Making Your Practice Matter

I was thinking about musical “fingerprints” the other day. I’m talking about the details that can leave smudges, distract us, and keep us from noticing the beautiful parts of our musicianship.

When we’re practicing scales, arpeggios, études, etc., are we just doing the repetitions by rote? Are we really listening and feeling for improvement?

These activities would help us a lot more if we looked at them like we might look at polishing fingerprints off a beautiful Steinway grand…