Practice, Practice and more Practice.....ha!...

[JerryPH]

There is always the temptation to reach the end of a piece because it’s fun,but that’s a waste of time. I think my lessons today are more about learning how to practice when my teacher is not by my side.

I've done that, but I did notice something kind of important... I did that when I had a particularly challenging measure or 2. I would skip over them, get to the end and use that to motivate me. I'd then go back and do my little "micro-focus" session by seeing nothing but that 1-2 measures and get it down before going back to the beginning. It is not something that I did on every song, just the ones that were particularly irksome in a few measures.

I noticed that in *some* cases, that actually helped me get through the song faster.

I've come to realize that down inside, I have a true love/hate relationship with learning. I absolutely hate the process of learning something new, but I absolutely love adding something new to my head.

 

[Siegmund]

I've done that, but I did notice something kind of important... I did that when I had a particularly challenging measure or 2. I would skip over them, get to the end and use that to motivate me. I'd then go back and do my little "micro-focus" session by seeing nothing but that 1-2 measures and get it down before going back to the beginning. It is not something that I did on every song, just the ones that were particularly irksome in a few measures.

I think that is a good plan.
Only hard part is to make sure you actually skip over the section you haven't learned, rather than half-ass it repeatedly.

There's no law that says you have to learn the pieces of a song in order from first to last. And so often people do learn from first to last, so when they "finish" a piece they have done the beginning many more times than the ending.
Deliberately learning it one phrase at a time 'back to front' instead of front to back would probably be a good strategy on a piece of uniform difficulty.

 

[JerryPH]

There's no law that says you have to learn the pieces of a song in order from first to last.

For sure! In truth there are some people that advocate learning a song *backwards*... meaning, start from the last measure, then go to the 2nd last measure and do the last 2 measures, then learn the 3rd from last measure, link it to the final 2 measures... and so on.

The logic here is that a musician is strongest with the parts of a song they MOST practice, and that is the start of a piece and that this avoids the issue of a musician "petering out" near the end. I can see this helping musicians that it happens to, but realistically, I am not one of these people so, never tried it.

No matter what method is used, its evident that the little more disciplined an approach one uses, the better things will go. It's just finding what works best for you.

 

[Zevy]

I believe that one should first develop a “roadmap“ for the piece. After that one must develop a mental picture or a guide for how the piece should be played. Using that guide, when can slowly, but surely a towards a positive outcome.

 

[Ventura]

haha.. yes..exactly

for instance, the Roadmap are the lyrics to the Rum Bacardi..err..
Rhuba Cardi
and the Mental Picture is of Dinah Shore singing those lyrics
and i base my flow of the song on the memory of her Hips and'
Hands and Cugat's motions oiver his orchestra..

 

[JeffJetton]

For sure! In truth there are some people that advocate learning a song *backwards*... meaning, start from the last measure, then go to the 2nd last measure and do the last 2 measures, then learn the 3rd from last measure, link it to the final 2 measures... and so on.

Yup! I use this trick from time-to-time for both myself and my students. As the two of you mentioned, it avoids the common problem of having played the beginning of the song a gazillion times but the end only a few. It's also works on "trouble sections"--you don't have to do the whole song that ways.

But there are two other hidden benefits too!

1.) It disconnects you from the "logic" of the music, so that you can more easily focus on the mechanics and notes and movements required. Sort of like how sketching a portrait based on a photo that's been turned upside-down makes you draw what you actually see, and not what you have a pre-conceived notion a thing should look like.

2.) It has you playing the "new" thing you just learned first, right away, while it's fresh in your mind. This is opposed to having to wait until you slog through the stuff you already know to get to the new thing, by which point you've likely forgotten some or all of how to play it. (They use this reversing trick for the same reason in language learning too, where it's called "back-chaining".)

 

[Wheezer]

Then of course there's the point that you shouldn't waste time practising something you can play.........hmmmm

yes, this is an easy trap that I fall into when trying to get a short difficult section of a phrase under my hand. I often find that I can isolate the difficulty down to maybe 2 or three notes in a passage that trip me up. But, rather than focusing on those few notes, I find myself playing a four measure passage, then tripping over that problem note or two. Then, back up and play four meaures and trip at the same place again, then back up and…. When I catch my self doing this, I’ll narrow it down and work on just the couple of probelm notes.

 

[Wheezer]

The metronome in the head is usefull, but it doesn't offer the exact numbers to learn from and it is NEVER as accurate or unforgiving. Sure it CAN be a crutch if that is all you use, but if you don't, you won't know your EXACT numbers.

Some people advance slowly, and without a metronome would never know what their "breaking point is EXACTLY nor likely that they are actually improving 2-3 bps. That can be discouraging, not motivating.

Everything in moderation.

A point to consider is WHO is practicing and most importantly WHAT ARE THE GOALS. If you don't have a short, medium and long term goal, or no goal at all... what you are doing is practicing just to practice and are likely wasting 80% of that time. If you are not a professional or someone with real goals, that's completely FINE. Not all of us want to become virtuosos. Some play to hear themselves play "Mary had a little lamb" and are completely thrilled and satisfied... and that's all cool for them.

If you have a direction, you have goals, if you have goals you have things to attain, ways to measure advancement and you grow MUCH faster. But that said, if your goal is to learn 10 songs this year... very cool. If your goal is to vastly improve your technique so you could MASTER 10 songs, each more difficult than the last, you have a direction, have a better idea of how to get there and have a higher chance of success of meeting a more challenging end result faster than just randomly practicing anything that floats by on your music stand.

Fastest advancement comes from FOCUSED and WELL CHOSEN items to practice in a goal oriented fashion that is documented and planned out in advance. Here is the shocker... for most but the highest aiming group, that doesn't mean 10 hours a day! A couple of truly focused goal oriented hours a day 5 days a week will get 90% of the people there faster than they may be aware of.

I use a metronome, but it also became a crutch. I found a metronome app that you can configure to randomly drop out a given percentage of beats or measures so it’s a little more like a safety net than a crutch. It is more helpful at internalizing a constant tempo than a traditional metronome.

 

[JerryPH]

I use a metronome, but it also became a crutch. I found a metronome app that you can configure to randomly drop out a given percentage of beats or measures so it’s a little more like a safety net than a crutch. It is more helpful at internalizing a constant tempo than a traditional metronome.

If that's what YOU need, then you found your solution. I know pretty much when to use it, when to stop using it and when to not use it for me.

 

[Waldo]

I often improvise a difficult passage into something I can handle at my level of competency. Once I can play thru without errors, I then return to said part and pay special attention to "getting it right". This approach allows me to get the basics down without too much frustration getting in the way. It has also helped my improvisation skills a lot.

BTW; I think it should be "tempo de learn-o", not "di", which would be Italian, whereas "learn-o" is Spanglish, thusly "de".

 

[Javthedog]

Basically reiterating what's been said already, but...

It's not "practice makes perfect", it's "practice makes permanent". If you practice mistakes, you'll learn mistakes.

How do you make sure you're practicing "perfect" and not the mistakes? Play slowly. I am not kidding about this. It's the single-best piece of practice advice out there. Learn it, know it, live it.

I forget where I first heard this, but it's a good one: Remember that learning a section of a piece of music is not like playing a video game. In something like Mario Bros., all you have to do is play the level perfectly once. That's a "win". You can mess up and die 99 times, but if you make it to the end and/or beat the boss, you get to move on to the next level.

In music, that doesn't work at all. You can't play a section with mistakes 99 times, then play it once perfectly and chalk it up as a success. You have to develop the skill to "beat the level" pretty much every single time, on the first try, without dying. That requires intentional focus on the trouble spots and the patience to slowly iron them out.

I know I'm always recommending Tom Heany's First Learn to Practice, but I'll do it again here. What can I say? I like the book.

Read the book - some stand out ideas.....Practice the movement and the music will follow......... think of practice as the way a mechanic looks for and repairs a fault - the driver will 'play', when the faults are fixed.............. Practice is different from playing............
All good and thanks for your varied input.