The Practice of Practice

by Jonathan Harnum

Nearly every musician I’ve spoken with about practice says they try to nap regularly, and some nap every day.

Veteran actors know that after an intense session of memorizing lines, it’s best to take a nap immediately. If you’re memorizing music, or anything else, the best thing you can do after a cram session is to go to sleep for at least 90 minutes before you do anything that interferes with the information you just stuffed into your noggin.

You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

Nicholas and every other musician I’ve spoken with about practice taught me that practice means more than just sitting in a room working on technique. What I should have asked Nicholas was not “how do you practice,” but “how do you get better?”

“My idea about practice is doing, and basically getting your ass kicked.” By “doing,” Nicholas meant performing, and playing with others. Nicholas auditioned in front of Pat Metheney, but he didn’t make it into the program.

Anybody would agree that three or four performances a year is a paltry amount. Nicholas Barron and most other professionals regularly do three to four performances in a weekend. Performance is practice, and a very special kind of practice.

A performance is like a test. The value of a test isn’t that it measures your ability; the value comes from retrieving information from memory. The process of retrieving those memories and actions solidifies learning better than anything else you can do. The more you retrieve skills from memory, and the more varied that retrieval is in both time and place, the better you learn it.

Embrace the nervousness you feel before a performance. It’s a good thing. The butterflies will probably never go away, and you don’t want them to. At 85 years old, with decades of performances to his credit, Tony Bennett said, “At this point I welcome the butterflies, because that means you care.”

Learning how to play music is an endless journey, and like any journey, the horizon recedes as you move forward; there is always something more in the distance.

I think one of the reasons so many top-notch music professionals I’ve spoken with about practice have said they’re still trying to figure out how to do it best is that there is always a further horizon. If you want to keep getting better, you have to reach beyond the horizon of what you know, beyond your current ability, whatever it is. But how can you know what you don’t know? Only through experimentation. That’s why a creative approach to practice is so crucial, because that creativity and willingness to change things up helps you figure out how to practice. Even veteran musicians bump up against their limitations and get stuck.

“Every single day.” Good practice is all about working on something you can’t do, so it’s natural to feel stuck. Embrace that struggle, because that’s what good practice is. Practice is often fun, but it’s not supposed to be easy. Don’t label something you can’t play as “difficult,” though. When you label something you can’t play as difficult, that label sticks, even after you’ve mastered it. Instead, think of challenging music not as difficult, but simply as unfamiliar. Good practice is all about embracing the challenge of making the unfamiliar, familiar.