The Art of Practice

The Art of Practice 

Establishing a regular practice routine is of paramount importance when learning an instrument.  Frequent and regular repetition is the key to making steady progress - a small amount of practice every day will yield better results than practising for two hours immediately before the lesson!  Young children especially benefit from incorporating practice into their daily routine, and at the beginning it is only necessary to practice for 10 minutes at a time.  As musical ability increases, so does the time spent practising, but if practice feels like a chore, something is wrong somewhere!  Make sure that you take time to enjoy playing (parts of) the pieces you are learning as well as doing some focussed work on difficult sections, and incorporate breaks into longer periods of practice if your concentration span is giving out before you manage to cover everything that you need to.  Ideally, a portion of each day should be devoted to some form of practice.  It is better to practise for shorter periods and keep the frequency up however – it is less important to practise for long periods than to practise effectively. 

Effective Practice 

Yet what exactly is effective practice?  Actually this has less to do with training your fingers and more to do with your brain: whenever you learn a new movement (such as playing a new combination of notes and/or rhythms) you actually build a new ‘thought pathway’ in your brain.  When you repeat the action several times, this pathway gets bigger and bigger.  If you don’t ever use that pathway again, eventually it will waste away, but if you keep using it, it will keep growing.  The really amazing thing is that once you’ve set up a secure pathway by repeating an action several times, your brain carries on sending signals down that path for a while after you’ve finished practising, thus continuing to build your thought pathway: it is self-perpetuating!  However, this is also the reason why it is so much more difficult to ‘unlearn’ a mistake once you’ve made the same one a few times – you will be building a ‘by-pass’ in your brain which has to leave a pathway already forged in order to trample through the wilderness!  So that is why it is so important to read through a piece before you play it for the first time: firstly, you can concentrate on reading the music without the distraction of playing it, reducing the chances of misreading, and secondly, your brain will have already started building the thought pathway before you’ve even lifted a finger!

Targeted practice

Practice is most effective when you target specific problems rather than just playing through everything a few times.  If you find a particular spot difficult, stop and work out exactly where the problem is.  Very often it is simply getting from one note to another, and in that case only those two notes in question need to be selected for ‘special treatment’: repeat them several times, before gradually adding the notes before and after until you can play the whole phrase.  Sometimes it is a group of notes, in which case you need to play them slowly until you are confident, and gradually increase the speed until it is consistent with the rest of the phrase or piece. 

When starting to learn a piece, always make sure you know the fingering you should use, and practise it slowly until the fingering is secure.  Avoid trying to play a piece up to speed before you have learnt the notes or fingering properly, as you run the risk of building incorrect ‘thought pathways’; instead, break the piece into manageable chunks and tackle them one at a time before practising the ‘joins’.

Routine 

It is said that we humans thrive on routine, and it is certainly easier to build in practice time by making it a regular slot in the day – just after school, before dinner etc.  It is also important to structure the time you actually spend practising.  It is best to start by doing some warm-up exercises and scales.  This gets you in the right frame of mind before you tackle the main focus of the session – and gives you time to make sure that your fingers are behaving as they should do!  Once you are ready to begin working on pieces, organise the session so that you start with the trickiest work first, as this will require the most concentration, and is best done when you are still feeling fresh.  Then you can move on to less demanding work, such as looking at a piece that your fingers already know, and perfecting the detail – dynamics, phrasing, articulation, and so on.  Give yourself time to enjoy playing something through towards the end – perhaps the piece you worked on earlier, or a favourite piece you learnt a while ago, or even some improvisation; make time to enjoy the fruits of your efforts!