Regarding #1- This is an area which gets missed in young players practicing because they get absorbed in the tasks of the week as assigned by their teacher. But if dedicated time is set aside daily, even in a modest amount of say 10 minutes, 3 songs can be reviewed(re-played) which the player or student(is that you?!..) did in past months or even years.

     An important part of this module of practice is to actually make up the list that contains songs previously mastered which the player either wishes to be able to play for people or themselves, or which the player believes others will enjoy for all the various reasons that people enjoy music. When I first made up my list of maybe 10 songs and pieces, I did it with the titles down a column on the left and then 10 or 20 columns to the right of the longest song title for dates that I rehearsed the songs. I stuck a new date in the first column to the right of the song titles and began checking off the songs in the list as I played them. So after a few days I’d checked off the whole column of the last date and put in a new date and began checking those off as I did them. Doing this put me in far better shape to perform than I’d previously been, and has enabled me to play cocktail parties on just a few days notice where over an hour of material has been required to be played with a fair polish on it.

      Far too often, players or students let previously mastered material slide, never to be brought back into performance shape. This is a sad waste of precious effort and energy I believe. As players, we often get tired of music that we’ve worked on enough to polish, forgetting that the excitement we once experienced as we brought that music into near perfection, is a sharable feeling that gets passed on to people that we would play the pieces or songs for!