Work Smarter or: How to Practice in 15 Minutes a Day
Of all the skills that students learn in lessons, practicing itself is the most important. Yet so often we forget that practicing is a skill that can be developed and strengthened. Lots of students get told to practice more, but not to practice better.
I think that most people (including me) start out with a very thin, stereotypical idea of practicing, which basically boils down to "play just what you played in the lesson, except over and over again for an hour". Aimless but obligated, you burn through an hour grinding a few measures, playing in a rush, mostly thinking about what's for dinner, until the sweet relief of the timer comes.
I've encountered a few students with great musical sense and talent to spare, who just can't get the sound or speed that they want so badly. It's not for lack of time or lack of playing skill, but because they don't practice skillfully.
In this series of blog posts, I'm going to cover a few simple strategies that form the core of good, productive, efficient, satisfying practice.
You Can Slow Down?
I practiced unskillfully for a long time, most of my teenage years really. I managed to learn some major pieces, but it was always "two steps forward, one step back" and the final results were pretty shaky. My practice strategy, if I had ever written it out, would've looked like this:
- Play a piece at tempo as soon as you get a rough idea of the notes
- Make the same mistakes 9 out of 10 times
- ???
- Total mastery!
Of course, I never made it to step 4.
I'll never forget the first time I got a clue about what practicing really was. I had dropped in on a classmate in a practice room to chat a little. We got to talking about her piece, and she said she was working through it with "slow practice".
I didn't get it. I said, You're not a beginner, what's the point of slowing down a little bit if you need to play it fast?
No, she said, she wasn't just slowing down just a little bit, she was playing the section as slowly as she possibly could and as loud as possible. Like her fingers were hard of hearing and a little slow to catch on. Slow enough, she said, that it was more difficult to play and you had to really think about it. She claimed that it was the foundation of her daily practice. Don't you practice that way?
I was dumbfounded. It had genuinely never occurred to me, at age 16, that practicing was anything other than playing as fast as you could all the time. I remember very clearly being a little mad that no one had ever told me about this! (They probably did, but I wasn't listening)
Practice Makes Permanent
So, what is slow practice and how does it work?
As Dr. Noa Kagayama so aptly puts in his excellent article on Bulletproof Musician, slow practice is really "slow-motion" practice. The motion of the fingers, hands and arms is slowed down to a point where all the sounds and movements are magnified, so the practicer is fully aware of everything that's happening in her hands, her ears and her mind. This magnification creates plenty of room to play with intention and perfect accuracy.
To figure out why this is important, we need to delve a little into how the brain actually controls complex movements. Think for a moment about what it's like to tie your shoes. When you were five years old, the first ten times you tied your shoes, you had to plan it out, visualize it, talk your way through it, and really concentrate. Then you figured out the steps, but it still took you a good minute to get them tied and they came undone a lot.
But now you do it in seconds, without thinking, maybe without even noticing you are doing it at all. Quick test: Can you explain in detail how to tie your shoes? I know I can't! So what happened? How come I can tie my shoes without "knowing" how to do it? Should I go buy some velcro sneakers?
Well, when you repeat a complex motion, it gets learned by a region of your brain called the cerebellum. The cerebellum is only about 10% of the volume of the brain, but it contains as many neurons as the rest of the brain put together. It controls the complex and precise movements we do every day, without thinking: climbing stairs, riding a bike, catching a ball, cutting up vegetables, writing a note, playing video games.
If you can think back, there was a time in your life that all of those things required a lot of conscious, sustained effort. Now you don't have to worry about them, because your cerebellum learned how to do it for you. And the cherry on top is that your cerebellum completely outdoes the "thinking, planning" parts of your brain when it comes pulling off smooth moves in style. It adds precision, speed and fluidity you can't get from conscious effort.
The password for the cerebellum is "repetition": anything you do more than once, the cerebellum says "Hey! I better get that down!" And I mean anything. The blessing and curse of the cerebellum is that it is completely non-judgmental. The judgmental parts of your brain are a mile away, and by the time they say "Wait a minute now, that was supposed to be a B-flat!" the cerebellum has taken E-flat to heart. It can't wait to impress you with how well it knows how to play the wrong note. So, we have to be very, very careful about what we repeat around the cerebellum.
And this shows us why slow practice works so well and mindless, sloppy repetition works so badly. Practice as we know it is the process of taking patterns of motion from the conscious mind and handing them over to the cerebellum. If you practice slowly, you can make sure that you are playing only the right notes, with the best fingering, and a stable, relaxed form. Everything that your cerebellum is overhearing is solid gold.
And the cerebellum is such a sponge, it actually takes many fewer repetitions than you would think to start to feel very comfortable. You'll notice a change when the music starts to "play itself". That's the cerebellum learning its new trick! And you'll find that there are a lot fewer stubborn mistakes to grind away if you never repeat those mistakes in the first place. And that means less repetition overall. Sure, mistakes will still pop up, but you only have to listen to what those mistakes are telling you: slow down here, and pay attention.
Slow, engaged, intentional playing from the very start is the bedrock of skillful practice. There's a reason it's a deep-running tradition in the world of professional musicians. It turns your practice into a well-tuned machine that cranks out sturdy and confident performances. It's something I wish I had known about a lot sooner: go slow to go fast!
Next week – Practicing Away from the Piano
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