We hear people talking about setting REALISTIC goals. When you’re practicing, do you have a specific goal in mind or are you just running over the tunes? Unless you have a specific realistic goal you’re wasting your time and may be doing more damage than good! Whoa! This is not permission to skip practice. It’s a swat up aside the head. Let me explain.

Practicing should be all about teaching your fingers to behave. Everybody talks about “muscle memory”. Here’s what they’re really saying. If you teach your fingers to do the right things, you can shift your attention toward other priorities, such as phrasing, blowing good tone, and playing in unison with pipers and drummers. If you haven’t taught your fingers correctly, they’ll fight you every step of the way. They’ll dominate your thoughts (What note comes next?) and take your focus away from what you should be thinking about.

Once you teach your fingers correctly, playing becomes a matter of guiding the melody and tempo and producing a great sound. If you haven’t prepared your fingers to take over the technical aspect of playing, you’ll never play music! Once you’ve taught your fingers, you have to learn to trust them. Switch off the computer and use the force!

This all came about working with pipers to improve technique and memorization. Too often we’re thinking about the wrong things. There was another question that I’ll touch on here and then expand on in a later post. “Do I watch the Pipe Major or the Bass Drummer?” The answer…YES. You watch both and others, all for different reasons.

We’re going to drill down on this over the next few days. Gear up and hunker down. Now go back and read this again.