I'll start by saying that "practice" it is a wide word to say to a student or even to yourself. Let's divide this word and make it look as a compound of categories, such as:
- Exercising
- Theory
- Improvising
- Mastering
- Reading
- Chords, Arpeggios and Scales
- Reviewing
- Memorizing
- Listening
Mainly this post is inspired in the fact that some music teachers would be very technical and include many exercises and other teachers would be very musical and avoid exercises as isolated exercises. Both I think are extremes but I agree that everyone does what it works for them. Then if things are not working for you you should try this advice I'm about to explain.
I consider that exercising is quite important for beginners and intermediate level students, specially because their fingers never played an instrument before and they have a need to be trained and develop their full potential. Also is the time where students memorize and digest most of the technical skills. So the first advice is to provide exercises to the students when this is having difficulties with technique, coordination or stretching.
Then important for teachers to differentiate between the outcomes of each exercise and there has to be a reason to do an exercise otherwise it becomes a waste of time that should be placed on the pieces and on mastering the pieces.
For this reason I have found very convenient to separate them in three categories.
1) Root Exercises
2) Macro Exercises
3) Micro Exercises
ROOT EXERCISES: Are those very few exercises not more than ten exercises that follow the very fundamental movements of the hands or fingers. For example for exercising strumming, down stroke -up stroke is a root exercise for this skill. So this means that the exercise will be very efficient and will bring result very quickly to the player, outcome on speed, fluency, clarity and any other derivative movement or exercise that includes strumming.
MACRO EXERCISES: Macro exercises I believe is what most of players and teacher do to train technique and these are exercises that contains many different movements and skills, for example scales, arpeggios, intervals. If we take scales these can be divided on many aspects. Scales as a macro exercise contains many micro skills within and there are the following: Skipping strings both hands, Press and Relax the fingers left hand, Alternate Index and Middle right hand, shifting... This means that the training will happen but result might take longer to show and is not very accurate on what is the outcome that the player wants.
MICRO EXERCISES: As the word micro suggest these exercises are very specific and attack on very minuscules problems. Of course these doesn't mean that they are not useful, this means that we must use these exercises very carefully and for specific problems that the students could be facing such as a very weak small finger on the left hand. So for this problem students might need several micro exercises made for the small finger,
I hope you find these information useful and you start to use these three categories to differentiate outcomes when exercising and also to measure carefully when using the word "practice" without specifying what kind of practice has to be made.
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