Routine Behavior
I’m a mixed bag when it comes to routines. I take a shower every morning, brush and floss my teeth, make my bed, warm up, drink my coffee, do lip slurs… or wait, is it coffee then warm up? Lip slurs first? Should I do breathing exercises first or should I jump right in? What about stretching, isn’t that something I should be doing as I get older? I haven’t gone for a run in a while, oh but that’s because it’s too hot. But I have a bike trainer that lets me ride indoors during the hellish Arizona summer… but I’m not using it. Wait, did I floss this morning? Oh shit I need to do laundry!
I’ll readily admit that routines are tough for me to grasp onto. I stay up late - I’m writing this at 1:19am. I haven’t had a strict bed time since… if only I could remember. For breakfast I eat... a granola bar? How about a bagel? Just coffee? Lunch is a mystery a lot of the time. I rarely plan out dinners, too.
If I’m so chaotic with routines, why am I obsessed with them, and why am I writing about it now? That’s a great question for someone with more degrees than me, but the one type of routine that I am truly interested in and have no hang ups about obsessing over is my practice. I am constantly trying to find ways to improve my practice efficiency, to make a more beautiful sound more easily, more readily; to be able to express myself through my music as easily and purely as I can.
I also get overwhelmed with the multitude of options available for implementation into my routine. There are countless method books, etude books, scales, slurs, excerpts, chamber and ensemble music, solo repertoire, seminars, festivals, auditions, etc., that I could never in one lifetime begin to scratch the surface of. I find myself wanting variety, to keep myself interested and not stuck in ruts on single snippets of information. Ironically, I’ve listened to the same Spotify playlists over and over and over again for years now. Again, someone with more degrees can help me understand such oxymoronic behavior.
I suppose I’m just consistently baffled at how put-together, steadfast, and concrete so many professional musicians’ routines seem to be. “Seem” being the operative word here. There are so many individual routines published by extremely successful players or their students: Joe Alessi’s warm up, Peter Steiner’s warm up, the Remington Warm Up collection, Schlossberg, Bill Adam, Caruso, on and on and on. It’s all so overwhelming! How is anybody to choose what will be right for them? How am I going to choose? Should I be publishing my own warm up and selling PDFs for a few bucks?
Flip the script to non classical musicians. Tom Morello, guitarist of Rage Against the Machine said in an interview that at some point early on he stopped practicing. What the hell? I thought we had to practice 25/8/366 to have even the slightest chance of making it!
It’s all just a lottery ball scrambler of routines. Maybe I should stop playing the lottery, trying to nab somebody else’s winnings and leech off of them. Build my own jackpot somehow. Invest, take out dividends, quit buying scratch offs trying to make a quick Jackson here and there. “I gotta get my shit together!”
But we don’t live in a vacuum. We can’t simply start from scratch, none of us can unlearn what we’ve learnt. But what we can do is take those exercises and snippets we already know, and polish them. Learn them to their fullest potential, alter them, make them more challenging as we improve. A 3 note lip slur starts slow, getting ever so slightly faster and faster until people look up to us asking how we make it sound “so easy”. Working on high range? How about setting a goal for a single half step more each month? Sounds slow, right? In a single year’s time, that’s an octave of quality work that will not need to be retouched after that year’s 20% filled planner with your initials embossed is tossed out. Sounds a lot better than trying to snipe out crappy high Fs for 5 years!
I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been working out of Brad Edwards’ Lip Slurs book, one set each of slow and fast slurs each day. I started at #1 on June 1st. It is June 27th at the time of writing this and I am on #11. I am similarly working through Edwards’ book Patterns and Snippets. Again, I started on June 1st, and I am also on #11 in all three main sections in that book. One could spend 10 lifetimes on nothing but the Arban book, never perfecting it. I predict that my progression through these texts will only continue to slow down, numerically. But qualitatively, my playing is leagues better than if I were to move onto the next exercise before I truly believed I was capable of playing the one I was working on at that moment.
My point is that we should simply pick something, and commit to it for a long enough time until we are truly ready to move onto something else. “Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for a while.” We can never really know how something will pan out for us, but it sure would be interesting to find out first hand, wouldn’t it?
Life is too quick to worry so much about not having the perfect routine. The other side of that same coin is that insightful practice of making quality investments in small changes over time leads to great benefits later on. That coin will be flipped so much that it would be foolish to count, but the odds always come out balanced.
