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Due to many mundane, annoying, and uninteresting factors, I haven’t been able to practice nearly as much as I would have liked to over the last four days: Thursday I practiced, but only for an hour or so; Friday I was forced to take off; Saturday was just a bit of strength training and some quick fundamentals; and today… well, today was a disaster.
I finally had some time to practice this afternoon, but after playing so little over the last few days, I felt horrible. This is perhaps the worst thing about playing the trumpet: the utter disappearance of ability that comes as a result of a couple of days off, or even just kind of off. It is certainly hard to deal with so demanding and unrelenting a bedfellow. Anybody know what the terminal velocity of a trumpet is? I’m about to go find out.
I recently had an experience quite similar to this one but with a little bit different twist. I had been having really productive practice sessions for a solid chunk of time and I was really getting excited about I was sounding. Then one night after a pretty heavy day of classes an rehearsals I finally got over to the practice room at about 9:00 P.M. (well after I usually have my first session) and nothing was working. I couldn’t focus mentally and my fundamentals were a mess. It was by far the most frustrating day of practicing I’ve ever had. There is a lot of consolation in “tomorrow is another day”, but over a week later I still think about that night and try to analyze what went wrong.