Challenge

I love to sing. Really, really love to sing. If I go for too long without singing, my temper gets a little short and nothing seems to go right. I love to play the piano and the guitar. And yet, I'll let weeks go by without touching one of the three guitars that grace my living room. I'll let weeks go by without singing anything more than I must to get through my lessons. Never really singing. Inertia.

Sir Isaac Newton's First Law of Motion can be stated thusly: 

I think that about says it all, don't you? (I have absolutely NO idea what that means.) I learned Newton's first law this way: An object in motion will tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by another body. Contrariwise, an object at rest will tend to stay at rest unless acted upon by another body. This is also called the Law of Inertia.

So, now let's look at the word: inertia.  It is from the Latin: in - without, not; and ars - skilled, art. So, unskilled, artless. I've also seen it defined as: lack of art or skill, inactivity, indolence. Lazy. Hmm. . . I am indolent. Even lazy. But I really resent the lack of art or skill part there. I am very skilled. 

However, singing, playing the piano and guitar are all use-it-or-lose-it skills. I try to be understanding when my students come to me and tell me that they really didn't have time to practice this past week. I know how busy our lives are; it's difficult to find the time to do anything, even things that we enjoy. 

That's one of the reasons I made these warm-up videos for my students. Basic warm-up. This takes 1 minute, 52 seconds. I'll round it up to 2 minutes. 

This is followed, in my standard warm-up by: Short scale to the 5th. This is the high voice option. 1 minute 26 seconds. Say - 1:30. Do it twice: once on "Ah" and then again on "Ng-ah". There's 3 minutes. 

Finish with Arpeggio Scales coming in at 1 minute 13 seconds. So, that's a grand total of roughly 6 and a half minutes. (I really hope these came out in the right order!) 6 minutes and 30 seconds. That's how long my idea of the barest warm-up would take. 

There are 1440 minutes in a day. Let's round up our 6:30 down to 6 minutes. This gives us a fraction of 6/1440, or 1/240 of a day. (I rounded down because when I tried 7, the decimal was HUGE!) 

   When I was 12 or 13, I came to a parting of the ways with my piano teacher. She was nuts. And not in a funny, good way. No, this woman was flipping insane. She let her cat sleep inside the piano while you were trying to have a lesson. She'd pace the perimeter of the room kind of like the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper. 

(If you haven't read it, here it is: The Yellow Wallpaper.  I warn you, though: it's really weird. Short, but weird. But back to Miss Fedderer) 

She'd pace and pace and when you hit a wrong note, she'd scream, and you'd have to stop and fix it. 

She was the only piano teacher in town, so it was her or no one. At that point, I had a stack of piano books that was almost 3 feet thick. It took me over 90 minutes just to get through everything she'd assigned me for the week, just once. Not really practicing, just running through. In my 30 minute lesson, we'd never get through it all, but she'd keep assigning more and more. 

Finally, she insisted that if I really wanted to improve, I needed a minimum of 6 hours of practicing each day. 6 hours! 

I tried to explain to her that with school and homework, there really wasn't any more time in the day, if I was to make my 10 p.m. bedtime. So she told me to get up at 6 a.m. and practice for 2 hours before school. For some reason, my parents didn't think much of that idea. I tried to explain to the woman that piano wasn't my first instrument:  voice was. That may have been my last lesson with her. 

Dad then found me a piano student at the college who was interested in teaching. She carefully broke a lot bad habits I'd been taught, and I began to enjoy practicing again. For a more reasonable hour or so, every day.

You see, to me practicing is not just a means to an end. It is an enjoyable way to spend some time. It is cathartic, letting me pour my emotions into the music. It relieves stress. It allows for time to ponder some of the problems that life throws at me. My preferred method is to accompany myself on piano or guitar while I sing away. But, I can work on just one instrument at a time, too. 

And yet, unless I have something specific to work toward, I tend to just let it all slide. Inertia. So, here comes the whole point of this blog. I need to practice, and so do you. Just warming-up takes under 10 minutes. I've given all of you what I use as a warm-up. You can add to if, if you'd like, but I wouldn't recommend subtracting. 

Let's work together and overcome inertia! I pledge to spend 30 minutes each and every day this coming week in music practice. Voice/piano/guitar. 30 minutes total. That's not a huge amount of time, but I will do it, and I'll report to you, either on FaceBook, or my new Twitter feed. Don't try this at home: I am a professional. Or, no, do try this at home! But, if 30 minutes seems scary, try 15, or even 10. If all you do is the warm-up every single day, I promise that you will progress faster than you have been to date. They say that 3 to 4 weeks are required to make any new practice into a habit. Maybe we should change the vocabulary. We don't want to practice. We want to habit.

Let me know how your habitting goes this week. I will be checking.

(Yes, "habitting" is a word. Stop being a problem.)