about practicing and how much should you practice so now obviously if you're very

talented practicing is very very important but

when I was growing up I practiced basically three hours every day and a

lot of a lot of my students feel sometimes and wrongly so that if you

practice more it's gonna be better so if you practice five hours it's better if

you practice eight hours it's even better and the answer to this if it's

wrong don't practice more than four to five hours that's a tip I can give you

if you are very serious because after afterwards it's it's not useful anymore

the body doesn't absorb any more stuff as a matter of fact you can cut yourself

having little physical problems with your wrist and sort of suffer so I would

say four to five hours for ambitious fiddle players yes and as I said

personally three hours was fine number two when you practice it has to be slow

you cannot practice impatiently you know and putting in the time of practicing is

not enough I would rather practice with your head

for two hours and somebody else just mindlessly for 8 because that's that

doesn't work so I can tell you that if you want to practice really correctly

number one slowly number two have an agenda why do you

want to practice you know make sure that you practice in small sections you want

to make sure that you don't repeat anything without actually hearing what

you're doing because when you repeat certain things and for example let's say

that you practice something for the bow and you keep repeating it and then

you're playing it slightly out of tune then you're actually practicing the play

out of tune that's why you have to actually mean listen very carefully to

what you are doing and so on so I know that this is very

very general but at least the important thing is to do it very slowly and to do

it at small sections and to have patience if something sounds great

on Monday and it does not sound so good at Tuesday don't give up it means that

it's not yet there keep practicing slowly again and again and by Wednesday

it'll be slightly better and by Thursday it'll be even more better but patience

is very very important let's talk a little bit about nerves nerves you can't

get rid of nerves really the only thing that you can do about nerves is to be

familiar with nerves so that when you're nervous when you play then you know

actually what happens to you personally and sometimes you might think that

you're gonna get nervous and it might not happen and sometimes you say oh I'm

not I'm never gonna get nervous you know tonight's gonna I feel so good and all

of a sudden on stage you start to get the jitters don't be surprised just be

familiar with what happens to you everybody is individual you know some

people stop playing very outward outwardly you know they they play very

very inwardly and very privately but when they get nervous they're afraid to

express themselves that's one of the things that happens some people they're

bow shakes everybody has a different kind of thing but as long as you

actually remember what happens to you and just say oh I know that that's what

happens to me I'm gonna try and deal with it that's one way of getting of

dealing with nerves not so much getting rid of nerves but dealing with nerves