Five Tips for More Effective Practice
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I think one of the most transformative times in my music education was the summer of my junior year… I was by most people’s definition a workaholic, practicing 4-6 hours a day. During that period, I came to feel like the input of my work was not equating to my desired output. I felt like I should have been better technically, playing my pieces better, and memorizing faster than I was. Not to mention feeling buried under the massive amount of work from being a music education major at the University of South Carolina. It was during this time that I sought to learn how to make my time in the practice room more efficient: Could I decrease the input of time while increasing the output of results? Luckily for me, that was exactly what happened.
First things first, I had to find resources about efficiency, practice, cognition, and skill acquisition. Out of the ones I found, these four were the most helpful!
Practising the Piano - Part 1: Vol. 1 by Graham Fitch
Practising the Piano - Part 1: Vol. 2 by Graham Fitch
The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skill by Daniel Coyle
Next, I crafted a battle plan and applied it to the goliath of a piece, Khan Variations, a standard marimba solo by Alejandro Viñao. After experimenting with a variety of practice strategies, I learned the entirety of Khan Variations in roughly 3 months... The previous piece I learned took me 6 months! I nearly halved the amount of practice time it took for me to learn a piece of equal difficulty. The following five strategies are a part of what I used to achieve my new practice goals, I hope that they prove as useful to you as they were for me.
Create a Practice Safe Haven
This varies from person to person, but generally, the space you practice in will affect your productivity tremendously. If you practice in a super cluttered area, it will clutter your mind. It’s kind of hard to focus on intonation when you keep on staring at that opened bag of raisins on the floor or smelling fast-food the previous person left in the practice room trash-can. Whether it is your personal space or a shared school-space try and keep it fairly clean and organized.
This tip also applies to distractions from electronic devices or from outside the practice room. I’ve had trouble with slipping out of a flow state due to notification alerts from my phone, so to combat this I often put it on silent or turn it off until I take a break. I’ve also had problems with people coming into my practice room at inopportune times. While I do love the people who do this and I would like to have a conversation with them, I let them know to wait until I am taking a break to come in, unless it is an emergency.
Utilize Time-Blocking
So, now that you have a sacred space to practice, what’s next? At this point, I suggest diving into what exactly you want to accomplish in this particular practice session. For example, your main goal could be to learn the first 16 bars of a piece. This main goal will take the entirety of your session, which in this case let’s say is 30 minutes. Your next step would be to break down this larger section of music into manageable chunks and giving them small periods of time to learn them.
This could look something along these lines:
5 minutes - Practice Measures 1-4
5 minutes - Practice Measures 5-8
5 minutes - Practice Measures 9-12
5 minutes - Practice Measures 13-16
5 minutes - Practice Measures 1-16
5 minutes - Break Time
This type of organized practice helped me in many ways. I was able to quantify how long to stay on a certain set of measures. I had a problem with practicing certain chunks too much or too little before timing my practice this way, which is now a non-existent issue. This system also helped me learn how long it would take to learn a piece, which can be really helpful when juggling a large list of repertoire, rehearsals, and deadlines.
Of course, this system is extremely flexible, the chunks can be bigger or smaller, the time frames can be altered, etc. The only thing that is unchangeable is that there is a specified amount of time for a specific task at hand.
Be Wary of Parkinson’s Law
This is an old adage stating that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". In musician’s terms, if you give yourself an hour to learn 16 measures of music, it is human nature to expand the work to fill the full hour. However, it is very likely you may have only needed 15 minutes!
One of the experiments I ran on myself when learning this law was to decrease the amount of time I gave myself to learn single measures in my marimba solo. For example, every other day I decreased my time by a single minute, going from 5 minutes to 4 minutes, 4 minutes to 3 minutes, and so on. Eventually, I found that if I tackled the measure with focused intensity and smart practice technique I was able to learn most measures in under 2 minutes. Of course, this is adjustable, as there will always be problem measures or chunks that require you to increase the time.
This law is applicable in a macro sense as well. You may give yourself a week’s worth of practice sessions to learn an etude when you may only need a day’s worth. Being aware of this has helped dramatically decrease the amount of time I spend on any given goal.
Don’t be afraid to Take Breaks during your Practice Session
Reflecting on my time at USC has always cracked me up because I used to never take breaks to a fault. I vividly remember a day during my freshman year of college. I had been in the practice room for two hours at this point and was mentally and physically spent, but I kept pushing myself to continue. However, I had hit the point of diminishing returns, missing notes, having memory slips, creating bad sounds, and generally having a bad time. Then enters one of my best friends who tells me that my practice session was sounding kind of rough and boy was he absolutely right. Don’t be me, take some breaks! The way I would tackle this is by using the Pomodoro technique. This is a 25-minute productivity session and a 5-minute break that can be repeated.
Pomodoro Practice Session Example
30 Minutes - Pomodoro Session 1
10 Minutes - Porgy and Bess Xylophone Excerpt
10 Minutes - Exotic Bird Xylophone Excerpt
5 Minutes - Record a Run-through of Xylophone Excerpts
5 Minutes - Break
30 Minutes - Pomodoro Session 2
10 Minutes - Pines of Rome Glockenspiel Excerpt
10 Minutes - Sorcerer’s Apprentice Glockenspiel Excerpt
5 Minutes - Record a Run-through of Glockenspiel Excerpts
5 Minutes - Break
This time split has increased my motivation to practice because I am generally more accurate in my playing, helped me enter and stay within a flow state, and gave me time to engage with distractions in a concentrated way (like watching tiktoks for five minutes). This time split is also ultimately adjustable, I’ve done smaller splits and larger splits. This is a personal decision, however, I recommend the Pomodoro technique as a starting point. It is also worth noting that your brain and body will continue to digest the knowledge from your practicing during your breaks and even after your practice session!
Practice Slowly
This is THE most important tip I can share with anyone who wants to acquire a new performance-based skill like music-making. One of the best ways I’ve heard someone describe the feeling of slow practice is like the scene from The Matrix Trilogy, where Neo is dodging a cascade of bullets in slow motion. When practicing slow enough like you are in slow motion, you are able to catch every single detail needed to perform a chunk as close to perfect as possible, like Neo is able to dodge every single bullet.
For example, when practicing this way on marimba, I was able to play every single note accurately on the exact part of the bar to get a good sound, with good touch, rhythmic integrity, and awareness of my own body. When at a slow enough tempo, I was able to be extremely surgical about the microscopic details of the playing of a particular passage.
For two weeks during that summer, I practiced a large chunk of Khan Variations at only 30% tempo. By the end of that time, without increasing the speed, I was able to play that movement at tempo accurately and with musical intention, which was a complete surprise to me and opened my eyes to how powerful slow practice could be.
Recommended Reading
Want to learn more about why slow practice is so powerful?
Take Action!
Looking over the new year and your practice goals, it may be a good time to try some new things out. You may find that some or all of these tips can greatly improve your performance, or at the very least make your time in the practice room more enjoyable. I hope you all get as much use from this information as I did and if you are looking to learn more, check out the books linked at the top of the post. Good luck!
If you are looking for more info on practicing check out this post on four techniques to tackle a difficult piece of music.
