The Practice of Practice

by Jonathan Harnum

Vygotsky believed peer interactions are especially powerful, natural ways of learning, especially when those peers are more capable than you are, as in my example with the big band.

Some of the scaffolds good teachers use are hints, prompts, and cues, as well as specially designed group activities. Good teachers can also introduce you to behaviors you can use to scaffold your own learning (coming up next). And a good teacher will also know when to gradually remove each of these tools as your practice results in growing independent ability.

Vygotsky believed that social interactions are rich, useful, and necessary learning environments. Sometimes musicians get so caught up in the practice room mentality, we overlook the massive practice we get when we play with others. Get yourself some of that sweet, sweet Zone of Proximal Development goodness by playing with other musicians who are better than you. Lots better. Those skills will rub off on you if you pay attention.

In his excellent book on classical music practice, The Perfect Wrong Note, pianist and teacher William Westney describes the need for privacy like this: The reason so many of us lose our bearings about practising early in life is that we practice in living rooms with other family members in earshot—and healthy practice would simply sound too obnoxious, intrusive, repetitious and unmusical for others to hear without annoyance.1

As you move through the section, remember the difference between a strategy and technique. Strategy is an approach that just about anybody of any level can use immediately. Technique is the skill you need to get the most out of the strategy.

Practicing creatively engages you with your material like nothing else can. Repetitively going over and over the same scale pattern on your instrument can certainly be helpful for basic technique and digital dexterity. However, engaging creatively with the material gives you ownership of what you’re doing.

In order to do that I have some really basic exercises I do that are all about getting my ear involved from the beginning. Not my brain or my thinking...but really using the imagination from the beginning.

Ingrid said she starts by aligning her body, ears, and feelings with the moment and then begins to play sounds around the chosen pitch center.

I’ve found the most important thing for me is to have fun.

Rothenberg found that composers used the technique to play with the construction of a composition. In your practice, if you’ve got a difficult passage, play it backwards (in music theory this is called retrograde). Playing something backwards is easiest if you can read music, but check out Erin McKeown’s interesting example of singing backwards in the link at the end of the chapter.

One study3 found that when participants thought their ideas would be used by others, they came up with more creative ideas.

Imagine yourself a year from now. How would that future self approach a problem in practice, or practice in general?

Your creativity is like a muscle: use it regularly to nurture and strengthen it. In addition to the simple strategies I’ve mentioned here, there are dozens of books that will help you understand and nurture your creativity.

but if you want to get a lot better a lot faster, think of every practice session as having a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Avoid distractions by turning off your phone and stepping away from the computer or other electronics.

When I get the most done and I have the best practice time it’s when I really isolate an area of the music I need to work on.

Before you start, take a moment to go over what you want to accomplish. Identify the most challenging parts of the music and focus only on those, not the whole song. This is a common mistake beginners make. Forget the easy stuff. You’re after efficiency, and this means tackling the tough stuff. Don’t waste your energy on what you already know how to play. Sure, it’s fun, but the clock’s ticking.

1) Warming up the brain/body (around 5%-10%) 2) Intense focus on reaching the goal you’ve set (around 60%-75%) 3) Music (around 20%-30%)

The section might not be perfect yet, but it will be better. It’s those incremental improvements that eventually add up to become talent.

Take a few minutes at the end of the practice session to assess how well you achieved what you set out to practice. This part will be difficult or impossible if you came into the practice session without a goal. Again, it doesn’t have to be some complicated process. Just think back and take stock of what you did, what worked, and what didn’t.

Hemingway used to stop writing in the middle of something, sometimes even in the middle of a sentence or paragraph, so that when he returned to the writing desk, he could just dive right back in and easily pick up where he left off. Reviewing the practice session and generating ideas for the next practice session are kind of like Hemingway’s approach.

As a musician, when you listen to music, it’s not a passive act; you’re fully engaged in the experience, almost swimming around in it, perceiving detail and depth that casual hearing just can’t pick up.

musicians are better able to hear the upper notes of chords, are better able to hear emotion in babies’ cries, and are better at overcoming the “cocktail hour” effect, able to isolate a speaker’s voice from the background noise of general conversation.

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

After you’ve used imitation to learn, when you get out there to show folks what you’ve got, show your own stuff. Do something with those sounds you can make. Don’t recite somebody else’s poetry; tell us your own story. Show us who you are.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Rupesh said he prefers to practice at night, but said that it can be difficult—especially after a long day—to come to a practice session without any preparation. Rupesh’s strategy is to write down the details of a raga he wants to practice on a small note card, keeping the card in his pocket so that throughout the day, he can pull out the card and study its details.

If a piece of music is a gem, facts about the music are its facets. If you don’t know the answer to the following questions about the music you’re working on, you’ve got a perfect opportunity for a bit of mental practice.

Mental practice is also more practical. All great musicians use some form of mental practice in their pursuit of excellence. Mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato calls it silent practice, because she’s not actually using her voice.

found that successful musicians used many of these mental practice strategies:4 ◊ Isolating problem sections to practice mentally ◊ self-talk (talking yourself through problems, issues, or approaches out loud, coaching yourself) ◊ chanting or clapping or tapping out rhythms ◊ singing parts ◊ counting ◊ fingering silently (while hearing the music in your mind) ◊ imagining someone you admire greatly is in the practice room listening to you closely ◊ visualizing a performance in great detail.

As you’ve already learned, your first order of business with a new piece is to go through it and identify the problem sections: those phrases or sections that are going to need the most work before they become familiar and easy. Once you pinpoint the challenges, you’re ready for chaining and back-chaining.

Rhythm is a fundamental music skill, and practicing your rhythmic skills on something other than your main axe is a good idea. It’s pretty easy to learn the basic playing techniques for a small percussion instrument. Lots of musicians I’ve talked to about practice play the drum set, too, people like Serge van der Voo, Erin McKeown, and others. The benefit of playing a rhythm instrument is that when you play, rhythm is your main focus:

However, in my experience, creating a groove, or a rhythmic chord progression, is much easier on guitar than it is on the piano.

Without rhythm, there is no groove, no beat; without rhythm, there is no pulse, and we all know what happens when you don’t have a pulse. Without rhythm there is no dancing. Rhythm is essential to making good music. Like matching pitch and playing in tune, rhythm is a musical skill you should give special attention to.

The way your brain learns is by building the connections necessary to do whatever it is you’re practicing. If you play something incorrectly during practice, that’s what your brain remembers. Take your time. Do it right.

Using this approach—gradually speeding up over time—is simplest if you use a metronome. Using a metronome not only allows you to keep track of your speed, it’ll point out where your rhythm isn’t as precise as you thought. The metronome also allows you to increase speed by very small, nearly imperceptible increments. Here’s how it works:

That improvised musical conversation with Behar utterly convinced me how crucial improvising is to music learning, and a musical life.

We have a combination of an area that’s thought to be involved in self-monitoring turning off, and this area that’s thought to be autobiographical, or self-expressive, turning on. A reasonable hypothesis is that to be creative, you have to have this weird disassociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on, and a big area shuts off so that you’re not inhibited; so that you’re willing to make mistakes; so that you’re not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses.

This leads me to encourage you to practice improvisation. And when you do, try not to judge what you hear, either from yourself or from another with whom you might be improvising. This is easier to say than to do, but it’s a great exercise. We are judged and tested and held accountable too much in this life. It’s refreshing to let go of that for a while.

Improvising with one or more people is like a spontaneous conversation, whereas playing using written music is like reading a book or a story out loud. Both are wonderful things to do, both serve a purpose, both can be fun and enlightening. And just like any conversation or book, they can also be boring or pedantic or simplistic; some conversations are doomed to be dominated by a loud-talker or a “topper.” With written music, the unfolding sound is scripted. Spontaneous conversations—whether verbal or musical—flows where it will. Anybody can do it.

Experiencing and producing improvised sound is a great and—I would argue—necessary addition to your daily practice routine, and your experience making music with other people. There are no “wrong” notes in this kind of music, and that’s another of its beauties. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

The point is that you’re actively engaged in making sound and you’re being highly critical of the sound you create.

Nobody is born as a composer or songwriter; it’s a skill to be learned like any other. The best time to start learning composition is right now, no matter what age you are or what level of skill you have. One of the great things about composing is how invigorating it can be.

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

Music is the most vanishing of arts, and yet it’s timeless and eternal. A parable. The impermanent, abstract nature of sound makes the task of assessing the qualities of that sound a challenge.

my own opinion is that music is not a competition, it’s a collaboration. The way you “win” at art is by doing it, not by relying on others to decide whether you’re worthy of the blue ribbon or the prize money. Art is subjective; there is no first place.

scientists are beginning to discover how essential sleep is both before and after learning new tasks. This chapter is all about how sleep enhances your music practice. How cool is it that something you have to do contributes to your music learning? A recent study suggest that you can even practice during sleep.

That’s probably a few years away, at least. The good news is that regular sleep is absolutely essential to learning.

Matthew Walker, research psychologist at UC Berkeley, likens the brain to an e-mail inbox. After you’ve been awake for a while, your inbox is full; until you empty it, incoming messages will bounce, unreceived. Sleep empties your mental inbox. The process of consolidation in sleep is like moving the important items from your email into a folder. For the brain, that folder is long-term memory.

the researchers found that most professional musicians they interviewed napped in the afternoon, after their main practice session, and before their later, less rigorous practice session.