Introducing PracticeMind for Everyone
We are happy to announce the release of PracticeMind for Everyone, the new book for all instrumentalists from Ovation Press Books. This new version of PracticeMind is the much requested adaptation of the string instrument focused book PracticeMind: The Complete Practice Model.
Authors Hans Jensen and Oleksander Mycyk have written PracticeMind for Everyone with ALL instruments in mind. The book focuses on the mental aspects of effective practice and lays the groundwork for greater inspiration and excitement throughout the practice process. Taking full advantage of the Complete Practice Model introduced in the original PracticeMind book, you will find unique ways to improve your motivation, goal setting, feedback and much, much more!
It is our hope that PracticeMind will help anyone interested in improving the quality of their practice and performance. This comprehensive guide will help you in your daily practice sessions, competition preparation, audition planning and more. Click here to learn more and to order your copy!
Alex Klein, Principal Oboe Emeritus of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has reviewed PracticeMind for Everyone and offers his detailed assessment:
"Long time experience is a key element in a how-to book. Hans Jensen has been a leading voice for cello and music education for decades, and this experience is finally shared to everyone, and to everyone’s great benefit.
Practicing tends to get a bad rapport with young musicians. It can be tedious, repetitive and frustrating, particularly nowadays when our fast world of social media and diverse interests call our attention ever more intensely. This is precisely where PracticeMind comes in with brilliant solutions, raising our interest and curiosity about what we do and how to reach our goals. This marvelous book teaches us to replace tediousness with discovery, to change our habits from mere repetitiveness to organization and purpose so we always have a goal in mind and never just practice for the sake of practicing.
"PracticeMind comes in with brilliant solutions, raising our interest and curiosity about what we do and how to reach our goals."
And it then evolves the curiosity forward into new or underdeveloped fields of study, like mental practice, visualization, bringing in science, but above all PracticeMind for Everyone reveals how practicing can be fun. Our internal chemical structure is sufficiently well known by science, but little understood at the level of music studies. The concept of doing something for pleasure involves a significantly different chemical realm than doing something because we have to. In turn, the brain retains not only where our fingers go and how long they stay there, but also our mood, our distractions (if any), our inner chemical status and a host of details we may not even be fully aware of, but which affect our music performances. That information will all be brought back from our memory when we are on stage, giving us the same sense of pleasure, discovery and accomplishment we felt when we practiced.
"PracticeMind for Everyone reveals how practicing can be fun."
In PracticeMind we see how all of this works in the practical sense, without the need to dive into neurology or chemistry themselves but accessing the beauty of scientific thought into what used to be considered mere emotional work. Music and science do indeed meet when we organize our practicing and explore how it all works. The answers are there, clear, and disposed in an attractive way as much as practicing itself should be attractive.
I congratulate authors Hans Jensen and Oleksander Mycyk for their splendid work, and thank them for this gift to all of us who strive for excellence in music."
Alex Klein
Principal Oboe Emeritus, Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Artistic Director, FEMUSC - Santa Catarina Music Festival
Grammy Award, 2001, “Best Instrumental Soloist with Orchestra”