Creating structure in your practise · Learning Jazz Violin

Creating structure in your practise

A few of you have mentioned this recently : too much on your list, and once you start on one thing you might fall down a rabbit hole or end up somewhere else entirely and lose a practise session to it.

It's a real hurdle, and it's harder than it used to be. The internet is throwing new, exciting concepts at us constantly, and it's easy to end up burnt out on information and stuck in practice paralysis before you've even picked up the violin.

Here's the structure I use myself, and with my students. It's not an exhaustive list of everything you need to work on, but it's a solid shape to hang a session on:

Scale work, either a major or minor scale over a drone (I've got a bunch of variations on this) or an enclosure exercise (you probably know by now I have hundreds of these).
Transcription, either starting something new, or working different lines and ideas out of a transcription I've done recently.
Creative but challenging, usually taking ideas from step 2 and applying them over a sequence.
Creative and easy, playing over a tune I already know well and I'm comfortable on.

If I get all four into a session, I feel like I've actually gone somewhere, rather than just spent time.

Here's the thing though, structure alone isn't going to solve all your problems, firstly knowing how to fill that structure isn't always easy and sometimes too much self direction can lead to self doubt really quickly. Especially at the start of your journey into learning something new,

If you want help with that, you can always book a call with me below.

👉 https://scheduler.zoom.us/matt-holborn/jazz-violin-chat

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Creating structure in your practise