Summer Practice Challenge 2026
The challenge
How many minutes of instrument practice can we collectively achieve over an 8 week period from Monday 6th July to Sunday 30th August? Can we beat last years total of 50,539 minutes?
We’ll leave it to you decide on the details of your own contribution – it might be that you decide to do four 15 minute practice sessions a week, or maybe 10 minutes every day. The aim is to reap the rewards of some consistent practice and finish the summer with some new or improved skills on your instrument, and maybe do a little good along the way too.
If you join after the start of the challenge, it’s not too late! We will send you any packs & zoom recordings that you have missed!
What counts as practice
We’re talking about scales, technical exercises, or focused practice on a particular issue, rather than just playing lots of tunes. You might like to do you own thing, but if you’d like some inspiration, you can sign up for our weekly resource packs to keep you going. Each resource pack will contain:
- exercise of the week
- tune of the week
- exercises based on a ‘tune on week’
If you would like the resources in mandolin tab, or transposed for your instrument, just let us know and we’ll sort it out!
Weekly Zooms
There will be optional online practice sessions on zoom each Sunday. People can choose to sign up for online practice when they enrol. Recordings will be made available afterwards for participants who have chosen this route and cannot attend live.
Keeping track of practice time
When you sign up, you’ll receive a practice log that you can fill in as you go. We’ll also give you a link to an online practice log, so that you can also let us know how many minutes you have done and we’ll keep the running total for the whole group.
Staying motivated
You are welcome to join our Facebook group, so that we can share progress, practice tips and encouragement. We’ll also run some optional zoom sessions where we can get together and practice (independently) at the same time. We’ll email details of these throughout the challenge.
Doing a little Good Along the Way
It’s entirely up to you, but we’d love it if participants also decided to use the challenge as an opportunity to raise money for their own chosen charity, perhaps through a Facebook Fundraiser or other online platform.
We like planting trees, so we’ll also plant a tree with Just One Tree for everyone who signs up to the challenge.
How to take part
There are three options to taking part:
- Sign up for £40 – weekly resources and weekly zooms
- Sign up for £20 – weekly resources only (no zooms)
- Sign up for £5 – no resources
Everyone who signs up will a voucher for one of our technical practice packs to get them started and a practice log for counting minutes. We’ll also plant a tree for you!