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Let's pretend you have decided to learn a couple of contrasting pieces by a certain date (say, in 30 days). You have long thought about having a nice goal, almost like a small mission for yourself and since living with the feeling of regret, laziness, excuses, boredom, and aimlessness became too depressing, you have looked at the mirror and said to yourself: "Now or never". So you are all pumped up with excitement and ready for change. These two pieces would add a nice excitement into your day - you will watch your skills grow every day and by a certain date you will be ready to play them in public. Here are a few mistakes to avoid when you are planning and goal-setting your organ practice: 1. Starting with too much excitement. When we are jumping from joy about the prospect of succeeding in some exciting goal, it's very easy to lose ground. Temptations come every day, every hour, every minute. Our inner dragons are waiting for us around the corner. Actually it's nothing special. Start silently. Practice just today. If tomorrow comes, you will have another chance. 2. Having too much to learn every day. Have you planned to learn one page a day? Maybe you can do it once or twice, but believe me, in three days your mission will become unbearable (unless you are professional at this) because you will have to repeat previously mastered material. Bite only what you can eat. If you learn one line a day, then you have a chance to do it long-term. 3. Giving in to the idea "it's not the first time I decided to achieve something and failed." Of course, we all have had our failed New Year's resolutions and other epic failures, some public, some private. But it's not a failure, if you learn from it. F = Feedback. Although you are not some Super Man, but you are not a loser either. This time it's worth your effort. 4. Thinking about the end result all the time. Looking too far ahead without doing the work for today is pointless. All that matters is today. Remember, you are like this train going from place A to place B. If you are on the right track, you will reach your destination. But you have to keep moving. 5. Scolding yourself for not being able to keep up with your plan. There will be some days when you miss a practice session or two. This happens and it's OK. Not that you must chicken out of your mission. You see, your inner dragons want you to stop. So every slip you make along the way will be held against you (in your mind). You can adjust your plan as long as you keep going. Make sure you pay attention to these common mistakes. You don't want to be disappointed and go back to where you started without actually achieving anything. But find your inner strength, believe the power of today, and you will successfully master these pieces and will be ready for another challenge. Result is not the goal. Process is the goal.  Paulius Grigonis: Moments when the dreams come true... With Professor Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin.
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When people pick wild blueberries in the forest during the first 30 minutes is really fun – a beautiful nature, singing birds, we put the berries into the basket one after another. It’s even better when the berries are fairly large – then you can have the full basket fairly fast.
But later, the further you are into the forest, the more effort is needed. If you try picking with a bent back – your back begins to hurt; if you are picking on your knees – they begin to hurt also. After about 2 hours of this process, it becomes a real suffering for most people. Your body hurts in any position. However a lot of people don’t stop picking the blueberries here. They try to ignore the physical pain and continue picking them until they have full baskets. Why? The answer is simple. These people have a goal – they don’t want to come back home with empty baskets. Practicing organ music is similar to picking blueberries. At first practicing gives much pleasure, the sounds of the organ are relaxing and you are in a good temper. But if you try to really focus and continue playing after about 30 minutes, practicing begins to be not so easy. Often you would want to switch to another activity. But if you have a goal such as learn and master a certain organ composition or prepare for a public performance, then you are able to overcome your struggles and practice with pleasure much longer (with frequent breaks for stretching and relaxation, of course). Do you have a goal? In my previous post I wrote about devising a plan which is needed to achieve your goal in 2013. This plan will be your road map for the upcoming year. It won't let you to get lost among many other tasks that you do in your daily life.
However, having a plan alone is not going to help you much. It's too big, too broad, too general for your every day tasks. You need something more manageable, something that you could do every day. In other words, you need to create series of steps for your plan. So now, when you face the last day in this old year, it's the most crucial time you think about those steps. Because if tomorrow comes and all you have is a plan, you won't know what exactly you have to do that day and in which order. The best way to go about creating these steps is to take your plan and think what kind of results you should get every month in order to reach your goal on time? If your goal takes 12 months to accomplish, divide your big goal into 12 parts. Then take each month and think what you would have to achieve each week so that you reach your monthly goals. So you would need to divide each of the 12 monthly goals into groups of 4 smaller weekly goals. The last step would be to take these weekly goals and divide them into 7 parts, each one for every day of the week. Or if you only want to work for 5 days a week towards your goal, divide them into 5 parts. Note that it's important to leave yourself some time to relax, to recover and have some flexibility. If anything unexpected comes up that day, you can still make it up during the week. Take some time to think about these steps today and write them down. This process will give you a strong start for the New Year. Then all you need to do is to implement each of the daily steps and at the end of the year you will reach your goal. It's like going from town A to town B on the train. Because the train follows a certain predetermined track, you can be sure that you will reach your destination. By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my video Organ Practice Guide. Yesterday I wrote about the need to have a clear goal in mind for the upcoming year. The days at the end of the year are critical, you see, because if you enter the new year without a predetermined goal in mind, you will likely have the same results as you had this year.
So my question is do you like those results? And because you are reading this, my guess is that you want some kind of positive change. So that's where this goal comes in. Remember, it doesn't have to be a single goal. In fact, it's better to have 3 most important measurable and achievable goals written down. Hopefully now that you have your goals on paper, think about the exact plan to getting to that goal. Be as specific as possible. For example, if your goal is to prepare for an organ recital in 6 months, think about what kind of pieces do you want to play. Calculate how many pages are total in your program. Divide the number of pages by the number of days you have left until your planned recital (minus one month). Then you will know exactly how much music you will have to learn each day in order to reach your goal on time. (And by the way, you don't have to be an experienced professional organist to play an organ recital at your level of competence - you only have to have professional attitude with a sense of responsibility. The wise practice plan will prepare you for it). Do you see the process here? It's just an example, of course. Write your own plan which suits you and your goal. By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my video Organ Practice Guide. The New Year of 2013 is almost upon us. As you review what you have accomplished in 2012, it is not too late to think of what will be your goal in 2013.
If you do what you did in 2012, you will have the same results. So the question is do you like what you have achieved in 2012? Or perhaps you are dreaming for something to change? By the way, I like this definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (Albert Einstein). So if you practice in the old way in 2013 over and over but expect different results, that wouldn't be very good strategy, would it? Instead what if you think about what kind of results you want to have in 2013, and then adjust your practice accordingly. Write your goal down. It will hold you accountable. By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my video Organ Practice Guide. Because organ repertoire is so vast (the earliest surviving music is from the 14th century), we might sometimes get overwhelmed by the variety of compositions, composers, national schools, types of compositions, and historical periods. In this case, our wishes might be too broad for the moment. One day we might want to play this, another day - that. By doing so, we might even lose our motivation to play the organ in the long run.
We can't achieve a quality performance by playing different pieces every day. What happens is that by doing so, we might develop reasonable sight-reading skills but our overall level will not be as high as if we create a strict practice routine or plan. If you want to succeed in organ playing, you need to have a plan. Just like any other activity organ playing requires thinking about our goals, strategies, and tactics to achieve a higher level. So, how do we create this plan for our organ practice? First of all, we need to think about our goals with organ playing. Where do we want to be in 2 months, in 6 months, in 1 year, or 5 years from now. Do we want to get a solid foundation of our organ technique? Or to find a good organist position? Or to be able to play a challenging but exciting organ piece of our choice. Or maybe to prepare for our organ recital? Because we are all different, our needs will be different, too. But we still need to think about our goals. When we know what we want to accomplish in x months from now, then we can begin to think about strategy to do that. For example, let's pretend I want to be able to play the famous Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor (or any other piece) in 8 weeks. In order to achieve that goal, my strategy might be something like this: I would need to spend 3 weeks by learning the piece, 1 week memorizing it and 4 more weeks perfecting it. Once I have the strategy in place, I can plan the tactics, too. This would mean I have to calculate how much time and effort I have to put in order to learn the piece in 3 weeks. Because this piece is about 9 pages long, I would need to learn 3 pages per week, or 0,5 page per day to meet my goal. So, would you like to create something like this for your own organ practice? Try this approach and you will have incredible clarity in what you need to do to achieve your goal. By the way, do you want to learn to play the King of Instruments - the pipe organ? If so, download my FREE video guide: "How to Master Any Organ Composition" in which I will show you my EXACT steps, techniques, and methods that I use to practice, learn and master any piece of organ music. |
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 Photo by Edgaras Kurauskas
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Drs. Vidas Pinkevicius and Ausra Motuzaite-Pinkeviciene Organists of Vilnius University , creators of Secrets of Organ Playing. Our Hauptwerk Setup:
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