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Short, regular sessions: making good use of a practice timer
“I don’t have time to practice”: often this comes from thinking that a useful session lasts an hour. Yet most teachers give the same advice: a little every day is better than a lot once a week. Fifteen minutes a day gets you further than an hour and a half on Sunday.
Why regularity matters more than length
Learning a musical movement means repeating it often enough for it to become natural. Between two sessions, what you practiced settles in. Coming back to it the next day, you pick up where you left off. After six days without playing, a good part of the session goes into getting back to last week’s level.
Long sessions have another drawback: concentration drops. After a while you play on autopilot, repeat your mistakes, and fatigue can tense up your hands or voice. A short session ends before that point.
Choose your length
There is no ideal length for everyone. A few guidelines:
- 5 to 10 minutes: for beginners, children, or busy days. Much better than nothing.
- 15 to 20 minutes: a good daily base for making progress on a song.
- 30 to 45 minutes: if you have the time, two blocks with a break are better than one long stretch.
Choose a length you can keep up almost every day, not the one from your New Year’s resolutions.
One goal per session
A short session can’t do everything. Before you start, set yourself a single goal, precise and measurable:
- “Play the bridge at 80% of the tempo, three times without a mistake.”
- “Go through the verse chords without stopping.”
- “Keep the click on 2 and 4 through the whole chart.”
At the end of the session, you know whether you reached the goal. If not, it becomes tomorrow’s.
An example 20-minute session
- 3 minutes of warm-up: a scale or a simple exercise, slowly, with the metronome.
- 12 minutes on today’s goal: the hard passage, raising the tempo step by step. See the step-by-step method.
- 5 minutes for fun: play the whole song, or something you enjoy. Ending on a good note makes you want to come back the next day.
Stop on time
A timer has two benefits. It frees your mind: no need to watch the clock, you play until it stops you. And it protects you from the session that drags on: when time is up, the session is over, even if you feel like carrying on. Keeping a little appetite for tomorrow is part of the method.
Write down your progress in one line, for example “bridge: 80% clean”. In a few weeks, this notebook shows how far you have come, even when you feel stuck.
With TempoClic
Each song in TempoClic can have its own practice time, from 1 to 60 minutes:
- Open the song settings with the pencil.
- Choose the practice time, for example 15 minutes.
- Start: a progress bar shows the elapsed and remaining time, and the metronome stops by itself at the end.
You can create a song for each part of the session, for example “Warm-up: scales” set to 3 minutes and “Bridge” set to 12 minutes, then go through them from the list. The count-in option adds one bar before you start, giving you time to get your hands in place. The guide explains every setting.