Author: Dutchy
Date: 2011-02-23 22:45
What works for me to build stamina is:
1. Long tones. Start at the bottom-most note you can play, hold it as long as you can, rest a moment, then play the next note. Go up and down the entire scale.
2. Play more. Which sounds like one of those stunningly obvious things, but...I had endless problems with stamina until I looked at how long, clock time, I was actually spending on practice each day, and then made a distinct effort to play for longer periods of time, to by golly just buckle down and sit there and play something, anything, for another 10 or 15 minutes.
Sometimes you get to the end of your regular practice regimen and you feel like, "Well, that was a good practice," and then you stop. But you build muscle and endurance by pushing muscles to the point of fatigue--and then letting them rest for a minute and then doing it all over again. So if you stop when you feel virtuous, when "that felt like a goodly amount of practice", instead of stopping when your embouchure collapses and you're spluttering uselessly, then you haven't pushed your muscles to build any stamina.
This meant that I had to go out and find more books of etudes and things, to eke out the time period, for a while I was even playing out of the Hal Leonard playalong books with the CDs, anything for more "clock time", but it has made a big difference.
3. Wait for time to pass. Stamina is just something that takes time to accumulate. When I had been playing for 6 months, I was marking my practice time in 2-minute segments, as in, "Practice for 2 minutes and then quit because you're spluttering uselessly". Now that I have been playing for 6 years, I'm doing considerably better, I can manage an entire hour without feeling desperate. Which I know for the professionals here is laughable, but my only goal is to hold up my end with my church's tiny orchestra twice a month, which entails about an hour of non-stop hymn playing, so #1 and 2 above are what made the difference and have enabled me to feel competent.
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