With just coming back from holiday and trying to get ready for moving house tomorrow, my brain, like my stuff, is a bit all over the place at the moment! As a result, there's a kind of stream-of-consciousness feel to this week's post, which consists of some random thoughts about practising.
Without further ado, I present four postulations on the topic of practice for your consideration and delectation (there were probably five originally, but I think one has been packed by accident and I can't remember which box it's in!)
Practising should never be done in real time
A definition of practising you may have heard me use before is 'doing something you can't do until you are able to do it'. However, Kenny Werner has a nice alternative of 'doing something you wish you were able to do in real time'.
I like this definition because it makes it very hard for you to fall into the trap of playing instead of practising. After all, if you can already do something in real time then you don't need to practise it and you know you're just playing.
If you can nearly do something in real time then it still requires more work until it is mastered. Slow it down and work on it until it's mastered
Execute the material you are practising perfectly
Sounds like a contradiction doesn't it? Surely, if you could do it perfectly then you wouldn't need to practise it? Actually, the point I'm making here fits in with the idea above that practice should not be done in real time.
We play music well when material is mastered. When it is mastered, we can execute it perfectly without even thinking about it. In order to play without thinking we have to practise until we're not relying solely on our conscious, analytical, thinking mind, but on a variety of resources including things like sound and muscle memory.
The quickest way to develop muscle memory is to repeat exactly the same movements over and over, so that the body is given a consistent message about the physical action required. If you don't play the material perfectly then every mistake weakens the consistency of that message and means that you will take longer to develop the muscle memory required for mastery.
Let's take the practical example of piano fingering. If you are trying to learn something like a be-bop head on piano, the fingering is going to be an important requirment. Bad fingering can result in an inabiility to execute the line smoothly. Now, if the fingering is worked out in advance and the phrases practised very slowly with consistent fingering, the body is being given consistent messages and will start to develop muscle memory at its fastest possible rate.
On the other hand, if the fingering is improvised continuously because it was either not planned in advance or the tempo is too fast then this will result in inconsistent messages being to the body and the muscle memory will take longer to kick-in. Even if the right notes are being played, if the same fingers are not being used each time, the inconsistency will slow down the learning process.
Do you get the idea? Every time a mistake is made or a wrong finger is used, the player is effectively giving their unconscious mind and muscle memory another option of what to do the next time that passage is played. Playing accurately in practice ensures that your are burning the same message into your brain and fingers over and again.
The only way that it's possible to practise something with this kind of accuracy is to slow it down to the point where it's impossible to play a wrong note or use undesirable fingering. This could mean that you have to slow material down to tempos that might initially feel unbelievably slow, but I've found that playing very slowly and accurately always yields faster results and a quicker path to mastery than fumbling and approximating at faster tempos.
If you don't know how it goes, you'll struggle to play it
Along with muscle memory, musical memory is a vital part of playing music well. When I talk about musical memory, I am talking about the aural ability to hear music accurately in your head. When we attempt to play music that we can't really hear internally, the results aren't usually what we hoped for.
Think about a melody of a song that you can play easily and sing it to yourself in you head. It doesn't have to be complicated, it could be the tune of a standard or even something simpler like a nursery rhyme or a beginner's tune. Sing it in your head and turn the volume up so you hear it nice and loud.
The reason that you can do this and hear it accurately is because you have developed an accurate musical memory of the sound of that melody. Having an accurate recall of that melody makes it much easier to reproduce that sound on your instrument - that's why it's always easier to learn music that you are already familiar with.
I refer to this kind of musical memory as simply 'knowing how it goes'. When you know how something goes it's easy to play it. However, it's possible to learn to play things without necessarily being able to hear them accurately through relying too heavily on other aspects of playing. Depending on your instrument these crutches can include things like pure muscle memory, consciously remembering the order of note names, using visual memory of note locations/valve positions/key combinations and so on. Unfortunately, whenever you rely too heavily on these things, it rarely leads to mastery.
To make sure that you hear things accurately, it's wise to spend time really listening to something that you are trying to play. If you are learning something by ear, make sure that you hear it accurately and you aren't just approximating it in your musical memory - if you only hear it approximately, you will play it approximately.
One of the best ways to test if you are hearing something accurately is to sing it. If you can sing it, it's a pretty safe bet that you are hearing it. If you can't sing it, or can only approximate it, you know you don't know it well enough yet. Some people maintain that you can't play what you can't sing. I don't know that I'd go that far, but I do know that whilst it may seem to take a long time to learn to sing difficult phrases, if you can do it, you'll find that they're considerably easier to play and that you remember them for far longer than if you'd leaned too heavily on the crutches I refer to above.
Prioritise turning notation into coherent musical sounds
If you are learning something from sheet music (and this is especially important if you aren't a good reader) the goal should be to turn the hieroglyphs on the page into a soundthat you can remember as soon as possible. Good readers can look at the page and start to hear the music in their heads based on the notation. If you can't do this then it's better to work on smaller chunks of music, maybe just a single phrase or two bars, until you can play it accurately enough to start getting your musical memory involved.
By contrast, starting at the top of the page and ploughing all the way through it, making a million mistakes and not really playing anything that sounds recognisably like music will not help you to learn the material.
Soon people may argue that ploughing on regardless is the best way to improve your sight-reading. Whilst I have to admit to not being a great sight-reader, I can't agree with that idea. For me, we learn to sight-read more efficiently when we can look at notation and it represents a sound that we know.
When we read text, we start by learning the phonetic sounds of each letter and sounding out words. However, once we are proficient at reading, we simply read the word as a whole. Struggling through notation without being able to understand or hear the musical phrase is the equivalent of a child phonetically sounding out a page of text without recognising or understanding the words that those sounds form.
Working with very small chunks of notation allows you to turn the dots into a sound and get your musical memory involved as soon as possible. Once you do this two things happen: firstly, you find it easier to play because you 'know how it goes' and secondly, you are more likely to associate that particular notation with a sound when you see it again - the musical equivalent of being able to read a word without having to sound it out.
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