Top Tips for Practicing Music at Home

Practicing music is a wonderful and therapeutic activity. Practice involves working through warm ups, exercises, drills and techniques with the goal of improving our musicianship. Practicing a piece or a set of music enables us to contribute to the overall success of the ensemble or event.

Here is a very practical process that can be repeated over time to practice music for weekend liturgy…

Warm up with scales, cadences, and exercises to get your body warm and ready to play or sing.

1. Go piece by piece.

2. Make note of the key and time signatures.

3. Guitarists - Observe the chord changes, and make note of any unusual chord voicings/tensions. Take a few minutes to lookup and learn these grips.

4. Pianists - Review the accompaniment and observe any unusual rhythms or accidentals.

5. Play the recording or YouTube. As you play the recording, follow along on your accompaniment or lead sheet. Observe the repeats, endings. Understand the arrangement and where things are heading next.

6. Once you have an understanding of the arrangement, break it down in your mind to “verse”, “chorus/refrain”, “bridge” and know where on your chart these sections are.

7. Run through the piece on your instrument/voice using either a metronome at the marked tempo, or along with the recording. If the recording is in a different key from the charts, this is a good opportunity to practice transposing!

8. Guitarists working in an ensemble with other guitarists should be considering what alternate voicings and chord positions they can use as an alternate to make the arrangement more polished and less muddy. Take advantage of capos and open triads in different positions on the neck!

9. The goal for practice at home is to be ready for rehearsal. A good rule of thumb for knowing you’ve practiced the piece enough is to make the following evaluation… “Am I emotionally connecting the lyric and music at tempo, or am I mechanically trying to get through the piece?”. If you are working to get the lyric, melody and chord changes executed correctly, you have some additional practice to do before rehearsal.

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