Last summer, me and my wife welcomed our first child, Jude. It has been the most wonderful whirlwind. Of course, with that whirlwind comes some adjustments. One adjustment was my time spent practicing. Having a kid is a huge time and energy investment. One that is entirely worthwhile and fulfilling, but that means less time for things like practicing.

One thing that I am really glad I learned as a young musician was the value of efficient, deliberate practice. The benefits of this kind of practice have reared its head time and time again in my life and it has especially done that now that I am focusing on spending as much time with my family as possible.

Prepping for Recording Azure’s Remoulade

To illustrate this I want to talk about my preparation for a summer recording session with Wildlight. The session was for a piece called Azure’s Remoulade by my good friend JaRon Brown. It’s a terrific piece of music with no shortage of challenges to overcome. I only had roughly 2 weeks to relearn the piece and prep myself for our session.

Now here is the catch: I had to do this prep during my son’s naps!

No longer are the days where I could practice for four hours a day without worry. I had an average 1-2 hours to practice each day, so efficiency was the name of the game. Here are some things that I noticed about my practice sessions.

Mindset

The first thing, that I noticed in this was I had a sense of urgency in each of these sessions. This really sharpened my focus in that moment and I felt myself getting into a flow state much quicker than in other practice sessions. Only two weeks of practice time will do that to you!

This can be a double-edged sword, but if you can find a sweet spot to the amount of large-scale time you give yourself it can be a boost! Give yourself too much time you might run the risk of invoking Parkinson’s Law. Not enough time and your stress levels might skyrocket!

Reflecting on this period, I wish I had gotten maybe an extra week or two, but I made it work!

Smart Chunking

Another skill that was really helpful was the ability to triage the sections in a logical order. Since this was a relearn, I knew the troubling spots and licks that needed lots of TLC. I would start my practice sessions with these spots and fine tune them with smalls chunks and very slow tempos. Then I would move on to other easier spots.

These easier spots I would often run large chunks with the electronic track and move on.

I also would often use interleaving practice to continue to get reps on the hard lick. For example lets say I have three easy chunks and 1 hard chunk. We will call them E1, E2, E3, and H1. I would rep them like this

E1 → H1 → E2 → H1 → E3 → H1 → repeat

I find this method to be very effective for retention and as a cherry on top, is very fun to do relative to blocked practice.

Pattern Recognition and Internal Cues

I made it my mission during these sessions to translate this piece into internal cues that were easy to memorize. For example, there are numerous block chord sections in the piece where I move to a new chord every bar.

The first time I learned these sections I learned the notes, but this time around I figured out the chords (or at least as close as I could get) and would say the chords out loud while playing these sections. This helped give me an audible cue in my head.

Another example of this is breaking up licks into parts and naming each part. For example there are a series of runs that run up and down the keyboard in the middle of the piece.

The last two runs were comprised of thirds, fourths, and fifths. To break down the lick I would play the chunk with the thirds saying “thirds” out loud, then repeat with the fourths chunk, and the fifths chunk. Lastly I would play the full lick and say the cue out loud when I played it (”thirds”, “fourths”, “fifths”).

Consolidation and Rest

After reading a wonderful book on the science of sleep (Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker), I came to the realization that I was possibly leaving a large amount of gains from my hard work in the practice room on the table due to my sleeping habits. So I tried hard to get a good nights rest, or at least as much as I could with a baby!

I also experimented with taking more breaks during my practice session. I would have really intensive bouts of practice for 5-10 minutes and then take a short 2-5 minute break. During these breaks I would drink coffee and look out my window or do small chores.

Both of these strategies (especially sleep), allows your brain to consolidate all of that practice and information you worked on. This is one of the biggest changes I have started to personally work on in the last year or so.

Reflection and a Challenge

Looking back on those practice sessions, I realized that they felt supercharged! I think the constraint of time, pushed me to use all of the tools I have (and sometimes forget about). Ultimately, the recording session went really well and I am happy with the product!

So here is a challenge for you. Give yourself a time restraint this week on your practice. If you are working on a marimba piece for your lesson, only give yourself 30 minutes a day on the piece. I think you will be surprised with the results!

All the best,

WCN

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