How to Practice Music (without an Instrument)

Using Mental practice to achieve your musical dreams

7 min readDec 21, 2019

I ran into a little problem recently: I arrived at a gig only to realise I’d forgotten to learn one of the songs; The Knack’s 1979 classic, ‘My Sharona’. Whoops. What could I do? I couldn’t set my drums up and start practising in a crowded room. How was I going to learn a song without actually practising on an instrument?

Easy. Mental practice.

Mental practice is:

“the cognitive (thinking) rehearsal of a physical skill without movement.”

Basically, thinking about doing something without actually doing it. Sounds simple, but it can be incredibly useful for anything performance-based, such as sports, music or even surgery.

Mental practice techniques like audiation are commonly used by musicians, similar to how visualisation is frequently used by athletes. Although, sometimes this gets lost in translation

I, too, sweat like a gypsy with a mortgage.

But. In the realm of music, how effective actually is mental practice? Could it be as good as physical practice? Could thinking about practising be as good as actually practising? Hopefully, this could be a godsend for musicians who are too hungover to practice. Luckily, researchers from the University of Music & Drama in Germany have tested this.

The Study

Researchers recruited 16 right-handed pianists (sorry, lefties) for a study to compare the effects of mental practice against physical practice. Participants played excerpts from 2 classical pieces: Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata 72 & Sonata 113. To keep things scientifically ‘fair’ both pieces were similar in terms of:

Amount of notes
Amount of bars
Difficulty

Participants practised each piece for 30 minutes and then performed it twice. Afterwards, they practised the piece again for 10 minutes and performed twice again. The difference is though, participants were in one of two conditions:

Mental practice first, then physical practice the second time
Physical practice first, then physical practice again

Then they came back on a different day and did it all again for the second piece. Hats off to the researchers, getting musicians into a room once is hard enough.

Mental practice vs. Physical practice

If participants used mental practice, they were given free rein to practice how they wanted to, except for actually playing the piano.

Not a suggested practice method, but technically allowed.

Researchers found that participants used mental practice in two overarching ways:

‘Mostly Mental’ — Participants focused on the music, internalising its sound and formally analysing it while showing no overt movement
‘More Physical’ — Participants showed overt movement; singing, tapping fingers, etc.

If participants used physical practice, they were asked to:

“Focus on physically practising the piece, ignoring any mental images you have as you practice.”

Results

The researchers found three interesting things:

Mental practice was beneficial for learning, but not for performance
Physical practice implies mental practice
There is no one perfect strategy

Overall how did mental practice compare to physical practice? Researchers found:

“Mental practice alone allowed a level of proficiency between 40% and 60% of that achieved by physical practice.”

So, even though participants weren’t actually playing an instrument, they still got better.

What gives?

Incubation

Let’s examine the first result:

Mental practice was beneficial for learning, but not for performance.

What exactly does this mean? In terms of performance, five days of mental practice yielded similar results to three days of physical practice. Participants performed equally, but those doing mental practice took longer to get to that level. So, mental practice clearly wasn’t as efficient as physical practice when it came time to perform. Why? Well, the researchers think that:

“…mental practice may be latent, and would this become evident after the musician engaged in minimal physical practice.”

The effects of mental practice take longer to occur than do the effects of physical practice. This is known as incubation: after we learn new information, it takes a while for it to actually ‘sink in’. Graham Wallas, Psychologist and Educationalist, divides this process into four stages:

Preparation: Inputting new information into the brain
Incubation: After getting ‘stuck’ on a problem, you just leave it for a while
Illumination: The ‘a-ha!’ moment when everything you’ve learned clicks into place
Verification: Checking you’ve learned it properly

Participants using mental practice engaged in the ‘preparation’ stage — they had input all the information they needed to. However, perhaps there wasn’t enough time to ‘incubate’ this new information, and so their brains simply weren’t ‘ready’ to perform.

Combining Mental & Physical practice

However, even though mental practice alone takes longer to have an effect compared to physical practice, what would happen if they were combined? According to the researchers:

“Mental practice could thus have a preparatory effect on the task, which increases the efficiency of subsequent physical training.”

The researchers believe that while mental practice alone isn’t great for performance, it seems to ‘prepare’ the brain for performance. The brain loads up on all the new information it’s learned and gets ready to physically practice. Sounds plausible, but if this is true, then participants who used mental practice and then physical practice should have improved quicker…

…Which is precisely what they found.

Participants who used a 30-minute session of mental practice and then one 10-minute session of physical practice performed as well as those using physical practice for five days.

That’s a huge difference. Why? The researchers think it’s to do with how the brain physically changes over time:

“The plastic changes in the motor system following the use of mental practice alone were the same as those occurring by repeated physical practice.”

When we learn, our brain physically changes. Cells called ‘neurons’ form new connections with each other, which enables our brain to learn new information, such as riding a bike, solving math problems or trying to understand season 2 of Westworld. Here, the physical brain changes that occurred after five days of physical practice also occurred after one session of mental and one session of physical practice.

By combining mental and physical practice, participants learned new information much quicker compared to just physical practice. Basically, they’re superhuman.

Are physical practice and mental practice separate?

Well, sort of. There’s a clearly a difference between thinking about something and actually doing it. But, they’re not entirely separate. The researchers claim:

“physical practice intrinsically implies mental practice Processes, despite [participants’] honest attempt to avoid them…mental practice appears to be an automatic, rather than voluntary strategy used when facing a musical task.”

Physical practice without using at least a bit of mental practice just isn’t possible. Try it yourself: Tap the rhythm to ‘Happy Birthday’ without hearing the song in your head.

Do it. Do it now.

Could you do it? The researchers sum this problem up succinctly:

“It seems impossible to turn it off completely.”

The best kind of Mental practice

Everyone seemed to try different types of mental practice; some tapped their fingers, some sang, some focused on musical aspects, and some analysed the piece. So, which of these is the best kind of mental practice? Unfortunately, this can’t be answered cleanly:

“Our data do not show an advantage of one category over the other, as the main discriminating factor between these groups — finger movements — was not associated with practice outcomes.”

In short: we don’t know. Different kinds of mental practice seemed to have different effects for everyone, seemingly without reason. Finger-tapping seemed to be one of the more common ways of utilising mental practice, which would suggest it may be the ‘best’. But the researchers beg to differ:

“For some, moving fingers seemed to lead to stable and reliable traces that physically shaped a robust structural comprehension of the piece; for other subjects, it seemed a blind, mechanical shortcut that produced a blurred and weak performance.”

For some, it helped. For others, it did not. Researchers simply leave it at this:

“Each musician should find a personal, optimal balance between the two.”

Translation: do whatever works best for you.

Well there you have it: if you want to practice, but you left your instrument at a gig, or there’s a spider in your case, and you’re too scared to open it, then do some mental practice. What kind of mental practice? Whatever you like best, it doesn’t matter. Will it be as good as physical practice?: