Practice Schudule 1, 2, 3

I took my flute home on Friday and made it my goal to get in 10minutes a day over the course of the weekend, beginning on Firday night. this would get me in a solid half hour of practice time but becaus eit was spread out i was able to focus on various areas of my playing.

Beginning on Firday night i parcticed solely band music, focussing specifically on spots of trouble for myslef or places where i thought i could improve. I started out by running 'The Light Eternal'. In this piece i ensured that i focussed on smooth transitions between sections as well as the fuege at 147. Next i played through the movements in the Holst Suite, specifically focussing on movement one after the key and time signature change. Though i found the rhythms to be easy enough, the key was somewhat awkward; i always found myslef playing d natural as a pose to d flat so i spent a time working on that by breaking down the bars and playing them over and over again until the fingering patterns were committed to memory. Then i moved on to movement 4 and breifly practiced 4 bars before 69 where the doublets to review the timing. Finally i played through rumble on the high planes focussing solely on the chromatic riff that comes up in the piece frequently as well as the chromatic scale at 205 and the last 4 bars of the piece. I now have all the notes down but have to work on getting my speed up to tempo; my plan is to keep playing the bars over and over again until they are committed to memory and i am able to play them at proper speed.

On Saturday i mainly focussed on reviewing my scales and thirds from the purple book; at the beginning of this semester i found that i had somewhat forgotten many of my minor scales and thought it would be good to go over a review and re-commit the fingering patterns to memory. I began with some exercises from the purple book focussing on fingering patterns as well as the chromatic scales that we have to play for the test we were told about Friday; In doing so i found out 2 things, first that i find descending a chromatic scale much easier to read than ascending as well that it depends on the note as to whether i can read it better as a sharp or a flat ( for example i would prefer reading d flat in stead of c# but would prefer f# instead of g flat). That being said i took that knoledge and really focussed on playing the full chroamtic scale at the back of the purple book up and down so that i can read ascending and descending equally and at the same tempo and also so that i can read any note as either a sharp or a flat. I plan on continuing to spend 5minutes at the minimum reviewing the chromatic scale each time i practice in order to boraden my playing ability. Also during this time i work on getting a good tone form my upper register by playing the b flat and e flat scales up the octave; i did this by working on fully filling my instrument with air as well as reviewing the fingeriungs - at this point in time i am comftorable with playing in the upper octave but will still continue to practice because that never hurts.

Finally Yesterday i did a mix of everything - I played some of the rhythm studies from the yellow coloured book really focussing on counting the sub divisions. I also re-reviewed the chromatic scales for my test, now, tomorrow and once again played through the band music. I found that i still had some difficulty playing the chormatic scale so i reviewed those a little further by breaking it down into a pyramid and slowing down the tempo but found that i had relativly little difficulty with the "trouble spots" in band rep. which i practiced on Friday.

Overall; i feel that i made effective use of my parctice time this weekend. I made good progress on band rep. and reviewing of scales and will continue to work on the chromatic scale by continually playing them until i can play ascending and descending comftorably as well as at a consistent tempo.