All of us have limited time and mental energy in a given day. And while practice is never going to be quite as fast or as easy as we’d like, centuries of musical tradition and modern research have done a great job at figuring out how we can spend our limited practice time as effectively as possible.
The best way to approach the topic of effective practice might be to consider what is not effective.
A few things that are not practice
Noodling is not practice. Too often when we pick up our instruments, our hands automatically begin to carry out ingrained habits. They spit out pieces of music, fragments of solo parts, little solos, and so on.
I suggest something different: sit down at your instrument without playing anything. Sit down with your guitar, your piano, ukulele, whatever it is you’ve got—and don’t play a note. Just sit. Take in the silence for a moment. Then, think consciously about what you want to play first, or what you’re about to start working on.
Too often we start a conversation with our instrument on a bad foot by just picking it up and making some meaningless, rambling sounds. Get used to taking up your instrument with a sense of purpose. And remember that playing these little fragments of things you already know how to play isn’t practice! That’s just being a human jukebox.
If you’re not correcting your mistakes, it’s not practice.
Practice shouldn’t be impossibly hard, but it shouldn’t be too easy either. It should stretch you. It should feel effortful. If you’re working on material where you regularly make mistakes, that’s actually a good sign—it means you’re taking on something that’s just a little beyond your reach.
Mistakes are a natural result of attempting new things, but that doesn’t mean you should allow mistakes to continue unchecked. Practice really isn’t practice unless you stay totally alert for mistakes and sloppiness, and spend time calmly correcting them. Mastery in any craft is the result of a long chain of small mistakes, adjustments, and corrections over months and years. If you don’t pay attention to your small errors and correct them, you don’t make progress.
Multitasking isn’t practice. When you attempt to do more than one thing at once, both things will suffer. They’ll both take a lot longer, and your results won’t be as good. When you practice, make sure you focus entirely on practice for the duration of the session. When you find yourself fidgety, take a break and get entirely away from practice for ten or fifteen minutes—then come back refreshed.
If you pick up your phone every few minutes to read and answer texts during practice, not only do you lose a minute or two to that action, but you waste a lot of mental energy switching between Text Mode and Practice Mode, with the end result that your text conversation will be distracted and your practice will cost much, much more of your time and energy for a worse result.
Seriously, twenty focused minutes is better than a half-distracted hour. It makes much more sense to just put in a short, focused session and then go do something useful or fun with the other forty minutes. Silence your phone and leave it at the door.
So now that we’ve covered some practice pitfalls, let’s get into what practice should be like.
How to know when you’re practicing well
The only goal of practice is to improve your skills. Ideally a teacher or expert in the subject will design your learning materials to ensure your improvement. Keep in mind that practice is not meant to be a crowd-pleaser. Remember way back in Section One how I asked you to find a practice space where no one can hear you? That’s why. You’re not here in your practice space to play for anybody else’s amusement or approval. You’re not here to worry about proving yourself—you’re here to worry about improving yourself.
On any given day, you should be absolutely clear on what you’re working on. If you’re unclear about your next move at any given moment, consult some learning materials or a teacher to find your next area of study.
Making improvements depends on accurate feedback. Either by monitoring yourself or with the help of a teacher, seek accurate feedback on whether you’re “Doing it right.”
Practice should be difficult. It should feel like you’re reaching and struggling a bit. Embrace challenging things! Whatever you’re practicing should be challenging enough that it requires focused mental effort—if you’re not focused, you aren’t learning.
The sensation of mentally stretching can be uncomfortable, but it’s the kind of discomfort that you’ll learn to enjoy in time. Keep in mind that whenever something is difficult to do or to understand correctly, you’re learning, and that’s a good thing. Don’t shrink away from the chance to learn something! Run toward difficult things.
Practice embraces the details. There’s an enormous amount of satisfaction in taking just one tiny piece of the craft and mastering it in an afternoon. Just the smallest, most specific skill that you can nail down really, really well.
By making this small effort every day, in time you’ll progress further into the craft than you’d ever think possible.
Practice is repetitive. It involves deeply and repeatedly focusing our attention on simple things. Making small adjustments. Investigating possible variations. Wading patiently through lots and lots of iterations.
What to do when the challenge is too tall
At some time or another, you’ll likely find that you’ve handed yourself a challenge that you truly weren’t ready for. Usually that’s because you’re trying to Run before you’ve Crawled—meaning you’ve taken on something that requires several prerequisite skills that you haven’t taken the time to nail down yet.
Facing that kind of steep challenge, all you need to do is break that big task down to figure out which skills you’ll need to train yourself on—and then work on each of those skills individually using the Crawl, Walk, Run strategy.
Take care of the small details, the mundane little fundamentals of this craft. You can’t expect to run a marathon before you’ve learned how to tie your shoes properly. And likewise, if you want to write beautiful lyrics, you’ll want to learn the basic mechanics of rhyme and song structure and figures of speech really, really well.
Try to make a habit of really taking a step back and noticing exactly what you’re having trouble with. The better you understand the problem, the better your chances of fixing it. And by the way, the problem is almost never personal. It’s not a question of talent.
Doubt your methods, doubt your approach, doubt whether you’re correct—but never doubt that you can find your way past obstacles.