How to use the online timer
Half an hour at an instrument can be thirty minutes of progress or thirty minutes of pleasant noise, and the difference is entirely in how the time is divided. Playing through a piece from beginning to end feels like practice and mostly rehearses what already works, including the mistakes. Splitting the session into warm-up, technical work and repertoire tackled in sections is duller and is where improvement actually comes from.
These pages cover practice for piano, guitar, violin and drums, along with singing and a general session for any instrument not listed separately. Each has its own limiting factor: fingertips on a guitar in the first few weeks, intonation on the violin, timing and the neighbours on drums, and the voice itself for singers, which is why that session runs to twenty minutes rather than thirty. Grade exams give the time a ready-made shape, since scales, sight-reading and aural all carry marks and the neglected parts show up in the results.
Slow practice is the recurring answer. A passage taken slowly enough to play correctly, five times over, does more than the whole piece at full speed, and a phone recording is an uncomfortably honest second opinion.
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