As musicians, we spend literally thousands of hours practising. We often measure our practice in quantity (e.g. “I practised for 2 hours today…”) but it is important that we practise effectively.
Apart from being a waste of time, ineffective practice can actually hinder your performance. You are also likely to practise more to compensate for your inefficient use of time, and over-practising can lead to injuries.
So how can you practise effectively? Here are 5 things you can do to try and improve your practice sessions.
1. Have a practice plan – don’t just play and see how it goes
When you practise by just playing through and working on bits which don’t sound good, you are practising reactively. Practising reactively is not an effective approach – instead, it is better to think about what you need to work on and plan your practice session.1,2
It is very easy and tempting to practise in a reactive manner. This is because paradoxically, enthusiasm and the desire to improve quickly can make you practise in this intuitive way.3 However, unplanned and reactive practice can have negative effects on concentration and motivation, resulting in frustration and procrastination.3
So how can you avoid the temptation of practising reactively? One way to engage in strategic, planned practice is to set goals (see next point).
2. Set specific goals
Goal setting is an important skill for any kind of learning. Those who excel set specific goals, whether it be in sports4, academic learning5, or music.6,7
When music students are taught how to set specific goals for their practice sessions, they often report improved focus, higher self-efficacy (self-belief of own abilities), and enhanced motivation.3,8,9 This is because specific goals allow you to choose specific strategies and easily monitor your progress. This gives your practice session a sense of direction, making you less likely to engage in unplanned and reactive practice (see above).
It is important that your goals are as specific as possible. For example, the following are NOT specific goals:
- “Work on Piece X and Y”
- “Work on the hard bits”
- “Make it sound better”
Instead try thinking about:
- What aspect of Piece X am I going to work on today? Which sections need the most work?
- Where are the ‘hard bits’? What makes it hard? How am I going to tackle it?
- What can I do to ‘make it sound better’? Maybe I can work on bringing out more of the dynamic contrast in this section…Or can I try to phrase this melody better?
A few minutes of goal setting at the start of practice sessions can take you a long way!!
3. Record yourself and listen to it
Evaluating your own playing is a crucial part of effective practice. If you can’t self-evaluate, how you can you know what you need to work on? Or whether you have mastered a passage?
But self-evaluating while playing can be difficult – in fact, if you focus too much on evaluating yourself, it can actually hinder your playing.10 That’s where a recording device comes in handy.
Self-recording is an excellent way to evaluate your own playing. Students who listen to recordings of their own playing often find that they hear things which they had never noticed before.1,11,12 It allows you to identify problem areas effectively, which helps you to set clearer goals.13 The majority of students who participate in studies which involve self-recording find it a very valuable process.12
4. Aim to deliberately work on musical + interpretative elements
Chaffin and his colleagues14–16, who have extensively studied expert practice, differentiate between two types of ‘dimensions’ which musicians must attend to during practice: basic and interpretative.
The basic dimensions refer to the things we need to deal with in order to “simply play the notes”. They include things like:
- Recognising familiar patterns
- Dealing with technical difficulties
- Instrumental-specific elements like fingerings, bowing, position shifts, breathing, etc.
The interpretative dimensions refer to the musical, expressive aspects of the piece. They include things like:
- Phrasing
- Dynamics
- Tone colour
- Tempo
- Instrument-specific elements like use of pedal and intonation
You can differentiate expertise levels by looking at the types of dimensions that musicians focus on. For example, beginners tend to focus solely on playing the right notes (basic dimension), while experts constantly think about interpretative elements as they work through a piece. In fact, in professional musicians’ practice, the basic and interpretative dimensions are closely intertwined because their decisions about technical things (e.g. fingering, bowing, etc.) are often driven by their interpretation and musical intent.17
We can often get caught up in the basic elements: trying to learn the notes, overcoming technical difficulties, making sure that we have memorised the music well, and so on. But the amount of thought and attention you give to musical aspects of a piece during practice makes a huge difference to the resulting performance quality. Studies have found that deliberate focus on musical and interpretative aspects during practice is one of the characteristics which differentiates students who outperform their peers.2,18,19
5. Value and manage your time – don’t always start from the top and play through
Effective time management is a hallmark of expert practice. Professional musicians use and manage their time effectively by allocating more time to difficult pieces or more problematic sections within a piece.14,20,21 On the other hand, students who do not know how to practise effectively often just play through pieces. Their practice always begins at the start of the piece, with no prioritisation.22–24
Again, it comes back to planning and goal setting: you need to think about exactly what you are trying to achieve. Don’t go into autopilot and always start from the beginning of a piece – take a moment to plan.
For example…
- Perhaps you need to dedicate the practice session to a specific section you have been struggling with;
- Or maybe you started from the top last time and only got through the first section, so you need to pick up from there rather than practising from the start again.
Time management is important because if you are working on a sizeable amount of repertoire, chances are, you simply will not have the time to work on everything in one practice session. And as a professional musician, you will have even less time as you squeeze practice in between teaching, performing, and other roles.
References