Where does the practice of your musical instrument lie on your personal list of priorities?  Don’t tell yourself an answer based on where you think it is, or where you consciously placed it on a list of what you want your priorities to be.  What activities do you partake in that take precedence to practicing?  Homework, a job, a hobby, partying, Facebook, etc.?

If you are someone who wishes to eventually perform for a living practice needs to take precedence over all of the activities I just listed.  Many people will state that they want to win some sort of performing job, and they say that they try to practice X amount of hours in a day, but they rarely do.

For students at the undergraduate level one of the main obstacles that stand in the way of getting an optimal amount of practice daily is homework.  No matter how much homework a student gets they need to make sure that their practice is set to a high priority.  I’m not saying you should ignore your homework, but getting your practice done needs to ALWAYS be more important to you.  (By the way, I maintained an exceptionally high GPA throughout my college career, so I’m not making excuses for any failures.)  Another common obstacle is a job.  This one is more difficult to overcome, because the possession of a job is way most of us pay the rent and buy groceries.  However, if you are a student who eventually wants to have a playing job you must find someway to get in your optimal amount of practice.  If this means that you take out more college loans or downgrade your lifestyle, so be it.

Your level of playing depends in large part on the amount of practicing you are able to do.  When I say that, I don’t only mean the amount of practicing you do in preparation for an upcoming audition, I also mean the amount of practicing you’ve done since the time you started to take music seriously.  This reason is why I have been weary of the option of studying another profession alongside music in my previous posts.  A very, very, tiny number of special people are able to study music and another profession concurrently and still have the ability to obtain a job as a professional musician.  When you look at your schedule it may seem like you have enough time in a day to do all of your practicing, go to classes, complete lots of homework, and still have an hour to enjoy yourself.  However, you should be careful!  It is nearly impossible to work for 15 hours straight everyday and one is almost never able to get as much accomplished in a day as they think they can.  More importantly, if you choose this route, make sure that your practice is a higher priority than almost all of your other activities.

When you sit in front of an audition committee they won’t care if you say, “Well, I had to have a job!”, “My college professors gave me too much homework!”, or “I wanted to have a good social life!”  Audition committees only care about one thing; how well do you play?  If you want to have a solo or chamber music career, your audiences will also only care about that one thing.  Anyone who wants to have a career as a professional musician should keep this fact in mind everyday.