Have you been feeling stuck or frustrated in your music learning? Have you found yourself working on the same piece or section of a piece for weeks on end, without any real progress? Maybe you’ve hit an overall plateau, like you’ve reached an intermediate level but can never seem to go beyond that. Do you find it hard to memorise music, or to build up a range of material you can reliably play from memory? Perhaps it’s been hard to keep up your motivation to practice, because some days it just feels like “What’s the point?”
These problems are familiar to almost every music learner I’ve ever met. And when they experience them, most musicians make two big assumptions:
- These kinds of struggles are inevitable. I’ve just got to put up with it.
- If I was more “talented” I would improve faster and struggle less (i.e. “it’s my own fault”)
It might shock you to hear that neither of those things are true. In fact, every one of those issues mentioned above is actually just a symptom of using an outdated, ineffective, and needlessly-frustrating approach to music practice.
In this chapter we’ll introduce an alternative which, if you choose to adopt it, can dramatically change the speed and joy with which you learn music going forwards.
The traditional approach to music practice is based on what the scientific literature calls “massed repetitions”. That means brute-force repeating of the same thing, and hoping your skills will automatically improve through sheer repetition. If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s what almost every musician has been taught to do during “practice time” for literally hundreds of years.
But you might have heard also the saying “Practice doesn’t make perfect—practice makes permanent.” Which means if you’re playing the same mistakes again and again, you are, at least to some extent, actually learning to make those mistakes more reliably! What’s more, if your goal is solely to “play each note exactly correct”, even a “successful” outcome would have you being a mere note-reproducing robot.
So there are two major problems with the traditional model of music practice:
- Firstly, the methods used are incredibly inefficient. This wastes up to 90% of your practice time on activities that don’t actually trigger the brain’s “learning mode” and improve your skills.
- Secondly, the focus is generally only on “getting the notes right”, rather than producing beautiful music which you find deeply fulfilling and satisfying.
In terms of our H4 Model we might say it’s a Hands-only approach—and a highly inefficient one, at that.
It completely neglects:
- Head: Do you understand what you’re playing, and why it’s those notes rather than other ones?
- Hearing: Do you have a vivid mental model of how you want it to sound? Are you listening as you play? Can you play that kind of music by ear, or improvise with it?
- Heart: Do you feel truly connected to your instrument, to the music, to other musicians you play with, to your listeners? Are you able to put your own expression into every note you play?
So What’s The Alternative?
In this chapter we’ll invite you to reconsider what “music practice” means, and what it should look like. Heads up, this is going to involve a lot of words and terms being put in quotation marks, as we try to really re-examine our intentions, expectations and assumptions around practice!
We’ll introduce the most powerful concepts from the scientific research on accelerated learning and rapid memorisation, including the “Superlearning” techniques which have been proven to allow any average person to learn and memorise music up to 10 times faster than normal. And we’ll explore a variety of ways to bring musicality into your practice, connecting your Hands to your Head, Hearing and Heart.
We’ll mostly be focused on “music practice” in the sense of “sitting down with your instrument to practice playing particular pieces of music you want to be able to play”. However, as you’ll discover, the principles and concepts we’ll cover can actually be applied to any music-learning activity you do, including all the musicality training covered in the rest of this book.
We’re at an exciting moment in history. After centuries of music learners being handed the same-old practice methods that waste most of their time and cheat them of the results they could potentially enjoy, finally things are starting to shift. Now the same methods that apparently-gifted “prodigies” and “virtuosos” had been using to learn music dramatically faster than everyone else, are getting into the hands of average, everyday music learners.
Some of the concepts around the science of accelerated learning are gradually becoming more mainstream, with pioneers such as Gregg Goodhart (The Learning Coach), Dr. Josh Turknett (Brainjo), Jason Haaheim (The Deliberate Practice Bootcamp), Michael Compitello, Dr. Jonathan Harnum (author of The Practice of Practice), Nick Bottini (author of Just Play), Dr. Molly Gebrian (author of Learn Faster, Perform Better), Sarah Niblack (SPARK Practice), and Mark Morley-Fletcher (Play In The Zone) teaching classes and courses on Deliberate Practice and more. Other concepts, especially those combining Superlearning and musicality, are things we’ve been creating, developing, and proving out with our own members inside Musical U.
Overview
In this chapter we’ll begin by re-imagining what “practicing” music means, and look at ways you can effectively practice, even without touching your instrument. We’ll look at how the brain learns—and how it doesn’t—and the implications for learning efficiently. We’ll introduce two tools, recording and the metronome, which can both make all your practicing more honest and more effective.
Then we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of Superlearning techniques, with Deliberate Practice, Desirable Difficulty, and Contextual Interference. One of the biggest learning points for us at Musical U has been the vital importance of combining Superlearning with musicality, in the spirit of the H4 Model, and so we’ll cover specific ways you can benefit from doing both together.
Next we’ll tackle memorisation. Remembering how to play a piece is a skill in its own right, whether your aim is to play from notation or get “off book”. We’ll cover the specific techniques which can let you memorise dramatically faster, and retain a wide repertoire with a fraction of the usual time.
Finally, we’ll look at how to structure each practice session, and how the dynamic decision-making of Deliberate Practice can be put into action in several ways to maximise your use of time. And we’ll wrap things up with an example illustration of what a Superlearning-based practice session might look like.
We are going to cover a lot! But as soon as you start using even a small number of the ideas and techniques shared in this chapter, you’ll find that the results you get from your regular music practice rapidly (and in some cases instantly) transform, helping you move faster and faster towards that Big Picture Vision of the musician you want to become. I’m excited to share this with you. Let’s dive in.