How to Organize Your Practice Time with Vincent Herring

A well-structured practice routine is key to seeing results and growing as a musician and a performer. But how do you know if your practice routine is working well for you? 

Nathan sat down with Vincent Herring to talk a bit about how he organizes his practice time.

Do you have any good rule of thumb for when you’ve practiced something enough for the day? Maybe something that’s been giving you trouble, how do you know when it’s time to move on?

Here’s what’s important: it’s being organized. If there’s a line you can’t get, it’s not going to matter if you practice it for five hours that day. It’s better to practice that line for 30 minutes today, tomorrow, and the next day. Your brain needs time to work through things and commit them to memory.

Just think of this like if we were going to be bodybuilders. It doesn’t matter how much we work out today, and honestly working out too much today could mean we’re worse off tomorrow. But if we do incrementally more little bit by little bit, that’s how we get there.

If instead of trying to focus on a lot of lines, we just focus on what we want a little each day, we’ll see that we’re able to manipulate it and play it at will, anywhere and anytime. But you can’t be in a rush, because you don’t build muscles in a day, that’s just not how it works.

So if you have something, like a diminished pattern, are you consistent on that every day, or do you every say, “I’ll revisit this next week.”

The best thing you can do is start a journal. And in that journal, you have everything that you’re working on. This may sound like just an extra thing, and for some people may feel tedious, but this actually has real results. 

Every time you get ready to practice, go right to your journal. You can have everything you’ve practiced in there, and you can open it up and say “ah, I’m working on this.” Otherwise it’s easy to sit down and start playing something…which leads to playing another something. Soon enough, you think “ok, what was I actually supposed to be doing here?”

If you’re organized with your practice time, you can make real progress.

So what, to you, is a well-balanced practice routine?

Really, that’s different for everybody. People come up and ask “what should I be practicing, and for how much?” The answer is not so clear.

We all have strengths and weaknesses, and they’re different for everyone. For example, some people really struggle with their ears—identifying passages and progressions. For other people, maybe they have difficulty with time.

So to make a good practice routine, you have to be brutally honest with yourself and say, “what are my weaknesses?” Because if all you do is practice your strengths, then you’re just getting further out of balance. If you have bad ears, then you need to make a lesson plan that continuously challenges you to grow your ears and ability to hear. 

Everyone’s lesson plan looks different, but it’s important to keep challenging yourself. If you’re looking for a good place to start, check out our resource of 25 Bebop Etudes on Jazz Standards!

Vincent playing an excerpt from the 25 Bebop Etudes on Jazz Standards

We’ll see you next time!