Effective practicing helps us spend less time in the practice room and gives us more time to do the other things we enjoy. Mindful practice helps us understand how we learn; get to know yourself during your practice time.
The Four Levels of Practice
- Playing mindlessly with repetition – you may get a bit better but won’t see quick improvement. This is pretty time consuming. This is usually how younger children practice. We need to grow out of this as we mature!
- Identifying problems and repeating them –you need to understand the root of the problem and play correctly; repeating mistakes in problem areas just cements the problem.
- Mental representation – you start to think about how to do something better; your mind is involved logically and not just playing by rote.
- Deliberate practice – you have purpose and feedback (you know how to solve a problem and can receive correction, ie, from me or from your own ears understanding what sounds correct from enough listening). This is not easy practice. There may be resistance, criticism; it’s not as fun. Classes and practice journals can be a part of deliberate practice; use my practice logs!
What Neuroscience Says About How We Learn
- Block practice is when we devote a chunk of time to one task. Over time we improve. Eg, set the timer for 30 minutes per day. This is the easiest and feels best. It is also slower to achieve mastery.
- Layered practice says that the more we retrieve information, the brain decides it is a vital memory to solidify. Use smaller chunks of practice repeated more than once a day. This is more efficient for retaining. It speeds up memorization and muscle memory – ie, if you have a difficult passage to work out or memorize, just spend five-ten mins a couple/few times a day at different times working it out. More painful but must faster to work out issues.
- Random practice – this comes from baseball research – when the batter knew the type of pitch and the sequence, compared to when the batter didn’t know what type of pitch was coming: the latter became much more proficient in handling all pitches with less practice. Switch up the order of tasks in your practice session to randomize skillsets.
Breaks Improve Retention
The importance of breaks: we need breaks to help our brains process information, especially if we are using random and layered practice. A one minute quality break (ie, no phone, not homework/work/chores) will improve retention. Look out the window, drink water, stretch, breathing. This is how to give the brain a break. I recommend a break after 20 minutes.
Enough Sleep is Vital
The most important break we take is our nightly sleep. This is a tough one for me and for many of my students. I rarely sleep more than 5 hours, due to the demands of modern life and stress of single parenting and I absolutely see it in the slow speed of my progress on difficult works and the slowness of memorization particularly!
If you can sleep an extra hour or practice, take the extra hour for sleep (unless you’re already sleeping more than 8-10 hours). The strengthening of skills we need for music and making retention happens in hours 7-8 of our sleep; during hours 1-6 of our sleeping, our brains and bodies are recovering and rebuilding the vital systems. After 6 hours, the brain and body can give some bandwidth to new skills – memorization, retention, muscle memory. This is part of processing and recovering.
Other tips & tricks. Get to Know How You Learn!
- Set a timer: work on a passage for a short set time and stick to your limit; come back to it after a break, change in tasks, later in the day.
- When you feel something is just starting to get easier, then it’s time to move on to a new task; that’s your brain letting you know you are able to process the input. If you “hit the wall” where things are getting worse, then it’s also time to move on; brain is overloaded.
- Mix mental & physical practice – physical practice is at the instrument. Mental practice is studying the score, listening with the score, visualizing how to execute, posture required to execute a task. Mental practice with mini-motions can be very helpful at creating new pathways. Visualize what the body is doing in great detail. Posture, dynamics, colour can be worked out mentally.
- First learning a new piece needs longer chunks of time. This is just grinding through the sight reading and making basic muscle memory. Further along in the development, it’s advantageous to jump around with random practice, eg, through the harder passages. Introduce random practice when sections start to “feel easy”.
- If we over multi-task, we may not retain anything. Better to work on one passage for a deliberate period targetting a specific quality – developing legato, voicing; concentrating deeply on one element. Even if for a just a couple minutes. Then, try another aspect on the same musical material.
- When practicing a difficult piece, start with daily work, then as it gets easier, space out the session to every other day, or once a week, and monitor how often you need to practice as it becomes more accessible to you.
Kind regards, Rosanna D’Agnillo – www.RosannaD.com