Making practicing public, live, and personal

Here comes another crazy idea of mine and thankfully I don't have just myself to blame for this one.    It started a while ago after I had tweeted quite a bit during a practice session of mine.  One of my friends on twitter tweeted to me, "I wish I could hear you practicing over twitter."  

My initial reaction was, "Ewwwww...I don't think you really want to know what's going on when I'm practicing."  But especially since I've started my own practice coaching business, I have put some more thought into my friend's statement and began thinking that livestreaming my practice sessions just might be the thing to do.  It would be a great way to hold me accountable for practicing what I preach, would give me more motivation to set aside time to practice every day, and if people actually chose to watch it, it could give them some insight into how I work, think, and deal with life as a busy musician.  It would show that even professionals have problems, that we make mistakes, and have bad practice days - in other words, that we too are human.  If nothing else, on good days it could provide folks with some decent background music.  

So here we are.  Thanks to the joys of the internet and technology, I am now able to jump off the cliff and let you all into my little strange, obsessive little practice world.  Right now I happen to have a lot of time to practice so I'm practicing several hours a day.  In a few weeks, once school gets going and rehearsals start up I'm not sure how it's going to work.  My plan, however, is to post a schedule for the day each morning on my Beyond the Notes Facebook page.  You can also come here to my blog and look at the sidebar on the right-hand side of the screen.  I have my ustream channel embedded there and it should automatically show when I'm livestreaming.  

If you miss my practice sessions, which is very likely since everyone is so productive and busy, you can always watch the archived videos that are also stored on my channel.  I'll keep a week's worth there at any given time.  

This is all very new so I welcome feedback on how I can make this work better so that it will be more interesting and informative.  And if you have specific questions about what or how I'm practicing shoot me an e-mail at practicecoaching@yahoo.com. This is now my third day of streaming and I was encouraged yesterday when another friend on twitter, a pianist, responded to my livestreaming yesterday by saying, "Could only tune in for a few minutes.  Long enough to send me to the piano."

I'm not sure if she was already headed to the piano, but if it was watching me practice that drove her to practice, this crazy experiment is well worth it!

So go pop some popcorn, pull up a seat, and join me...Beyond the Notes...live!

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