One of the first changes to make to our “music practice” is to get away from having “practice” mean strictly “doing things with my hands on an instrument” If you’re a singer rather than an instrumentalist, the equivalent is to get away from it meaning strictly “I spend time singing the exercises and pieces I’m working on”. . Certainly that can still be a big part of how we spend our dedicated session of practice time, and we will be looking at ways to improve that. But we need to expand our idea of where and when “learning music” happens, and how musicality training can spread beyond just “Hands”.
Hopefully by this stage you’re convinced of the power and potential of developing your musicality, not just your instrument skills. But allow me to illustrate with a story…
I’m generally a pretty easy-going guy, I don’t get worked up easily. But once in a while, something will really infuriate me. It happened recently, in the context of helping one of my daughters learn to play the piano.
A friend of hers had been learning keyboard with an app. I won’t name names, but it’s one of the two or three piano apps that have become popular in recent years. My daughter was keen to try it too, so we downloaded the app, started it up, and I sat with her while she followed the instructions.
Within minutes I was flabbergasted. And utterly enraged.
It was the epitome of “turn someone into a note-reproducing robot”. Notation and a keyboard were shown on screen, with no explanation, and then the student was instructed to play the keys which light up, when they light up.
“Okay,” I thought, “maybe this is just for the first few minutes, to get them going, and then it will start actually teaching them some music.“
But no. We actually spent a couple of weeks with this app, to give it a fair shot. And it never progressed beyond “do what the light-up notes tell you to do”.
The student had no idea what the music should sound like. They weren’t helped to feel the rhythm. They couldn’t have clapped along, let along sung along. They would have no inner sense of what music they were trying to create, only the outer experience of what happens if they press the buttons somebody (or something) else tells them to press.
It was the ultimate Hands-only experience. And it drove me crazy. Because I know that even students who “succeed” with the app will wind up feeling frustrated, unmusical, and disappointed in themselves, within a few months (if not weeks, or even days).
In truth, the app was little more than a videogame—and to present itself as a way of “learning music” is, if you ask me, unforgiveable.
Even without going as far as the kinds of musicality skills we’ll be covering in Parts II and III of this book, if the app had included even a little of any one of the three off-instrument practice activities below, it could have cultivated the student’s musicality, their autonomy, their musical connection, and set them up for success and joy in music.
Let’s make sure you don’t miss that opportunity yourself, in your music practice.
If you’re reading through this book in order, these three activities will already be familiar to you, and hopefully you’ve even started practicing them yourself. Now let’s make the connection between them and what you’ve probably thought of as your “music practice” on your instrument up until now. Each of these activities can be done both during your regular practice session (i.e. when sat with your instrument) and at other times in the day, making them a wonderful way to find endless extra time for “learning music” even when you can’t sit for a full session with your instrument.
A. Active Listening
We define “Active Listening” as listening with careful attention, as opposed to “just hearing”. There’s also a particular method we recommend, of “listening with a question in mind”.
You can apply this in a wide variety of ways to support your instrument learning. The two main opportunities are:
- Listen to recordings of the music you’re learning, either by artists you admire, or recordings of yourself playing it.
- Practicing Active Listening during your instrument practice i.e. really truly listening as you play.
The benefits of the first should be clear. The more vivid your mental representation of the music you’re learning to play, the more empowered you are to craft a compelling rendition yourself. More on this when talking about Audiation, below.
The second one ties in closely with the principle of Deliberate Practice which we’ll cover later in the chapter. The more alert attention you can bring to the results of each thing you attempt to play during practice time, the more you’ll be able to adjust your approach and continually refine and improve your playing.
In both cases, if you’re learning music from notation (e.g. sheet music, chord charts, tablature) then practicing Active Listening while looking at that notation can be a valuable approach, helping you to bring life to the dots on the page and develop your instinct for how symbols and sounds relate.
As well as these two opportunities, there is also the broader Active Listening practice you may be doing, which helps build up your understanding of music. Even if it’s not with the specific pieces you’re learning to play, this time spent in listening actively will help you better understand, appreciate, and ultimately perform that music too.
For example, one of the major benefits of Active Listening is how it helps you understand the Form of a piece of music, and how each layer of the Texture is contributing during each section. That alone can do wonders for how you approach playing your own part.
We had one notable example of that inside Next Level coaching recently. One of our violin-playing clients had always struggled with overwhelm when trying to play her own part in orchestra rehearsals and performances. She could play her parts when alone in the practice room, but would make mistakes or struggle to keep up when surrounded by the full orchestra.
She was amazed at how quickly some off-instrument practice eliminated this problem for her. Simply working on her Active Listening skills and better understanding “the big picture” of the piece she was playing (including how all the orchestra sections’ parts fit together) helped her to be at ease and play her own part far more freely. What she’d thought was a limitation of her Hands turned out to be far more in the Head and Hearing, and so was most effectively addressed with a bit of direct work on those.
B. Singing
The idea here is simple: whatever you’re trying to play on your instrument, sing it. In Chapter 4: Singing, when discussing ear training, I asked the provocative question “if you can’t sing it back, are you really hearing it?” This is a big opportunity when it comes to instrument practice too.
Remember that app I mentioned above, which simply ordered the student when to play each note, without the student having any clue how the music would come out sounding?
Using Singing for off-instrument practice is the opposite of that. If you are able to sing the music you’re learning to play on your instrument, that proves you know inside how the notes should sound.
What’s remarkable is how powerful this is for identifying the source of issues in our playing. If you keep fumbling the same section of a piece, or you keep playing the same wrong note, making sure you can actually sing through that section of the music is a great way to distinguish “is this mistake in my head or my hands?” Often fixing the issue in your sung version will immediately correct it in your instrument playing too.
In a roundtable Masterclass with the Musical U team, our Instructional Curriculum Designer Anne Mileski shared a wonderful anecdote illustrating this point. When she was working on a recital piece at college, she always struggled with a certain fast passage. Her teacher asked her to sing it… and even slowly, she found she couldn’t! Once she worked on slowly singing through that sequence of notes, she was able to pick her trumpet back up and nail it. The problem wasn’t in her Hands after all.
Singing also lets you explore many of the expressive possibilities available to you, to make the music your own when you play it. We’ll explore this more in Chapter 17: Expression.
C. Audiation
If you think of some of the pieces you’ve been learning to play on an instrument or sing, could you hear them in your head, from beginning to end, with each note clear and precise in your mind’s ear?
If not, this may well be a major source of difficulties and struggles you’ve faced in learning to play it. While it’s true that written notation can “tell you what notes to play when”, until you have an internal representation of how the music should sound, everything will be harder.
That’s why proactively working on your ability to audiate the music will hugely help your success in learning to play it on your instrument.
If you also incorporate the “mental play” technique we covered in Chapter 3: Audiation, where you visualise yourself playing it on your instrument as you hear it in your mind, you can also directly tackle technical challenges and physical problem-spots in your playing.
For example, if there’s a run of notes you often fumble, practicing Audiation and Mental Play can let you very slowly run through it note-by-note, without ever touching your instrument in reality. And the somewhat magical thing is, once you iron out the kinks in your imagined playing, more often than not they disappear from your actual playing too.
As mentioned in that previous chapter, I first tried this technique while learning piano. I’d been struggling to get my right and left hand to play their parts together, even though each one could handle its own part fine. I was shocked to find that going through the music with Mental Play, really giving my brain a chance to understand how the two parts fit together, suddenly allowed my hands to work in perfect collaboration.
Remember to start audiating with very short sections at first, because your musical memory is a limiting factor. One helpful exercise to try is to make it a habit that before you play through a piece for the first time in a practice session, look through the notation and try to hear inside, measure by measure or phrase by phrase, how the music will sound.
You may well have seen professional musicians doing exactly this on a bus or a train. They’ll be sat there with their instrument in a case beside them but sheet music in hand, reading through the music with their eyes and imagining in their mind how it would sound and how they would be playing it. You might never have guessed that a trombonist could practice on a train without all the other passengers complaining! But clearly they know the very practical power of this “secret music practice skill”.
Developing Your Vivid Mental Representation
Each of these three activities—Active Listening, Singing, Audiation—will not only increase your musicality, which can then be expressed through your instrument, they can each also help directly with the tasks you’re focusing on during hands-on-instrument practice time. They can be combined with each other and with your instrument practice in an endless variety of ways, to suit what you enjoy and find to be most effective for you, personally.
All three of them can be seen as ways to help you develop a crystal-clear and vivid mental representation of the music you’re learning to play.
That’s why you’ll find that actively listening to, singing, audiating, and mentally playing the music you’re learning, even when away from your instrument, has a major impact on how fluidly and quickly you can play it when back at your instrument.
This vivid mental representation is also what lets you escape “musical roboticism” and start bringing the music out from inside you each time you play.
When we expand our practicing off-instrument, mindfully cultivating a sense of joy and fascination with the music itself, we tend to find that when we return to instrument practice, many of our musical “problems” have already been solved.