okay you know everybody is talking to me about practicing and what's the deal
about practicing and how much should you practice so now obviously if you're very
talented practicing is very very important but
when I was growing up I practiced basically three hours every day and a
lot of a lot of my students feel sometimes and wrongly so that if you
practice more it's gonna be better so if you practice five hours it's better if
you practice eight hours it's even better and the answer to this if it's
wrong don't practice more than four to five hours that's a tip I can give you
if you are very serious because after afterwards it's it's not useful anymore
the body doesn't absorb any more stuff as a matter of fact you can cut yourself
having little physical problems with your wrist and sort of suffer so I would
say four to five hours for ambitious fiddle players yes and as I said
personally three hours was fine number two when you practice it has to be slow
you cannot practice impatiently you know and putting in the time of practicing is
not enough I would rather practice with your head
for two hours and somebody else just mindlessly for 8 because that's that
doesn't work so I can tell you that if you want to practice really correctly
number one slowly number two have an agenda why do you
want to practice you know make sure that you practice in small sections you want
to make sure that you don't repeat anything without actually hearing what
you're doing because when you repeat certain things and for example let's say
that you practice something for the bow and you keep repeating it and then
you're playing it slightly out of tune then you're actually practicing the play
out of tune that's why you have to actually mean listen very carefully to
what you are doing and so on so I know that this is very
very general but at least the important thing is to do it very slowly and to do
it at small sections and to have patience if something sounds great
on Monday and it does not sound so good at Tuesday don't give up it means that
it's not yet there keep practicing slowly again and again and by Wednesday
it'll be slightly better and by Thursday it'll be even more better but patience
is very very important let's talk a little bit about nerves nerves you can't
get rid of nerves really the only thing that you can do about nerves is to be
familiar with nerves so that when you're nervous when you play then you know
actually what happens to you personally and sometimes you might think that
you're gonna get nervous and it might not happen and sometimes you say oh I'm
not I'm never gonna get nervous you know tonight's gonna I feel so good and all
of a sudden on stage you start to get the jitters don't be surprised just be
familiar with what happens to you everybody is individual you know some
people stop playing very outward outwardly you know they they play very
very inwardly and very privately but when they get nervous they're afraid to
express themselves that's one of the things that happens some people they're
bow shakes everybody has a different kind of thing but as long as you
actually remember what happens to you and just say oh I know that that's what
happens to me I'm gonna try and deal with it that's one way of getting of
dealing with nerves not so much getting rid of nerves but dealing with nerves