Practice challenge notes – day two

Today is day 2 of the 14-day practice challenge. This is one way for you to establish music practice in your life.

Would you like to be a musician? If so, then just play music every day! That’s what this is all about.

It’s not too late to take part.

Click here to go to the practice challenge home page.

Click here to go to the practice challenge forum. 

Yesterday I came out of the gates pretty strong. I had two good practice sessions. I think I really wanted to practice. I’ve been working hard to solve some sticky technical issues on the site. (By the way, for those of you affected, I think we have solved it). The point is, the practice came as a tremendous joy.

So the main intention of the practice challenge is to play every day. The secondary intention of is to learn to enjoy your sound. I want you to keep returning your attention to the sound. Try to make it sound good. If you can’t make a good sound with what you’re doing then simplify it. Even it’s just playing an open string. This is important. If you learn to enjoy the sound, then practicing requires no discipline. It happens naturally.

I recently shared a tone-building routine. In it, we move from playing single open notes, to octaves, roots and fifths, triads, pentatonic scales, full 7-note scales and finally tune phrases.

Check out the ten-minute tone-building routine.

For each step of the way, there are lots of different sounds and textures you can use to practice. I’ll mention a few of them right now:

Please share in a comment below.

Thanks for taking part!

Leave a Reply

4 responses to “Practice challenge notes – day two”

  3. I had one of those “just don’t feel like playing” days yesterday, so will try to power through that feeling in the future ?. Sometimes life gets in the way…
    That said, I did find that videoing on day 1 showed me that I was bowing at a slant to the strings instead of perpendicular. So going to be working through that issue as well.