I've been reading, watching, and finding resources for what to do when in a rut, or when at the early stages of burnout. I recently published my birthday retrospective and I might have sounded a bit blasé or maybe a bit disengaged from my music. While I don't think I'm burning out, I do feel and am starting to understand what people mean when they say they feel their practice is "plateauing" or getting stuck.
I was thinking of what I feel when I am stuck, when the tunes sound all the same, and when I don't feel motivated to practice. My personal gut feeling is to try a challenge unrelated with my current playing.
Two tunes I mentioned in my birthday retrospective: Canon in D and the Pas de Deux are both classical pieces, from a world that I vowed never to re-enter. I burned out on classical training back when I was a kid, but looking back, I realized that I didn't actually get very far! I stopped before even getting to enjoy the good parts of the training!
When I was a kid, the farthest I got was 3rd position shifting, and I didn't start vibrato at all. Nowadays, with Ajineen, I am learning and practicing 3rd position with many tunes and scales, and it is starting to appear regularly in my mind as something I'm not scared of. I hope vibrato can be like that too for me.
My musical ideas to avoid burn out: try classical, try new techniques that I previously thought were scary or too technical. There are a few other ideas I am proposing to myself that I haven't done yet: be more precise, and go faster. Faster as in get to 8 -> 16 -> 24 -> 32 notes per bow with simple scales and arpeggios. Break things down to the very fundamental basics and get precise with note changes, string changes, bow direction changes. Get faster with all of my pieces.
Hopefully these ideas will help me avoid burnout.