Practice very slowly, with many repeats, very small chunks of music (often one or two beats is most helpful). Practice with an active imagination, that is, pre-hear in your imagination the beautiful tone, pitch, articulations, phrase shapes, etc that you are aiming for each time you practice any passage.
Decide on fingerings as soon as you start looking at a new piece of music (decide on, for example, side or bis Bb, fork or regular F#, side C or regular, etc). Decide on page turns early on in your learning process, as these need to be as comfortable and familiar in performance as is the notation. Making changes in your page layout just prior to performance can make you much less comfortable in the moment of performance.
Put the metronome on the eighth-note subdivision and practice small chunks of music slowly enough so that you are not making any note mistakes. A very slow tempo allows you to be totally in control of fingers, tone, articulations, pitch, etc. Students usually practice at tempos that are too fast for accurate and efficient musical learning.
Practice with a sound you are increasingly proud of regardless of whether you are practicing scales, long tones or the repertoire being studied. Avoid having a “practice room sound” that is anything short of what you want to use in performance.
Be patient with the process. If you find a day when “it just isn’t happening” it usually simply means you are trying to practice at a tempo that is too fast!
Be sure to study the piano part carefully, and frequently mark in cues from the piano part into your own part so that you are aware of the composite rhythm when practicing alone.
If you find a recording, study the recording with the piano part in-hand, not just your own part.
In Practicing – Keep in mind that we are learning to work with sound in the same way that visual artists are learning to work with clay or paint. We first learn how to make the sound (the artistic raw material for a musician) correctly, then we try to get better at using it to express musical shapes, ideas and emotions…the parallels to the visual arts are really interesting to me. We learn how to make the raw material- our sound- to be pretty, in-tune, how to articulate it, to slur it, to phrase/shape it, to color it, etc similarly to how an art student learns to do the same in clay or oil. Be patient, and try to love the process of arriving little by little, moment by moment at a satisfying result. Sound is very expressive and communicates deeply to listeners. Keep the goal of creating something artistic in sound- an “artistic sound object”- in mind! Practicing, then, is taking daily “baby steps” toward your goal of profound expression…as we constantly in practicing produce increasingly more interesting and accurate “sounds”, whether in the context of long tones, scale work, etudes or phrases of repertoire being studied. Anytime we are practicing, we can always be making sounds we are aiming for, pre-hearing, imagining and believing in, or at least we can always be trying to do this, even at the slowest tempo, or on the smallest musical fragment…each sound, color, pitch, articulation, and so on can be intended and chosen. This imaginative choosing is very artistic! Aim for this active imagination when you practice! Your ear and imagination will also then be guiding your body and physiology at the subconscious and the conscious levels. —Dr. James Umble, Youngstown State Saxophone Studio
Keep listening to all kinds of music: orchestral, vocal, strings, etc and thus internalize a vocabulary of great articulations, tone colors, shapes, style and more that you draw on when practicing and playing your instrument.
Learn from a recording by listening to short sections repeatedly, then playing that section on your instrument. Listen to recordings for specific concepts as you repeatedly listen to it- on some listenings ask yourself, for example, how does the performer use vibrato? Where does the performer breathe? Listen again and again for concepts of tone color, phrasing, style, and so on, as opposed to listening to the work in its entirety without asking such specific questions. Think of listening to a recording as “taking a lesson” from that player, and ask specific ”questions” about the performance by listening for specific concepts in various sections. With this kind of listening one is not seeking to become a “clone” of the recorded artist but to broaden one’s vocabulary to include the concepts heard on the recording. Students of jazz use this concept frequently, of course.
Map out times for practicing on your daily schedule.. Learn to use small chunks of time well- we can all make good progress even in a half-hour session if we practice slowly in a focused way, centering on a specific goal or problem.
There is a difference between playing and practicing – the former is doing what you can already do, and the latter is taking small, methodical, intelligent and disciplined steps towards becoming better, towards mastery of that which you cannot yet do. Be sure you are truly practicing each day in your practice room!
Use ear plugs if practicing altissimo or very loud passages in a small or live space.
Stay in touch with your body- learn to effectively warm up your body through proper stretching, for example, before jumping into fast playing. The study of Alexander Technique and/or yoga, for example, can be very helpful and important for musicians.
In practicing we repeatedly and lovingly work the things we cannot do at a tempo where we can.