A student sent me this excellent 5 minute video (thanks Anand!) and we can apply the principles to hep us practice our scratching effectively.
You can watch the video here and then scroll down to look at how we can apply this to scratching:
Overview
- Mastering any physical skill takes practice.
- Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement.
- Practice helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence.
- Mastery isn’t simply about the amount of hours of practice. It’s also the quality and effectiveness of that practice.
- Effective practice is consistent, intensely focused, and targets content or weaknesses that lie at the edge of one’s current abilities.
- Effective practice is the key.
How to practice scratching effectively and get the most out of our practice time
Top tips:
- Focus on what you want to learn or improve
- Minimize potential distractions by turning off your computer or TV.
- Put your cell phone on airplane mode – that will take care of instagram, Facebook and other social media distractions.
- Start out very slowly or in slow motion
- Master the mechanics of the scratch you are working on in slow motion first.
- This will build your coordination.
- Then you can gradually increasing gradually increase the speed of the quality repetitions.
- This will give you the very best chance of performing the individual techniques correctly and cleanly.
- Frequent repetition with a lot of breaks
- Play with dividing your time used for effective practice into multiple daily practice sessions of limited duration.
- e.g. when I am learning any new scratch, I only do 10-15 minutes of intense focused practice on the basic mechanics at a time, before resting or relaxing by freestyling. More than than and I find it fatiguing on the brain and muscles.
- Practice in your brain in vivid detail
- Once a physical motion has been established e.g. the baby scratch, it can be reinforced just by imagining it.
- A way you can do this is to use any downtime moments when you are not at your turntables to listen to music and imagine yourself scratching along using the scratches you know.
As this video says
Remember, effective practice is the best way we have of pushing our individual limits, achieving new heights, and maximizing our potential.
If you have any effective practice tips or suggestions, please leave them in the comments below.
If you would like to learn more about practicing effectively, check out my online School of Scratch and community. It will help you learn how to practice effectively and give you all the tools you need to do that.
Happy Scratching!
– Emma