6 Simple Tips on How to Practice Effectively
What do your practice sessions look like? Mine often go like this:
A sheen of sweat forms on the side of your forehead. When did it get there? How much time has passed since you began to screech out your first notes of the day’s practice session? A copy of the Bach 6 Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin sits on your music stand, winking at you. It mocks you. You could have been grinding at a few lines of the Gavotte en Rondeau in E major for anywhere from five minutes to a few hours, but it just wasn’t getting any better. The formally bright and happy key of E major now sounds mocking and derisive.
In the midst of the furious heat, a mirage appears: the black and white picture of J.S. Bach, in all his stony eminence, looks back at you, raises his eyebrows, smiles, and whispers “It’s perfectly plausible. My piece wasn’t meant to be played by peasants.”
The sheen of sweat has now become a waterfall. The room feels suddenly, unbearably hot. You feel like an egg frying on summer-singed asphalt. How did you manage to practice in this heat?
You gingerly place your instrument back into its resting place, closing the latches on the worn leather case. You just spent hours practicing to little or no avail. Do you really want to continue like this forever?
Probably not. Lucky for us musicians, aspiring professionals or beginners, if we follow these tips, we can get more done in one concentrated, focused 30 minute session than we can in hours.
6 Simple Tips to Practice Effectively:
Practice Tip #1: Strive for perfection from the first note you play
Perfection may not be attainable, but your mission is to get as close as possible. This means that if you want to reach your finished, polished, performance in the least amount of practice time, you must strive for perfection even as you are learning a piece for the first time.
You must have the highest standards for yourself, no matter how much time you have had to work on the piece.
This is easier said than done, of course. In order to do this, you must have the utmost concentration and focus. Your ear must be highly sensitive to any deviation in the pitch (pianists, lucky devils, of course do not have to worry about this), producing a beautiful sound with depth and core, and, if you are a string player, purging your playing of any unwanted crunch or screech in the sound.
And not only are you striving to rid your playing of any errors, you are also striving for musical perfection. No note should be left behind, no phrase played without thought. Try to imagine different ways to phrase a certain passage, and pick your favorite one. The technique you are practicing is ideally informed and influenced by the phrasing you have in your mind.
Now that’s a lot of information to process all at once. Which brings us to our next practice tip…
Practice Tip #2: Practice Slowly
In order for our brains to process all this new information, we have to work
S L O W L Y.
Always slower than you think. I once played a presto passage for my teacher with very questionable intonation, and when he asked me to take it under tempo, my definition of “under tempo” was at least twice as fast as his definition of “under tempo”.
Practicing slowly is especially necessarily when you are working on intonation. Not only does practicing slowly enable you to play the notes perfectly at a slow tempo, it also helps your brain and fingers subconsciously solidify where your fingers should rightfully land. Even if you are able to play the passage up to tempo, it is always helpful to bring it back to a slow tempo to reinforce your technique and to help you feel more confident.
However, sometimes even when we are able to play a passage at a slow tempo perfectly, we find ourselves unable to bring it up to speed. Why is this?
This post goes into depth about practicing at different tempo → Slow Practice: The Fastest Way to Learn New Music
Practice Tip #3: Set specific goals.
Never, I repeat never, practice without a specific goal in mind.
If you do not have a goal in mind, you are effectively wasting your time.
Quantity over quality, the old saying goes. We can measure quantity easily, but how do we measure quality? One way to measure quality of a practice or study session is by the specific goals achieved in the session.
And how do you achieve a goal efficiently? By setting it in the first place. How do you get to Oz if you didn’t know you were trying to go there in the first place?
Let’s say your goal is to “win the audition”. How do you do that?
By “playing the audition music at the highest level”. What constitutes the highest-level performance?
“Perfect intonation and great rhythm; beautiful, flexible sound with depth; convincing character and expressiveness; and phrasing/musicality”.
Now we finally have potential working goals.
Now make these goals even more specific. Be sure to break them up into small, manageable chunks. Instead of telling yourself “I will now work on intonation in the Don Juan”, tell yourself “By the end of this session, I will be able to play mm. 1–8 at quarter note = 50 bpm with perfect intonation.” Or, “By the end of this session, I will be able to play mm. 150–157 of this Mozart piano sonata with convincing character and phrasing, exactly as how I imagine it in my head. Or even, “I will now memorize the first three lines of this piece!”
Keep a list of specific, manageable goals on hand, and check them off one by one. And as you finish checking off the whole list, end your practice session and add new ones for you to work on in the next session.
Practice Tip #4: Split up practice time
Let’s say you want to practice for an hour and a half today. Instead of tackling it all at once, it is more effective to split it up into two 45 minute chunks, or even three short 30 minute sessions. This is better for two reasons:
- Your mind can only concentrate for a certain amount of time, depending on each individual. After this time passes, you start to wonder about the food you ate last night, a weird conversation you had with a friend three days ago, quantum theory, the artistic potency of the season finale of the sci-fi tv show you watched yesterday… what were we talking about again?
- It forces you to be as productive and efficient as possible since the session is so short. What if you only had 10 minutes? Would you play the piece over and over and over, temporarily fixing miniscule problems and effectively wasting your 10 minutes, or would you tell yourself, “I have 10 minutes, I will memorize these ten bars and be able to play every note in tune at whatever tempo it takes”?
Practice Tip #5: Consistency is key
The legendary violinist Jascha Heifetz once said,
“If I don’t practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.”
Heifetz, well, he was a wise man, and it would do us good to follow his advice.
Let’s say you are busy and only have time to practice a total of 2 hours this week. Rather than picking a free day and cramming in the 2 hours all at once, it is much more effective to practice 15 minutes every day of the week.
That is how long term memory becomes ingrained, and how your muscles and fingers retain the information that you have just practiced.
It is similar to exercising. It is better to work out 5 days a week for 30 min than two days a week for a much longer time. Your body regresses if it senses you stopped working out.
Practice Tip #6: You do not need your instrument to practice
There are loads of activities you can do to benefit your playing without your actual instrument.
This helps if you are injured or just taking a break from playing, if you are in a public place, or in any other situation where you will not be able to play your instrument. You could…
- Memorize the music. Try to mentally visualize yourself going through the motions of playing a certain passage. This is often harder than playing the same passage with your instrument from memory, since muscle memory cannot help you when the instrument is no longer there. If you can do this without your instrument, you will find that you can much more confidently and easily play from memory with your instrument.
- Brainstorm and write down goals. You know how to do this now. See practice tip #2 for a refresher.
- Listen to recordings. Not only does this help you familiarize yourself with the music, but it can also inspire and motivate you to practice or to think in different ways about the music you are playing.
I hope you found these tips helpful! Feel free to comment if you have any thoughts or contributing ideas about how to practice effectively.
