Friday 12 February 2016

Balancing rehearsal, maintenance and development

Daily practise is important not only for development but just for maintaining my voice, lyrics and playing.

Scheduling and prioritising my practice time has always been a big issue for me. Ideally I would do several 20 minute periods each day, but real life doesn't work like that. Some days I don't get a chance to do any music at all. On other days I'm reluctant to give up a practice slot after 20 minutes in case I can't get back to it. The end result is that I probably do an average of about 30-40 minutes a day (or 12-18 songs).

I currently have about 30 songs in my new repertoire of American roots music, with another 30 in development. There is obviously a great pressure to rehearse the songs I'm planning to perform next, but I also have to maintain the rest as well as working on new songs and techniques.

I've never found the perfect answer to this and my schedule keeps on changing. I'm currently dividing my time between:
(1) Learning new songs with the guitar.
(2) Rehearsing known songs and learning new songs with the mandolin.
(3) Reviving old songs with the concertina.

The songs with guitar have different styles of accompaniment so development of technique is intrinsic. I ought to be developing mandolin and concertina technique as well, but there just isn't time to do everything.