What overplaying can do to you

[danny45635]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to share my experience with what overplaying has done to me. I just graduated high school, and will be attending Eastman in the fall. I've always been someone with the mentality of "I have to practice as much as possible" and if I don't do that, I feel like I'd be missing out or loosing whative worked for. After the chops issues I've had, how wrong I was with that mentality.
I started to have upper register issues, my sound wasn't near as resonant, it it felt awful to play the trumpet. I didn't have pain, but it just felt weird to play for a long time. I'd keep practicing long after I should have stopped, and started using pressure to compensate for being fatigued. Eventually I tore my lip, and at my trumpet lesson on turesday, I could barely play a high C and I kept splitting notes, and my tone was awful.
So after this I took one day off, then 3-4 days of quiet long tones and Clarke 1 and 2 leaving second line G as my limit. This allowed my lip to heal. I can play like normal again finally, but I really wanna stress what overplaying can do to you. Particularly to other kids my age who think they have to practice several hours a day to improve at all. It's all about how you practice and what you practice, not how much. I'm really starting to take that to heart now.
Getting into several of the best music schools in the world, and then struggling to sound good at all was really scary. I hope this post is an eye open for others who practice too much.
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1965 Bach 37, Bach 236 D, Bach Artisan C, Schilke P5-4

[derekthor]

Excellent post, and despite the scare you had, a good learning experience. It's very tempting for new music students to fall for the "quantity=quality" trap. If you've gotten into Eastman, then you were probably already doing a lot of things very well, and Prof. Thompson will be able to help focus your energy and talent even more.

[deanoaks]

It is a good thing that you came to the realization that more practice won't correct over-practicing.
I had help coming to a similar realization my junior year of high school into my senior year of high school. Fortunately, I had a good instructor at UNCSA to notice the fatigue in my sound before anything too dramatic happened.

Chris Martin came to give a masterclass at Eastman when I was there and he gave us a similar story about when he was an Eastman student back in the 90's. He mentioned that he was only practicing 2-3 hours a day but that he just always felt tired because he scheduled his practice sessions to be 45minutes-1hour long. He claims that he practices as much now but breaks his practicing into 25-30 minute blocks at the most dedicating each block of time to a specific aspect of his playing.

Professor Thompson talks a lot about Hakan Hardenburger and his practice sessions as they were good friends when JT was in Atlanta. Hakan will not practice for longer than 25 minutes and will not practice much louder than a soft mezzo-forte for most of his practice sessions. Soft practicing combined with methodical, shorter sessions will remedy most problems and minimize the chance of injury.

When I was younger I fell into the similar habit of being over anxious about every element of my playing and practicing for as long as I could keep my lips together. That is the one thing I wish I could go back in time and re-do if I were given the chance.

You're going to love Eastman. Best of luck!