How To Practice Part I
Good day to you, dear readers. This series of articles is about practice. Ill talk about what different types of practice there are and how it’s done in the most efficient way. Also, I’m going to try and debunk a few myths and misconceptions about practice and progress.
Practice can be a real bitch. In my teenage years, I often practiced for hours on end but it sometimes felt like I was doing something wrong – it seemed as if I was stuck at a certain point and couldn’t move forward. Of course I still learned a lot during that period, you know – passively, due to the sheer amount of hours I put into practice and the manic style of repetition every day, but these days I know I wasnt doing it very efficiently. Today I can probably reach similar results in a quarter of the time. The years have shown me a lot of my past mistakes and misconceptions about practice. I wish somebody had told me all this stuff back then, which is why I chose to write about it here. This piece will probably be one of the most useful things on here if you know how to apply the advice. Please, feel free to contact me if you need help to do that.
A few rather basic ideas
I’ll start with a few things most people will already have heared a hundred times, but they are of high importance, so it would seem foolish to skip them:
- Practice makes perfect.
Well, that’s a no-brainer, obviously, but let’s still take a deeper look at this. Whenever you sit down (or stand up), in a concentrated and receptive state of mind and perform a task you’ll probably tend to do it as precise and orderly as possible (in foresight to the desired outcome). Everytime you perform the task, there will be slight deviations from the perfect execution. In a truly concentrated state, your brain will fine tune your movements ever so slightly each time, until the set of movements seems perfect. The learning curve is very steep at the beginning. Any new coordination will feel awkward at first. But on the second try already, it will have massively improved. The improvements will proceed in smaller and smaller increments each time, which might be discouraging, but these increments separate the master from the amateur. On the uppermost sections of this curve you’ll find the musicians of a symphonic orchestra for instance.
A good way to decide if you are skilled anough for the given needs are statistics. If you can repeat a chunk of music that isnt too long 8 times without a mistake you should be good. (A good way to think of “not too long” is a passage of a song that is long enough to identify this song, for example one A-part of an AABA structure. ) It is important to keep going after you can play it mistake free, because only then a coordination can really be remembered in it’s final and true form. This has to do with myelin production in your brain. Myelin is what is also known as the grey matter and makes up most of the human brain. You can think of it as a fatty sheath around the neural connections, that is responsible for the transportation of electric impulses. Once you start repeating the final pattern, the myelin sheath can grow thicker at the right places so that the right nerve impulses can be sent more efficiently. Children need less repetition due to their higher neuroplasticity. This basically means they learn faster as they need less repetitions to build up myelin. There is a great quote I found:
The amateur practises until he gets it right. The professional practises until he cannot get it wrong. – Stephen Hillier
- It’s better to practice 1 hour every day of the week, then 7 hours on one day.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First and foremost: You can only concentrate for so long. Even if your practice session is designed masterfully – you know, in an immersive and entertaining way – after a couple of hours you’ll feel exhausted and you’ll be far less receptive. My guess is, that it also has to do with arousal response. Something new is only exciting for so long (at a time). Thats just how our brains are wired.
Also, if you give your brain the same input on several consecutive days, it will register that this is important information, that is needed long term, not just for the moment. For the same reason, you’ll see most results of the practice only on the next day or after a few consecutive days of repetition. Only after sleeping has the needed information really been processed and stored in the long term memory. Obviously I’m not a neurologist, but you can probably tell that from your own experience. Ever experienced that phenomenal sudden prowess in a specific task, a couple of days after the first practice? See? Told ya.
A meditation on speed
Speed is an always upcoming topic when dealing with music. There are a few important things to mention here.
- Speed for the sake of speed is horseshit
I’ve been taught this on many occasions by soloists, whom I’ve witnessed taking a solo at slow or medium speed that moved something inside of me. They didn’t necessarily play a lot of notes – they rather played the right notes at the right time and articulated them in a highly personal manner. These are the solos that stand out – I’m sure you have made similar experiences. I’ve been also taught this by musicians going very fast with sloppy technique. Sometimes you also see specimen with good technique, but they always play the same patterns, lacking expression and creativity in their playing, only excelling in speed. Please don’t be one of them.
- You can’t get the fastest fast
You can of course learn a piece and then play it again and again in a given tempo, until you get it right often enough to increase the tempo, starting the process from anew. You should in fact do this when you learn a piece that you can’t inherently play fast enough (Which is more often the case than not). You can go pretty fast this way, there really is no upper limit I would know of, but remember the first point? The ever smaller becoming increments of progress? These also apply to the speed increases. Another problem is, that you have to practice like this every single day, because this kind of speed gain isnt a long time improvement. Also, it works only for this particular set of coordinations. Any serious deviation will break the speed. This means if you learn a jazz solo at high speed with perfect technique, the technique will transfer to a certain extent into your improvisation but you still won’t be able to improvise meaningfully that fast.
The reason for this is, that playing something learned and improvising are two fundamentally different processes. When you are playing something learned you are not thinking creatively – you are for the most part executing, reciting. When you are improvising you are also reciting bits and pieces, however you’re also creatively putting them together at the same time. The true speed you can improvise in, is the speed in which you can hear music in your head (made up of chunks you know) and then translate it to your instrument. As far as I can tell, this type of speed increases with the years. For sure it is easier for some people than for others; I am also pretty certain that if you begin as a child you can develop this kind of speed much faster, due to the aforementioned increased neuroplasticity.
- Speed has it’s time and place
So now, that I have successfully shat on speed and then explained how it can be accomplished, I wan’t to briefly explain when speed has it’s merits. It is conceivably simple: Speed makes sense whenever it is needed to successfully convey a particular artistic expression or emotion. Speed can be used to express excitement, troubledness, euphoria, panic – a broad array of ideas. Sudden speed changes also get used with a lot of success in some styles of music. Many beatiful styles of music are tied together with dancing, which may dictate certain speeds. Here the musicians artistic decisions even influences the dancers performance. The bottom line being, use speed when the music demands it, don’t use it to show of.
I’ll end the article on this note – it became rather long. Sorry for the lack of pictures. Stay tuned for part two, when we’ll discuss a few more distinguished insights.