Today we’re going to continue last week’s discussion of how to build your ideal practice routine.

In the last blog we talked about when, where, and how long you should practice every day, and today I want to dive in and look at practice on a micro scale for a little bit.

I will take a passage from an etude designed for an early intermediate student and demonstrate how I would go about learning it as efficiently as possible.

The faster we can progress and see returns on our investment of practice time, the more motivated we will be to continue our cello journeys!

This is probably one of the most important video series I could possibly come out with because, in my experience, even if you have a private teacher and take weekly lessons, often how to practice does not get enough attention.

We learn what we need to work on and we get new assignments, but learning how to learn effectively often isn’t covered clearly enough, and this is like planting seedlings without compost!

The ability to even think about this topic is our advantage over kids.

As adults, we are better able to see the big picture and to “eat our vegetables” in the moment, knowing that by following a certain route with patience we will end up saving ourselves time and headaches in the future.

This is that case where you can either have 1 cookie instantly or you can resist and exert some patience knowing that you will get 3 cookies in the near future.

Before we dive into the piece, I want to clear something up that I think is truly important.

I often mention the term “efficiency” with regard to adult learners because unlike kids, we don’t have all day long to practice.

In my opinion, however, and especially for those of you earlier on in your journeys, “efficiency” doesn’t mean “killing 2 birds with one stone” or multitasking, like it might in other areas of life.

To me efficiency is the rate at which we are able to learn, and in my opinion the reason why cello is so difficult is that we have so many seemingly unconnected tasks going on at the same time. Think about it:

Our left hand is playing notes with the fingers while our bow hand is giving life to the sound on a completely different plane of existence, all the while our ears are making sure we are playing in tune, our inner ears are ideally hearing the next pitch before we even play it, and on top of all that our musical mind is simultaneously keeping an overarching sense of how the note we are playing fits into the larger phrase.

That is a lot to manage!

And that’s why I believe so much of our learning is inefficient; we end up trying to practice many of these tasks simultaneously before we even have a strong grasp of them individually.

So, for me on the cello, “efficiency” is actually all about deconstructing a piece into its separate elements and then piecing the whole back together after the individual tasks are comfortable.

Warning! Okay, yes, in the beginning, our “efficient” practicing will probably seem like it is taking longer to learn pieces than by doing it less strictly, but the difference is that the rate at which you learn aspects like bow control and left hand fingerboard geography will skyrocket, and the great thing about cello is that this means a faster rate of learning in the long run, even when the music gets much, much harder.

Not to mention less time spent trying passages over and over and just waiting for a miracle to happen so that you suddenly can play it comfortably.

The worst part about learning pieces in this manner is that when those little miracles happen, usually you won’t know what “clicked” or why it’s now easier, and this will make those little miraculous moments fleeting and difficult to reproduce.

I hated the feeling of sitting down to practice the day after one of these mini-miracles and being unable to reproduce the magic. I didn’t know what I had done right the day before, and so now I was back to playing the passage pre-miracle and full of frustration.

So now let’s look at a piece of music and I’ll show you how I would approach working on it in 5 separate steps. This is etude number 9 from Dotzauer’s 113 Studies, book one.

Step One: The first thing I would do is look at it without the cello, and what I’m looking for are the general characteristics of the piece.

What key is it in, what is the time signature, are there any tricky or unusual rhythms I can see, unusual bowing patterns, unusual note patterns, etc.

So the etude I picked for the sake of this blog is relatively straightforward. There is no key signature, which means it’s either essentially either C major or A minor.

It’s in common time, which means 4 quarter note beats per bar; and with the exception of two bars, the entire piece is continuous 8th notes with slurs connecting every 4 8th notes.

These are all helpful things to notice ahead of time, because now I have a general idea of the scales I will probably need to utilize and now I also know my goal will be slurring 4 notes per bow and creating a coherent musical line that way.

Step Two: to pizzicato the notes.

I want to be able to pizzicato my way through the entire piece making sure that I’m playing the notes in tune and in rhythm.

And I don’t want to feel like there are any hiccups in my playing. If a certain section or left hand shift is tripping me up, I want to work on it until it’s smooth as butter.

Ideally, you want to get to the point where it becomes so secure that continuing to play it pizzicato would essentially feel like a waste of time.

Step 3: playing the notes one note per bow.

I would start with full bows focusing on creating a beautiful sound and a fluid bow arm; again, no strange hiccups whenever a harder section presents itself.

Then maybe another pass with shorter bow strokes at a faster tempo.

Step 4: for this piece, I think step 4 is slurring two notes together.

This is a nice stepping stone to the final product of 4 notes slurred.

My focus here is maintaining a fluid sound with nice long bows at a slower speed, taking extra care not to have a huge break in sound at each bow change.

I might use the image of a super long, thin snake; you want to trace the unbroken outline of this sinuous creature.

Then try with shorter bows at a faster tempo.

Step 5: by step 5 we are finally ready to play the notes with the correct bowing, 4 notes to a bow.

In terms of what I’m looking for, the same image will help as with step 4.

If I imagine a long, thin snake, I want to create an aural tracing of it’s entire outline without creating any gaps or strange deviations with the bow.

In this analogy the bow is your pencil, and you want to draw the snake with a smooth, natural looking line that looks and sounds effortless in its execution.

So, those are my 5 steps and at this point you may be wondering about the topic of dynamics and any other markings in the score that describe how to play the piece such as crescendo, diminuendo, etc.

I purposely left them out of my 5 step practicing system and here’s why.

In my opinion, I think that for those of us who are earlier on in our journeys, adding dynamics or other expressive elements would essentially be step 6.

Later on down the road, I would include dynamics into my practice process because the nuance required in the bow should be built in as early as possible.

But for my adult students early on in their journeys, I stress learning how to make an open, beautiful sound throughout an entire piece.

If you can do that, I believe it’s easier to then adjust your bowing to create dynamics. For me, beauty of sound needs to be instilled from the start.

This process, with a focus on creating a beautiful sound throughout, is actually the exact process I use and teach in my course Cello in 30 Days: The Ultimate Beginner Course. The 30 daily, sequential lessons in the course allow me to work with you and essentially to teach you how to practice and how to approach learning on the cello. If you’re interested in seeing and learning more about it, please click here.

So, this is basically the skeleton of what I consider an efficient approach to practicing the cello.

When I started, before I knew better, my practicing was one step - try playing the piece over and over in fits and starts.

Eventually I realized that by deconstructing the piece into smaller, bite size tasks and then reassembling those tasks slowly, I ended up way, way further down the road.

I hope that helps, and please keep in mind that while I believe in deconstructing your playing into smaller, manageable tasks, the tasks themselves will change slightly depending on the piece you are learning and what it calls for from the player.

In the next blog, we will take a look at creating your ideal practice routine on a macro level! If you have any questions at all about practicing the cello, feel free to email me at billy@adultcello.com.