The traditional view of music practice is as a means to an end. Practicing means “I’ll work hard now, so that some day I can play the music I want to.”
What if practicing music was its own reward? What if “making music” wasn’t the eventual payoff of all our practice… but instead the practice itself was a musical—even creative—act?
You may remember from Chapter 2: Mindset, when we mentioned (in the context of Enjoying The Journey) that “fun is not the opposite of learning”. The surprising truth is that when we make our practice activities more enjoyable and more musical, it’s not a distraction or a dilution—we can actually learn faster.
For example, with an approach we call “Creative Superlearning”, we can combine the nuts-and-bolts learn-faster methodology of Superlearning which you’ll be learning about in this chapter with our creative frameworks such as Expansive Creativity (see Chapter 15: Improvisation). The result is a learning process that is both faster and develops versatile musical creativity along the way.
This is a case where you really can “have your cake and eat it too”. You just need to be open to truly re-thinking what music practice is, and how you’ll spend your practice time in future.
So how can we transform our regular practice into a creative and self-rewarding musical experience? Well, we must begin with the key question:
What is “Practicing”?
Have you ever stopped to really ask yourself that question? For the average music hobbyist, they’ve taken some instrument lessons with a teacher, or gone through some online tutorial videos, and then they’re told:
“Okay, now go and practice.”
What exactly does that mean? How do you practice? What do you practice? What exactly is “practicing” anyway?
Generally those questions don’t really get asked (though they might have nagged at the back of your mind) and the answer is assumed:
Practicing means “playing it over and over until it gets better”.
For a student to be “good at practicing” normally means they have some habits they stick to, such as:
- Regular timed practice e.g. a 30 minute session each day.
- Starting each practice session with “warm-ups”.
- Playing scales and other technical exercises.
- Playing through each piece or song you’re working on.
- When you make a mistake, stop and try to play it properly, then move on.
- Start at the beginning of the piece/song, and play to the end.
- Practice only pre-written music, written by people the world has deemed to be “good” songwriters or composers.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that probably 99% of hobbyist musicians would agree that’s how you “should” do music practice.
Let’s come back to the observation made at the beginning of this chapter though. Nowhere in the list above is there anything from the science of accelerated learning, which goes back over 30 years and proves conclusively that some strange and counter-intuitive methods can help you learn up to 10x faster. Nowhere there is there anything about creativity. Nor Head, Hearing or Heart… or making the connections between those and your Hands.
In fact, even though the list above might have seemed to you to be a good, diligent plan for music practice, it’s almost the exact opposite of how we would recommend practicing, if you ever want to reach your true musical potential or become more of that “Complete Musician” we talked about in Chapter 1: Musicality.
Before we continue into the details of what effective and musical practice involves, there’s an important distinction we should make. Or rather, un-make…
Practicing vs. Performing
Traditionally we distinguish between “practicing music” and “performing music”. We do our daily practice routine, trying to get the music “good enough”, and then when we’re ready we schedule a “performance” where we play our music for other people and try to nail it.
This introduces a whole host of problems when it comes to performing, which we’ll tackle in Chapter 18: Performance. But it’s also responsible for many of the problems with practicing.
The solution on both fronts is to allow that strict distinction to dissolve.
In that later chapter, we’ll look at how performance practice can help ease many of the challenges around “the big performance”. In this chapter, we’ll concern ourselves with how allowing our practicing of music to be more like a performance can both accelerate results and enhance our musicality.
This isn’t to say your practice time becomes “performing the piece/song again and again”. That would just be a different form of brute-force “massed repetition”. Without any dedicated, focused work to learn to play the notes you intend, it would be a recipe for even more frustration and lack of results.
Playing Music
To a large extent, what we’re talking about is allowing both practicing and performing to blend back towards simply “playing music”.
How often during your practice time do you currently feel like you’re really “playing music”, rather than “practicing music” or “learning music” or “playing through sections of music”?
As you read about the various techniques covered in the rest of this chapter, you’ll find that some seem like “exercises for you to practice” while others seem more like “playing around with music”. Throughout them all, I encourage you to think less in terms of “practicing” or “performing”, and more simply “playing music” or “making music”.
This in itself will help to integrate Hearing and Heart, and help to frame all of the various activities you’re doing as simply enjoying spending time in music-making.