Consistency builds better music

Making music or practicing music consistently improves your playing much more than big practice or writing sessions.

For the past few years I’ve been teaching music and playing random gigs and making my own music on the side and the main thing that’s helped me improve those things is consistency.

I worked at a youth theatre and learned two musicals a year. That’s more than two hours of music every year that I’d play weekly and learn. My piano playing had never improved as much as it did with that gig.

Currently, I direct a youth orchestra and even though we’re doing online classes now we’re still rehearsing. That’s helped my conducting a whole lot because I’m consistently doing it, every single week. There’s a number of different orchestras at this specific music program and one of the other conductors plays every orchestral instrument, including saxophone. She’s been playing them for rehearsals for many many years, and that’s how she’s gotten as good as she has. Consistency. Regularly picking those instruments up and playing more and more challenging songs. She doesn’t have long practice sessions, but she’s been playing them little by little for many years.

Consistently working on something will help you improve a ton. Even if the incremental changes are small, the large scale improvement over a year will help a lot. Look for years of progress, rather than days of progress.

Start by doing something small. Small improvements will add up, and they’ll be manageable. You won’t burn out doing small things, but trying too hard to do lots of big things will burn you out.

ISJ