What Practice Makes…

I had a professor in college who fundamentally changed the way I think about practice.

“You’re an abomination, Sam.”

Yes, that seems pretty harsh but there is more context.

I came into college as a Music Education major with a focus on the French Horn. In the first year we were required to take a beginning piano class (another instrument I had been playing for close to 10 years at that point).

The classroom was full of electric pianos and we all had headphones. I sat in this room noodling around with some ragtime I’d been working on, totally unaware that the professor could hear what I was doing. Long story short, he told me not to come back to class, and that we would be moving forward with private lessons from here on out.

It was in our first lesson two weeks later that he shook his head and called me an abomination. It wasn’t in a Terrence Fletcher/Whiplash kind of way, more just astonishment. I’d worked with a piano teacher up until that point who’s goal was, looking back, to keep me interested enough to continue playing. What that mean is that I was able to build my own curriculum, picking pieces that I wanted to learn and bypassing many of the building blocks one typically learns when starting a new instrument.

In short, I was an abomination because I could play scales.

I could run through a number of pieces by memory, many of which were considered difficult, but if you asked me to sit down and play an A flat melodic minor scale, four octaves, it just wouldn’t happen. I’d never invested the time, mostly because I didn’t have to.

Over the coming weeks, my new professor systematically broke down every bad habit I’d picked up over the past 10 years. A list would take forever, but let’s just say I wasn’t nearly as good as I thought I was.

Sure, I could play a couple impressive pieces, but it would take me months to get anything new anywhere close to performance ready. So, I had to practice, and I tried, the same way as I had for the past 10 years.

And I failed.

The music my professor had assigned was kicking my ass, I’d hit a plateau and was getting discouraged. So, in probably the most important lesson I’ve ever had, he told me this.

“Practice makes permanent.”

Not perfect. Permanent.

Up until this point, I always though that the more I practiced, the better I would be. That day I learned that this was not the case. I was practicing wrong. And, the more I practiced, the more I would be wrong. Because I wasn’t practicing the correctly, I was just practiced. Banging out the same passages over and over and over and over in an effort to force myself do it right.

And I was wrong.

So, for 10 year, I was teaching myself the wrong way to play. Every piece I learned in that time had to be relearned and remastered.

It took months.

Our weekly lessons during that time were often more conversation than actual playing. He would ask questions: How does this part go? Why are you using that fingering when it’s easier to shift your entire hand up by a fifth? Why don’t you try it without the pedal? Why are you trying to go so fast? Etc.

What I learned in those six months changed my outlook on practice and how I approach new tasks to this day. Instead of hammering away at a problem with rote, repetitive stubbornness, I’ve learned to refine my attack. I start my my objective drill down from there.

When you’re able to recognize the core issue, and come at it intelligently, that plateau seems that much less insurmountable.

Think about how you practice your craft. What ways can you improve on the process? I’m sure there’s a way to stop banging your head against the wall.