This is mainly in reference to a situation where you are learning and practicing an instrument on your own, working from standard notation, guitar chord charts, tablature, or whatever.
It seems self-evident that you need to be working on at least a few pieces; if you spend all your practice time working on just one thing you won’t be able to keep it up out of sheer boredom. But work on too many, then you spread yourself too thin and never get the pieces worked up to performance quality.
So what have the other musical Dopers found to be the most effective choice?
Hmmmm… I would say it depends on what your goals are. If you want to be a better sight reader then I would say to work on 5 or 6 at the same time, but not with the same intensity that you would in preparing for a performance.
When I was studying classical guitar I would focus on only 2 pieces at any given time for the purposes of a performance, and often only one in a particular sitting. But my passion is in improvisation, so that’s what I would do to handle the boredom issue. In fact, when I came to a particularly difficult measure or 2, I’d often loop them and just kinda start jamming on them so I’m really doing both: practicing the piece and having fun with improv.
For jazz I would tend to work on 5 or 6 pieces at a time because they don’t need to be perfect.
I was the pit director and guitar player for a couple of rock-style musical theatre productions. In those cases the band would run through a minimum of 10 numbers each rehearsal. But that’s a very different animal than classical.
My goals are just all around better musicianship. I like so many different kinds of music that I sometimes feel I have too many irons in the fire. Recently I was working on a little Bach, on some music by Lodovico Roncalli (mostly easier than Bach), and a Howard Morgen book on fingerstyle jazz–already learned one arrangement and was working on another. Then I picked up an old Frederick Noad method book that I have, and found that a short piece by Giuliani was *much[/] easier to read than it had been when I looked at it years before, so I had to start working on that too. It never seems to end.
I’ll be honest. I don’t have much time to practice these days, what with the kid and building a house.
I sight read like a motherf*$ker, so I get by great during rehearsals.
BUT, I’m always, literally always, playing through things in my mind. Usually not to the point where my fingers actually move, but mentally I’m practicing something even as I type this.
Sometimes I even solve fingering problems in my dreams.
As for the number of pieces I’m practicing at once, I’ve never really thought about it. I just prepare whatever’s on my plate that week. I do practice efficiently. IOW, not spending time on the easy parts. Find the hard bits and focus.
I would echo Jpeg’s comment about not really thinking about it actually. While I gave very specific numbers, the truth is I don’t think it’s ever by design so much as just what happened to make its way onto my plate. The only thing really by design were the two classical guitar pieces I would have to perform at the end of each semester for undergrad juries.
But generally I bounce around a lot, usually starting each on a whim and then coming back to them as the mood takes me there.
I would also echo his comments about playing them in your mind. Again, not by design, but simply in the drift of a daydream (like say, while I should be working) I’ll often start playing through some ideas mentally which usually leads to a craving to have an instrument in my hands at the time to try it out.
I think if your goal is to improve musicianship in general then you should probably have at least one piece that you’re working on at any given moment with the goal of bringing it up to a performance level, while also working on a few others less intensely. You can make huge technical leaps by isolating those difficult measures in a piece and really working on them to make them sound easy.
Incidentally Giuliani is great for musicianship because he wrote so much with pedogogy in mind, but nothing really beats Bach for training your hand to be where it needs to be.
For me though, improvisation is the most fulfilling thing I do with my instrument.
