Practice Post: Explorative Practice

Hi everyone,

In today's post I'm going to talk about explorative practice, and this is a little more relaxed than practicing for your graded music exams.

Explorative Practice is where you develop your musical interests through music that interests you. You can do this by learning and exploring music from different composers, different genres or just focusing on studies. I also recommend that you do alongside your music teacher then that way you have got someone to support and advise you along the way.

I'm more of a classical girl, and one the things I like to do is explore pieces from different composers through the different classical eras of music. By doing this I have managed to explore pieces by Bach, Handel, Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff (just to name a few). I have been doing these explorative practice sessions for around two years why I'm on a break from my grades until 2022.

I like to split my practice sessions into 30 minute segments, so then that way both of the pieces I'm learning will be learned at an equal rate. But, some days I might just want to focus on just one of the pieces that I maybe struggling with a little bit - just to see if I can get myself over that practice hurdle.

Don't forget to tune your instrument and warm up before you start to practice your chosen piece/s. I like to do 'Harmonics on C' as a warm up before I start to practice. Everyone has their own ways to warm up, this is just what I like to do. 

By doing explorative practice with the help of my flute teacher I have managed to push myself to play pieces around Grade 6 standard. Okay, the pieces that I have chosen to learn and play might not be perfect at the moment, but at least I know what my playing boundaries are. Its also why my Grade 4 isn't phasing the same as my previous grades, as I can already sight read two of the pieces, and the study I know that I can do with practice. So, I'm already a third of the way there and I haven't even started working towards that grade properly yet. You will be amazed of what you can do through explorative practice, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

NB) The best to do with explorative practice is to explore around what you already know. You can push yourself within reason, but don't push too hard. A friend of mine did this, as they really wanted to learn a certain piece of music and it didn't go down too well with their teacher due to the piece that they were learning was just a little bit too advanced and in area that they hadn't touched on.

What I would suggest is work with your teacher, and maybe just suggest a piece that you would like to learn; and get your teacher to work with you on it and see what happens. If the piece is too advanced for you - your teacher should be able to tell you, and then they might be able to find an easier version of that piece of music for you that you want to learn.