Hey musicians: are you wasting your practice time?
We’re all busy people, and we’ve all got limited time for our art. We’ve got to make the most of what little time we do have for music and songwriting, and practice wisely.
Here are ten common mistakes that I’ve noticed over the past decade as a guitar teacher, a bandmate, and as a student myself. I hope these friendly warnings help you steer clear of some of the traps I’ve stumbled into over the years.
1. Noodling
“Noodling” is playing aimlessly, either with yourself or others. When noodling, you simply pick up your instrument and play whatever you feel like playing, improvising little ideas at whim.
Everyone should do at least a little noodling – it’s fun, relaxing, and rewarding. Your hands can easily do it while the rest of you watches television. But noodling doesn’t challenge you; it doesn’t stretch your abilities – so while it’s fun, it’s not a substitute for structured study and practice.
2. Playing things you already know
The goal of practice is to improve your performance. Playing things you’ve already perfected feels good; it’s a confidence boost – but you won’t learn much.
Practicing specific skills to maintain them is fine – but if you find yourself picking up your instrument day after day and just going through the motions of chords, scales, and songs you already know… it’s going to hurt your long-term growth.
Practice is the process of choosing something just beyond your abilities and struggling repeatedly to achieve it. It involves a lot of trying, failing, and trying again – sometimes dozens or hundreds of times. It’s less fun than playing things you already know, but it’s also more rewarding.
3. Lacking a structured program
Lack of structure is an especially dangerous trap for self-taught musicians and writers.
That category includes me – for years I had no planned approach to studying music theory, poetic techniques, or guitar techniques.
An expertly structured practice program is crucial. Those of us lucky enough to have dedicated tutors can rely on that teacher’s expert guidance; musicians that think of themselves as “self-taught” can turn to books, apps, and instructional videos to get their program of practice.
Creative writing skills are every bit as technical as learning to play an instrument, too; the main source of structured practice in writing comes from well-written books like Pat Pattison’s Writing Better Lyrics or Songwriting Without Boundaries.
4. Lacking goals
If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you get there? It’s best to have some short-, medium-, and long-term songwriting goals to pursue at any given time.
- Short-term goals happen on a timeframe of a single practice session or a few days.
- Medium-term goals happen roughly on a timeframe of a few weeks or months.
- Long-term goals happen on any timeframe longer than two months.
Highly specific goals are much easier to act on than wishy-washy ones. The goal “Write more songs”, for example, is a little too vague. How many more songs counts as “more”? Exactly how many songs do you want to write? By what date do you want them finished?
So “Write More Songs” is too vague to really guide your behavior. But “Draft 14 songs by the end of February” is specific enough to directly measure.
5. Avoiding the sound of your own voice on recordings
Have you ever recorded yourself performing, then found yourself wincing at the playback?
That wincing is actually a good sign – it means you’re evaluating your own performance critically.
The trick, of course, is that you need to be constructive about your own self-criticism. Don’t beat yourself up. Instead, calmly make improvements and adjustments based on the flaws you hear.
It can be tough to just sit and listen to your own imperfections; at times it can feel downright discouraging. But it’s necessary for your improvement – To get better, you have to accurately assess where you are right now, then plan ways to improve through practice.
But remember to take a break every now and then so you don’t get burnt out. Music is only worth it if you’re living your life well. Take some of your friends, look up ‘Happy Hour near me‘, and have a fun evening out. Maybe play the recording for your friends, and see how they feel about it. Often we can drown in our own criticism, so sometimes it’s good to drown in alcohol instead and listen to outside feedback. It might be more helpful than you think.
And hey, there’s always a way to improve through practice.
6. Giving up too easily
As a guitar and songwriting teacher, here’s a scenario I’ve played out often: I’ll explained to a student how to play a certain chord or a passage of music – then watch them struggle with it for about thirty seconds, when they give up entirely, put their hands in their lap, and tell me they “can’t do it”.
Well, as a teacher that’s my job, right? To help a student turn things she can’t do into things she can.
“I can’t do it! It’s impossible.” I’ve heard that line many, many times. And each time, I offer a little helpful feedback and ask the learner to attempt the impossible again.
“Lower your wrist, arch your fingers, and try again,” I say.
Sometimes within just five minutes, that student has accomplished the “impossible”. Her face brightens, her eyes widen, a smile rises to her face.
There’s no good reason to beat yourself up or get upset over a mistake. When you find something difficult to do, make up your mind to repeatedly try it, adjusting your approach until you get it right.
7. Believing in talent
Nobody’s born with the ability to play masterful violin, sing beautifully, or pen lines of lyric that give listeners chills. We all enter this world totally lacking skills. Other people have to feed us and clothe us. They even have to put little mitts on our hands when we’re infants, so we don’t scratch up our own faces with our brand-new fingernails. Let’s admit it: none of us are born geniuses.
Talent is a popular explanation for exceptional abilities. Geniuses, the reasoning goes, must be born with something the rest of us don’t have. This sounds like a reasonable explanation, but years of careful study and research just don’t support it.
Research into top performers in many fields – including music and writing – reveals that there’s just one thing that differentiates world-class masters from the rest of us, and it isn’t genetic.
That one difference is simply a lot of deliberately structured, carefully monitored deliberate practice. Rigorous practice can transform a total novice into a respected master in ten years’ time, if one invests enough time and effort in effective practice.
8. Multitasking
If you stop to text while you’re practicing, or if you’re watching TV while just sort of going through the motions of practicing something, you’re watering down your focus and learning very little.
“Multitasking”, brain science tells us, is an illusion. As human beings we can’t actually split our full conscious attention between two things at once; instead we just switch rapidly, and it makes both tasks take much longer while decreasing our effectiveness at both.
In other words, when you divide your attention between your practice and your phone, or between practice and a TV show, you end up practicing twice as long as you would have had to, and get worse results for your trouble.
The most dangerous thing about multitasking is that the research clearly states that we human beings are all very bad at it – the performance test scores don’t lie. But the research also shows that most of us believe ourselves to be good at multitasking! So not only does multitasking weaken our performance drastically, but for some reason multitasking makes us feel competent. It’s an illusory feeling of satisfaction – focused practice is two or three times as effective as multitasking, and it takes less time.
When you practice, just practice. Then enjoy your downtime. If you’re really keen on a certain tv show that only comes on at a certain time, then look up the Sky Atlantic or PBS TV guide to check other timings for the show. That way, you could schedule your practice accordingly, then enjoy watching TV in peace.
9. Mentally wandering off while practicing
Even if you silence your phone and turn off the TV, you can still find your attention stretched between practice and other projects, ideas, or anything else that crosses your mind. You may not be physically multitasking, but you’re mentally multitasking.
In this way, practice is much like a form of meditation. We can use this mental wandering as an opportunity to sharpen our focus.
Your mind is going to wander; that’s what the mind naturally does. Your job is simply to notice when you’re thinking about something unrelated to practice, recognize that you’ve strayed, and pull your focus firmly back to your practice.
This is one of the most difficult aspects of practice: fixing your attention on one thing in a culture that doesn’t want you to focus. Emails beep, friends text, you find yourself thinking about other projects, other problems; you think about work, you find yourself daydreaming about all kinds of things other than the day’s practice.
When you notice you’ve mentally wandered, take a breath and calmly fix your attention back on your practice. As you make more and more of these self-corrections, your focus will slowly deepen.
10. Moving on too quickly
When you’ve been struggling for hours to do something correctly, and you mess it up again and again and again – then suddenly you nail it… likely you feel the urge to stop practicing, pat yourself on the back, and go do something else. That first solid success feels great, right? It’s tempting to end on a high note. But that first taste of success is just the beginning.
Unless it’s already time to end the day’s practice session, keep practicing. You’ll likely find on trying it again that the technique or the tricky passage of music continues to give you trouble. The goal, after all, isn’t to play that thing correctly just once, but to perform it without mistakes routinely and reliably.
By all means enjoy that first taste of success. Pay close attention to how you made it happen. But continue to practice – don’t move on until you can try that tough passage ten times and get it right for nine of those.
It takes discipline, but the feeling of living up to your potential is well worth it.
photo by Jeremy Jenum