Do you have good days and bad days?
Welcome to the club! That, my friend is par for the course. It happens to us all!
Now let me tell you something. They eventually go away. Can you believe that truth? The bad days eventually begin to recede and the good days become more prominent.
Yes its true.
However, let me give you some advice to help mitigate the bad days and begin to make them happen less and less.
Consistency is the key to fight the bad days. Yes, I know it’s not earth shattering news. But, what I’m talking about is not just regular consistent practice. It’s also steady consistent practice of the same warm-up material. I’m not totally sure why that is, except what makes sense to me is that you’re training your muscles. These muscles need to practice the same material over and over again so that they begin to remember where they left off yesterday and can move to the next level up.
That’s the Olympic flutist equivalent of muscle memory, which is defined in part by Wikipedia as “everyday activities that become automatic and improve with practice.”
I do the same tone and technique warm-ups every day for months.
Literally months.
Then, I might change it up with one exercise change in each area. For example, adding a new tone exercise to the routine, and maybe a new scale study. But I’ll take out something from those routines because, lets face it we do have a time limit. It’s so good to let those facial muscles and finger muscles sink in day after day to those exercises.
Then one day you wake up and think, wow, I haven’t had a bad day all week. Bad days become less and less. Now, they still come, those pesky bad days. But you can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
If you are a flute major at college, I know what you are going through because…well, I had them too!
As I have stated before, WE ALL HAVE THEM. I did in fact wake up one day to realize that those bad days were much fewer and farther between.
You will too!
Dr. Flute