It's the thing we're always told to go do, but most of us are never explicitly taught how to practice or what practice really is. Some people think sheer hours on the instrument will make you good. Go repeat something until you get it right, and you'll be set. Others say "play it until you can't do it wrong." But whatever "it" is and "wrong" means is a mystery for many students. I'd like to take some time today to discuss what practice really is and some tools for learning both efficiently and deeply.
I love showing this TEDEd video to students, especially young beginners. It does a wonderful job of explaining how your mind and body connect so that you can execute physical skills more effectively and also how to get to that level efficiently. Watch the video below and pause it to answer the following questions as you go:
What is the definition of practice?
What do gray and white matter each do?
What is an axon?
What is myelin?
What is muscle memory?
What are the three characteristics of effective practice?
What four tips do they give you for effective practice?
The "Practice Makes Perfect" Myth
The most obnoxiously persistent myth is that "Practice Makes Perfect." BOOOOOO. If you watched the TEDEd video, you know why that is absolutely not true. The repetitions we call "practice" create habits. Now, those habits may be accurate or not depending on what you do. They may also be completely inconsistent if you're distracted while playing. Didn't get enough sleep last night? What about skipping meals and being hungry? Overworked and sick? Got homework or an exam you don't understand and are stressing about? What about fights with friends or significant others? Curious about a ball game score or what your favorite influencers are posting? You're gonna have a rough time in that practice session, and the odds of reading, executing, and internalizing your music precisely are, shall we say, not great.
And then there's that pesky P-word: perfect. What does that even mean? Is it just technical precision? Well, I know we've all heard performances that are technically precise yet bored us out of our minds. Does every perfect performance have to crescendo in the same place and to the same decibel? That doesn't sound very expressive to me or like it connects to our shared humanity. And there's the catch: perfect is subjective. There is no such thing as an "objectively perfect" performance because perfection is an opinion rather than a fact. If you need a lesson on facts vs. opinions, I'd like to refer you to your local elementary school social studies curriculum. I guarantee they have a lesson or two on the subject.
So, practice makes habits, and perfection depends on who you ask. I know some people would like to substitute "permanent" or "persistent" into the old adage, but I'd rather just trash it altogether. Let's reframe why practice is important so we can go about it more efficiently and with less judgment.
Tools of the Trade
You've gotta know your body to be a musician. The one class I regret never taking when I had the chance was an anatomy class; I'd have saved myself a lot of effort and confusion if I'd just known how my body worked from the start. Where even are my lungs? What the hell does "Breathe with your diaphragm" mean? How does the angle of my wrist relate to whether or not I am completely covering the holes? Does tapping my toe actually help my pulse stability? Don't have the resources to take a class? Never fear! Your bathroom mirror is here! Go to whatever room in your house has a mirror, and look at yourself. How does your hand connect to your arm and your shoulder? What muscles work together in your face, and which ones can you move separately? Does your whole torso expand and contract when you breathe, or are you isolating just your chest vs. belly (hint: let it all go)? We forget that our bodies are how we make music. We don't just use our minds and eyes and ears; we are athletes who simply use smaller muscles and fine motor skills. And the first tool that will help you figure out how you work is a mirror. I have a large one that sits on a chair in my practice space so that I can see my whole body while I play. I get close to it to examine my fingers and embouchure, and I back away to check in with my breathing and full-body relaxation. I've seen full-length mirrors as cheap as $10 at your favorite household retailer, so go get one to keep in your practice space and get to know your body. (Also, insert tangent about societal body image pressure BS and how it impacts our playing here. We don't have time for that today, but you get it.)
The metronome isn't just there to slowly drive you insane with its eternal clicking. It's the tool that teaches you self-control; it keeps you slow when your ego wants to go fast. Remember that you're creating a physical habit that needs time and high-quality repetitions to become consistent. You want to be able to not only do the thing that the mirror shows you but also make it happen on demand in a specific moment. Your second tool is an acquired taste to be sure, but the metronome doesn't lie, and we all need that friend who keeps us accountable in life.
Here's the thing I didn't know about the metronome until grad school: it's there to check you not command you. I spent a solid decade growing up not knowing how to actually use my metronome, so I ended up either simply following it or ignoring it completely. There was way too much guessing going on because I didn't know how to internalize that pulse or divide it accurately into subdivisions. Here are some exercises you can use to become friends with your metronome:
Put it on random speeds and work on anticipating when the next beat will happen. Don't wait for it and clap/play/sing in reaction to the click, but rather use a guess-and-check strategy so that you the one setting the speed and getting checked by the metronome. Are you too fast, too slow, or right with it? Can you correct yourself in real time, or do you have to stop and start over again?
The next level is similar but with subdivisions. Can you clap 8th notes and/or triplets steadily when the metronome is only giving you quarters? Can you do this at any speed?
Level 3 is when you take away certain beats in the measure. What I mean by that is to have the metronome only clicking on 1 and 3 but silent on 2 and 4 so that you are responsible for placing the silent beats. Can you still land precisely on the clicks every other beat? If yes, switch it and have clicks on 2 and 4 but not 1 and 3. If you really want to test yourself, put it on only beat 1, or better yet, just give yourself upbeats. This is super easy to do with apps like TonalEnergy, but you can also do it with traditional metronomes with a little math. Want to have only half notes click at you? Divide your bpm in half and count yourself in.
Speaking of anticipating and counting in, that's something you should do for yourself just like your teacher does in class. If you just start playing with no prep measure, it's like running a race without getting the "On your mark" and "Set" warnings (or beeps in swimming...you get it). You'll be behind and out of time from the start. Listen to the metronome for a few measures, then think "1, 2, Ready, Breathe!" (or modify it for whatever time signature you have) in time with the clicks so that you are prepared and get a really nice breath and begin right on the accented click for beat 1 in the next round. Also, please make sure to pay attention to any accented clicks you have on your metronome. They'll help you know if you've messed up because you'll not get the accented click on beat 1 when you expect it if you count incorrectly.
"But how do I know when I mess up? There's just too much to pay attention to, so I have no idea when I'm playing if I'm right or not."
I'm so glad you asked! Record yourself. You're right that there's a lot going on, and it can be super hard to keep track of it all. We can't actually multitask, so give yourself a break and accept a little help from your phone. Tool #3 is in your pocket most of the time and is your favorite toy anyway, so use your camera to record short clips of yourself and see if what you think is happening is what someone else will hear too. You don't have to post videos on Insta; these are not for anyone else (well, maybe your teacher if it's homework). The point of recording is to have another set of eyes and ears that can catch things for you when you're working hard. We all need help, and sometimes our friends and family and teachers aren't available, but your phone always is. Did you actually slur those notes, or did you just think you did? Were you really in time throughout, or did you drop a beat? Could an audience member really hear your crescendo, or was it not dramatic enough? It's so hard to make our inner and outer experiences line up when we have a bajillion things to think about per second, so outsource some of that work to your phone.
Remember how the video defined practice? We've already talked about the repetition part, but there were two other key words to keep in mind: goal and improvement. You gotta know exactly what you want to do and the trajectory of where you're coming from, so my tool here is a planner. Some people like journals as well, but I like the structure of a planner. It helps me visually lay out my goals for each day/week/month/semester, how I plan to go about working on them, and reflect before moving on. It also shows me how consistent I'm being with my sessions: are they daily for a similar length of time and each focused on a specific goal or set of goals? Have I actually only been playing in class or practicing for two hours the day right before my lesson? This is a new tool for me, and I absolutely love it! I was able to pace the prep for the audition I took recently by laying out deadlines in a planner and having a theme for each week. Am I working on articulation this week? Perhaps smooth, even runs next? Breathing still not deep enough for bass clarinet and need some extra focus? Done, done, and done. Tempo is also much easier to work on when you lay out checkpoints in a planner as well. Need to get 30 clicks faster by a certain deadline? Break it down to a smaller number of clicks per day, and don't let yourself go too quickly too soon so that you keep consistency and ease in your mind and body while you work on getting faster. I also like to do a scale of the week with my students, so I have them write down in their planners what scale they plan to do each week of the semester and what fundamental skill they're using the scale to work on.
You'll notice I'm being pretty specific with my goals. I don't want to just "get better" because that's a vague opinion. Instead, I want to pick a specific fundamental skill that I can gain significantly more control over in a defined window of time. If you don't have or want to get a planner to lay this all out in, here's a table you might want to use or adapt to your own needs:
Fundamental Skill | Desired Outcome | Timeline or Due Date | Reflection on Growth |
Body Use/Position | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Ease/Relaxation | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Breathing | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Pulse Stability | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Rhythmic Security | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Tone Quality | ​ | ​ | ​ |
​Pitch Accuracy | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Articulation Clarity or Speed | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Intonation Refinement | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Dynamic Control | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Phrase Direction | ​ | ​ | ​ |
Tempo Requirements | ​ | ​ | ​ |
You might notice I haven't mentioned a tuner yet. Well, here it is! The reason I put it so far down my list is because I view it as a refinement tool rather than a fundamentals tool. Let me explain: there are so many things that have to go right just to make a terrible sound that I want to recognize your hard work before telling you to do better. Should you play in tune? For sure, yes! But a well-tuned pitch at the wrong time is still a wrong note, and you can't tune a wrong note. You gotta know which finger(s) to put down before you can move on to voicing an altissimo note high enough to be exactly in tune. You also have to know what you're listening for in the first place.
I thought I was incapable of hearing intonation until college because I had no idea how to describe the quality of sound you got from playing in tune. I could play with a tuner or a drone all I wanted, but the only signal I had for precision was a green or red light, not my internal experience. I also had no strong tone concept or understanding that a weak tone will not be in tune, so pitch was simply a mystery to me. Here are some things to consider when learning to play in tune:
What adjectives would you use to describe the kind of sound you're making? Some I like to think about are fuzzy or watery vs. clear, wide vs. focused, airy vs. dense, crunchy vs. smooth, and resonant vs. muted. What I avoid using are words like "good" and "bad" because those are vague value judgments and don't give me actionable feedback. The pitch is much easier to discern when you aren't distracted by differences in tone quality, so focus that first.
I start with long sounds played together so that there's time to compare and contrast a constant pairing. I struggled so much in high school to figure out what was going on when the director would go down the line with us each playing a single, short note and just tell us how to adjust. They all sounded the same to me! Maybe one person was fuzzier than another, but I couldn't recognize higher or lower in that minute detail yet. Take your time playing a long note at the same time as someone else and just gather data instead of feeling like you're picking a pitch out of thin air.
When I'm playing the same note as someone else or a drone, do I feel like we match or is there a sense of crunchiness/discomfort? I'm a very tactile person, so if something is out of tune, I'll feel a cringe run up my spine or something else in my muscles rather than feeling that knowledge centered in my ears. You may not know yet if you're high or low, and that's okay. Just get in your body instead of your mind and feel if you are the same as the other sound or if there is a wavy/grating feeling. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using the guess-and-check method. Try anything and simply take notes on what happens, how it feels in your body. Then, you can start to look at a tuner or chat with a friend or teacher to start assigning meaning to what changed.
When you feel like you can confidently tune unison notes, move on to other perfect intervals - octaves, 5ths and 4ths. Play them against a drone and do the same mindful searching in your body that you did with unisons.
Play duets and trios with people who already know what they're listening for. They'll help give you something sturdy in your ear to hang onto while you figure out what needs to be adjusted. Bach chorales will always hold a special place in my heart because they were how I learned to play in tune as an undergrad. We warmed up on them every day in Wind Ensemble, and by immersing myself into the ensemble sound of those clear harmonies, I was able to figure out what I was listening for and begin to make adjustments.
So, now that you have a clearer concept of what practice is and some tools to guide you, go forth and conquer. Play slowly so that you can create precise habits. Get to know your body in a mirror to avoid injury and be more relaxed. Record yourself on your phone so that you can see if your internal and external experiences match. Make sure your goals are specific enough to guide each practice session, and track your work and progress in a planner. Anticipate where you think the pitch and pulse should be rather than always reacting to commands, and, when in doubt, guess. Finally, don't strive for "perfection" because it doesn't actually exist; instead, strive to find joy in making fun noises that you can consciously and consistently control in order to express your full humanity in the most authentic way possible.