✍️ How to Keep a PRACTICE JOURNAL (for ALL instruments!) 

Wonderf advice!! Thank you!❤❤❤

I have followed all of your advice. Thank you..❤️ I can also say that I pre-plan what I'm gonna practice the next day. It makes it so much easier to sit down and get focused without wasting any time.

"The perfect is the enemy of the very good." - another enemy of the effective practice journal is the "bullet journal" aesthetic. My own practice journal often suffers from too much attention to neatness, making sure thinks line up just right. So I appreciate the permission to take a utilitarian approach!

Thanks❤

I have never even heard of a practice journal - and I had piano lessons for about 10 years over the course of many years. I'm 72 years young. Thank you so much for all your videos.

Great presentation of this topic! Thank you, Dr. Boyd

I just write down a date and pieces I worked on that day. The pieces are typically divided into sections (that I wrote down on the book) or measures, and I write down which sections I worked on that day. Other notes are what tempo range, how many successful repeat practice to clear that section, minutes spent for a particular section, and anything that I noticed during the practice time to reflect later. I do this so that next day, I have a better idea where to start (the good thing). The bad thing is...often I can't read what I wrote (bad scribbles) or I can't get what I meant in my writing (completely forgetting my inner wisdom...lol).

This is something my teacher should have told me. On and off, I was trying for short spans of time to jot down what I had learned when but never stuck to it (and also began some years after I had started lessons). This whole subject "how to practice" was unfortunately never addressed. Today, I am playing by myself (violin and cello) and after a very chaotic beginning phase, I found it helpful to have goals or assignments for the week, such as "practice this scale everyday for the week, practice this etude everyday for a week, play that run slowly everyday and try to speed it up by the end of the practice session and by the end of the week". What I also found helpful was recording myself once a month and save these recordings in a file to look back at the progress of the year. There are so many ideas I found on YT and elsewhere that my teacher never mentioned, such as practicing vibrato with a set number of "swings" per note, i.e, beginning with two per note, then four etc. to achieve a controlled vibrato. During my lessons, it was never addressed how to practice vibrato for a specific piece, how to decide, when to use vibrato where and how to form it, so, during performance or lessons, I would try to decide WHILE playing the piece where and how to use vibrato and of course, that was most often doomed to fail. It was "some kind of vibrato", not a deliberate choice that hat been thoroughly practiced BEFORE playing tat piece for my teacher or an audience (student concerts for parents, mainly).

This is really good content!

i absolutely love your channel. thanks for sharing

I started my practice journal today. Merci.

Hi Prof, I take notes from, for example, your videos so I can review the material. This helps me listen better as well. That said, I am going to start a new notebook incorporating your ideas. Thanks!

What a great video! I’ve “returned” to the piano after years of very little time to play. I tried to come up with some sort of practice routine, but I’ve struggled with that. I only have a finite amount of time these days to sit down at the piano, so I really like your ideas on how to structure a practice session, and also appreciate your ideas on what to track in a journal. Thank you very much for putting the effort into this topic. I feel motivated to play 🎹 instead of focusing on the discouragement at my current abysmal playing level haha!

What methods do YOU use to track your practice?

Am thinking of starting to use a practice journal, so these comments are made from a state of ignorance ! But I was contemplating having different sections in the journal - one for scales/arpeggios, one for new pieces progress, one for theory, one for sight reading, etc - rather than write all notes in one place in chronological order. Would be interested to know if you think there may be any pitfalls in using such an approach ?

I cannot download the practice journal. I got a "the site can't be reached error" when I tried. Please help!

I downloaded your PDF and created my own practice journal. Have you thought about making and publishing a practice journal for purchase with your own daily thoughts of wisdom and tips?