environment, and clean up afterwards, together they would take up about 10-15 minutes of extra time. On top of this, at the moment I can only practice when I am at home, and often, keeping this commitment means I need to come back home from school just to practice, and then head back to school after practice. Considering that walking to school takes about 20 minutes, that’s at least 40 minutes of overhead time just so I can practice.

The second reason is that maintaining the practice every single day of the week turned out to be rather unrealistic. With the way my life is at the moment, it seems I will be unable to fulfill this commitment at least on one or two days during the week. The only way to fulfill this commitment is to withdraw from some other activities which I consider to be just as important to me.

The third reason is that the current amount of music we are playing does not warrant so much practice. I find that within an hour, I can thoroughly practice three pieces until I become really sick of each piece (and thus any further practice would no longer be productive). For the past two weeks, the amount of practice time backlogged has been increasing steadily, and yet I do not feel that this is negatively impacting my playing.

Lastly, the plan was poorly designed to begin with. The original goal is vague, and thus I do not feel that I am making progress. Mentally this is a discouraging factor that I should try to eliminate. On top of that, there are a number of other commitments that I am about to initiate, that I may need to adjust my efficiency for. So, let’s revise the plan.

Revised Plan

First and foremost, all previously backlogged practice time will be nullified. I will be no longer responsible for those backlogged time. They were created under the old plan. The new plan will be an complete refresh of my commitment model.

The new goal will no longer be a large, overarching goal. Instead, it will be one goal per piece.

For each piece, I will opt to become decently enough at it (decently enough means ready to record) by a specific date. The date will be decided when starting to practice the piece.

Now that the plan is revised, let’s see what happens.

Time Practiced 2 hours (1 hour practice, 1 hour composition)
Pieces Practiced: Nanaka’s Violin Solo, Tsuki no Akari, You Raise Me Up, Cecilia’s Song

Nanaka’s Violin Solo 3-11raw

Nanaka’s Violin Solo 3-11edit

Tsuki no Akari 3-11raw

Tsuki no Akari 3-11edit

You Raise Me Up 3-11raw

You Raise Me Up 3-11edit

Lots of sample practice recordings today. I realized that I can comfortably fit in three songs in the one hour practice session – 20 minutes per song.

Practice Time Backlogged: 4 hours composing, 5 hours practicing

Time Practiced 2 hours
Pieces Practiced: Nanaka’s Violin Solo, Tsuki no Akari, You Raise Me Up

Nanaka’s Violin Solo 2-11raw

Nanaka’s Violin Solo 2-11edit

Tsuki no Akari 2-11raw

Tsuki no Akari 2-11edit

Practice Time Backlogged: 4 hours composing, 5 hours practicing

Time Practiced: none

Didn’t have time to practice today. This seems to happen regularly now and preventing it seems to be very difficult. Perhaps the initial goal was a bit unrealistic.

Practice Time Backlogged: 4 hours composing, 6 hours practicing

Time Practiced: 3 hours
Pieces Practiced: Nanaka’s Violin Solo, Cecilia’s Song

Group practice time. Today, Yibo decided to drop out of the band due to having too many other things and can’t juggle everything. Lisa will come in and pick up his parts. In the afternoon, the music sheets has been delivered to Lisa.

Meanwhile, we’re looking for guitar tabs for You Raise Me Up. We can’t find Lena Park’s version, but Josh Groban’s version is everywhere. I suppose we can use those.

Practice Time Backlogged: 4 hours composing, 5 hours practicing

Time Practiced: 2 hour
Pieces Practiced: Cecilia’s Song

Today’s composition hours were spent helping Cecilia with her composition project.

Practice Time Backlogged: 4 hours composing, 5 hours practicing

Time Practiced: 1 hour
Pieces Practiced: Nanaka’s Violin Solo

Have some practice samples this time:

29-10raw

29-10edit

Practice Time Backlogged: 4 hours composing, 5 hours practicing

Time Practiced: none

Again, my fault. I knew today’s day was going to be quite busy, so I scheduled practice in the morning, but I overslept my alarm clock.

Oh well, what’s done is done. This will be added to the backlog and made up in the next week.

Practice Time B acklogged: 4 hours composing, 5 hours practicing

Time Practiced: 1 hour
Pieces Practiced: Nanaka’s Violin Solo

I now feel that I currently don’t have enough material to practice for any more than an hour a day, as one song becomes unbearably boring, especially songs as simple as the ones I’m practicing now.

Practice Time Backlogged: 4 hours composing, 4 hours practicing

Time Practiced: 2 hours
Pieces Worked On: Nanaka’s Violin Solo, Tsuki no Akari, SimplePiano

One hour was practice, one hour was composing. With composing time, I got stuck on where to take NewSong to next, so I started a new score and fooled around a bit. In the end, a half-assed piano piece was made. It’s not very good, so I’ll probably scrap it.

Practice Time Backlogged: 4 hours composing, 4 hours practicing