It is unreasonable to think someone could make a ball gown their first week owing a sewing machine, or create a realistic landscape art when they have no experience using the tools. An approach that lacks the fundamentals of building skills is a sure way to create frustration and reduce motivation. There is something that artists and athletes alike get to hide behind like a veil, something that the audience and viewers don’t get to see and that’s the practice and efforts they put into their skills to get to where they are.
Learning how to practice is a challenge within itself. My approach to learning a new piece is very different now than when I was a newer student. My friends and colleagues also have their own approaches. There are technique and skill exercises that should be included along with the piece a student is learning.
How to practice is a topic I go over in my lessons frequently. It seems straight forward, but experience has shown me that it is not. In the beginning teaching students how to practice is mostly me begging them to at least look at their instrument once outside of their scheduled lesson. A student that plays anything at all even if it’s not the piece we were working on is often a win in my book and that phase can last a long time. Then comes the dreaded run through phase that is how the bulk of beginner and even up to intermediate students practice. When I help a student polish up a piece, work on a particularly difficult part, or for no particular reason I go over practice strategies. However, what happens during a lesson doesn’t necessarily translate to a students practice time. It could be that without direction it is difficulty to know or have the confidence to work on something. Also it’s easier to start at the beginning and finish at the end, do that a couple of times and BAM practice.
As a teacher I’ll take that. Again if a student plays an instrument at all between lessons is a good practice week to me. With the run-through method there are two major issues: students work mistakes into the piece, the ending of the piece is under practiced, and more often than not both at the same time. If a student has a rhythmic mistake in a piece while practicing it becomes very difficult to correct. The problem here is that the mistake is learned in both muscle memory and in the students ear. We learn how a piece sounds and that is very important to practicing. Let’s say someone is singing a familiar tune. When they sing the wrong note or hold a word for too long it turns heads, not to the point of it being jarring, but enough to notice. Now if the tune is new to the listener then mistakes aren’t noticed and the same goes for learning a new piece. The other side of this coin is that if a student does know they are making a mistake they often stop dead in their tracks and restart from the beginning. Now is makes it so that the beginning of a piece is played often. Simply by the number of plays the beginning will sound stronger and more confident. Stopping in the same or similar place will cause muscles to memorize this action. If the student is stopping at the same spot and restarting the end of the piece never gets practiced. Even if a student plays through to the end of the piece there is generally a noticeable stop, pause, and start again in the music and that is very difficult to correct. This are very common difficulties with practicing.
This resonates with students that are ready to begin new and more effective practice methods. I’ll be honest, this is where the unglamorous part of music really is. When a student is ready I introduce warm-ups first, usually something that is scale based. Then targeted practice, just a couple measures at a time, to work on anything from expressive marks to technical passages. This part of practicing can be tedious and the most time consuming. There are many approaches when working with targeted practicing. I’ll admit it, it’s not the most fun. Targeted practicing then moves into bigger sections. Then I’ll move into how to approach a piece as a whole to learn it in a quick way. The sheer amount of ways to practice is what makes learning how to practice difficult.
The final part of learning how practicing in my opinion is learning how to polish a piece and make it performance ready. Most are surprised that practicing a piece and practicing to perform is different. Here’s a way to break it down: practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes performance. So, practicing the piece, start to finish, how the student wants to perform it is part of the practice plan. There is an interesting reaction to playing in front of another person. Even playing for a teacher in a lesson can make a student nervous and practice strategies can be used to make that less impactful during a performance.
To explore different ways of practicing I plan on starting a mini-series called “Learn a piece with me: Song for [Instrument]” I’m considering doing a YouTube learn-along as well, but we shall see.
Ludwig van Beethoven believed it was his literal God-given purpose to play and write music. So I know that he not only meant it, but lived it when he said “Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise [one] to the Divine.”
Happy practicing and I’ll see you next time.