4. Courageous Music Practice

It’s time to introduce the most powerful principle in Superlearning. But before we do, I need to give a little warning.

See, when we first taught the techniques you’re about to learn, in the Musical Superlearning course we created with Gregg Goodhart, we faced an unusual problem.

Up until then, our courses had generally been very positively received by the students going through them. They enjoyed the process, they had a good time learning, and they were generally delighted with the results.

This time it was different. For the first week or two of the course, there was actually a lot of griping and complaining! The musicians going through it were really not enjoying the experience. That came as a bit of a painful surprise to us on the team. But when we looked at what exactly was causing the negative emotions, it all became clear.

In the years since, we’ve refined and expanded our approach to Superlearning, and the way you’ll be exploring it in this chapter is designed to help you keep Enjoying the Journey :) Most notably, by integrating musicality training and combining all four H’s, rather than it being a strictly Head-and-Hands experience.

But there is still one point of potential frustration which I need to alert you to in advance.

When you first start practicing music the way you’re about to discover, it can be very uncomfortable. It can feel like you’re actually getting a lot more things “wrong” than you were before. On top of that, recruiting the whole brain for the task at hand is (by definition) more tiring than when the brain is just coasting along.

This can make the whole thing a challenge in the “Heart” sense, as you experience thoughts and emotions that could discourage and derail you.

The good news is threefold: you will experience greater progress and results than ever before. You will find new ways to enhance your musicality while learning new repertoire and instrument skills. And, just like regulars at the gym come to enjoy the burning sensation in their muscles that means they’re making progress, you will come to genuinely enjoy what Gregg Goodhart calls “the blearn”: the “burn of learning”.

Now that you know to expect this experience to be somewhat uncomfortable at first, it needn’t discourage or derail you. But this is why we’ve titled this section “Courageous Music Practice”—because ultimately it will take some courage on your part to try doing things such a different way, and persist long enough to see the big payoff. For some people that will be instant, as one of these techniques may let you finally crack something you’ve been struggling with for ages. For others, it may take a week or two before things click and you start to see your results transform.

Remember Growth Mindset, Beginner’s Mind, and Trial and Improvement mindset. Tak Courag, and stick with it!

Deliberate Practice: Plan, Play, Reflect

Probably the single biggest discovery in the scientific field of accelerated learning comes from the great Professor Anders Ericsson, whom I had the honour of interviewing before he passed away.

He conducted the pioneering research into the question of where “talent” comes from. Was it genetic? Inexplicable magic? Or were the “talented” individuals in various fields, from sports, to literature, to art and music, actually doing something differently to everybody else.

As we covered in Chapter 2: Mindset, the research revealed clearly that “talent” was essentially a myth. All the accomplishments and abilities of so-called “talented” musicians, artists, sportspeople, and other experts had been gained through a vast amount of a particular kind of learning activity.

Ericsson named this different kind of learning, which all the seemingly-talented experts have been doing, “Deliberate Practice”.

The defining trait which distinguishes it from the blind brute-force “massed repetitions” approach, is introducing a “reflection” step, where you analyse how things went and what you might try differently next time.

In the music context we can see Deliberate Practice as having three parts which operate in a repeated cycle:

1. Plan
2. Play
3. Reflect

The traditional “massed repetition” approach is to simply Plan then Play. We pick what we’re going to run through, then we play it. Repeat. Hope it gets better. (And be disappointed when it generally doesn’t.)

In fact, if we’re honest, often even the “Plan” step is skipped. We show up for a practice session and somewhat mindlessly run through our routine. We feel like we did our duty because we did the “Play” step. But we aren’t even making thoughtful plans about what to play, or how to play it differently each time through.

With Deliberate Practice, we introduce a “Reflect” step, where we pay careful attention to what just happened, and we use what we observe to influence our next “Plan”.

For example, you might be working on a certain two-measure phrase, which you just can’t seem to play at the target tempo. It’s fine when you play it slowly, but you make several errors when trying to play it faster.

You might Reflect that you’re always late playing the third note—so you Plan to try moving your finger a little earlier to hit that one. Or you might Reflect and notice that actually your finger is landing a little off-target which is why half the time you play the wrong note in that spot—so you Plan to be more intentional about that finger placement at that moment. Or you might Reflect and realise you’re obeying the “instructions” on the page, but actually your mental representation of that passage is a bit of a blurry jumble of notes—so you Plan to slowly play it through note-by-note and then audiate it after, to build a better mental representation of what you’re trying to play.

There are various ways to explain why introducing this “Reflect” step is so effective.

One is that this kind of intentional reflection “wakes up” the brain more fully, activating its learning processes. It also allows us to thoughtfully troubleshoot and problem-solve, which greatly shortcuts the learning process by helping us jump more quickly to an effective way to do the task at hand.

You can also think in terms of conscious and subconscious mind. The traditional “massed repetition” approach is relying on our subconscious mind to somehow automatically make us better at the task through sheer repetition. And while the subconscious mind is incredibly powerful, we need to set it up for success by giving it something to work with. The “Reflect” step is using our conscious mind to feed some new experiments and experiences to our subconscious mind, which can then figure out the new neural pathways needed for success.

And finally, I like to think of it as a way to become your own best teacher. By conducting a new little “experiment” each time around the Plan-Play-Reflect cycle, you discover for yourself the most effective ways to move your muscles and play the notes you intend to, a skill which itself becomes better and better over time. You become both student and teacher, as you continually optimise your own learning process.

One reason I like this “becoming your own best teacher” framing so much is that it sets the scene for integrating the various musicality aspects we’ll explore below. You are empowered to choose the “experiment” to run next at any given time, and use it not just to “get the notes right” but to move you along the path to your own Big Picture Vision, developing exactly the kind of musicality you care most about.

Recording and Honesty

Remember those frustrated students I mentioned going through our original course on Superlearning? As you start using Deliberate Practice, it’s common to find that things seem to be getting worse instead of better.

While part of that comes from the “Desirable Difficulty” technique you’ll read about in the next section, part may also be due to the fading away of what is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect (named after the researchers who first described it).

They discovered that people learning a new subject or skill area are prone to over-estimating their own expertise. In music that means we believe that we are playing better than we really are.

For example, imagine that you’ve listened to that one particular David Gilmore solo hundreds of times. You may now have such a strong and emotionally meaningful mental representation of that remembered version that when you go to play it you’re actually hearing David Gilmore rather than yourself!

When we start leveraging Deliberate Practice, our perceptions and reflections sharpen, and we begin to see more clearly what’s really going on and what we want to improve.

If you’re feeling truly courageous, you’ll want to start using recording as a regular part of your music practice. Audio (or even video) recording is a great way to keep ourselves honest about our playing.

You can use any physical or software audio recording device, including a recorder app on your phone or tablet. Generally the audio quality of any modern device will be sufficient to enable an effective “Reflect” step, so don’t let concerns about microphones, audio gear or room acoustics hold you back from starting to record yourself.

I recommend starting today. This may be painful at first, but “the truth will set you free”.

Once you know the actual problems and limitations you are dealing with, you can use the Plan-Play-Reflect process of Deliberate Practice (as well as the more specific techniques we’ll cover in the rest of the chapter) to do something about them. It will take much less time, and produce much greater success than if you rely solely on listening in the moment as you play.

Metronome in Mind

Along with recording, one powerful (yet intimidating!) tool at our disposal is the good old metronome. When a musician says they “can’t play something” or that they “always make mistakes”, generally the reality is that they can play the music if they play through it very slowly, thinking carefully about each note in turn—but they can’t play it at the target tempo without playing wrong notes or making other mistakes.

So tempo is always a factor in music practice, and many of the Superlearning techniques introduced in the rest of this chapter need to be done as part of varying our playing speed to gradually work towards a successful play-through at the target tempo.

When it comes to “getting a piece up to speed”, the traditional brute-force “massed repetition” solution is to keep trying, again and again, gradually increasing the tempo bit by bit, and hoping our fingers somehow figure out how to play it correctly at each new faster speed. We treat it like lifting weights at the gym, where we want to add a little bit of weight each time we do the exercise, and let the muscle grow stronger each time.

That does work, to some extent. But the limiting factor is almost never how fast our fingers can physically move. Coming back to the H4 Model, we need to make sure none of the “legs of our chair” are too short—and often the Head and Hearing (i.e. your brain’s mental representation of how to play it correctly) are actually the weak points, rather than your Hands.

So taking that traditional approach of simply increasing metronome speed bit-by-bit is actually painfully inefficient, compared to more intentionally helping the brain to form that “ideal mental representation” of how to play the piece correctly. The Contextual Interference techniques you’ll learn about below do exactly that. But to use them most effectively, you’ll need to form a new friendship with your metronome.

For many musicians, the metronome is synonymous with feeling pressured. It’s always ticking, seemingly faster and faster, as we struggle to make our speed goals. That way of using the metronome only creates more tension, and tension is the greatest enemy of speed and fluency in our musical expression.

Let’s also call out the elephant in the room. Many musicians don’t even use a metronome in the practice room, except perhaps momentarily, to get a sense of the tempo they should be practicing a piece at.

Just like recording ourselves, playing along with a metronome forces a brutal honesty during practice, and it’s easy to just shy away from that, and wing it during practice instead.

Here’s the thing though. Most of our discomfort and disagreement with the metronome arises from misunderstanding as to what it is for and how it can even become a powerful friend in our quest for musical Superlearning.

The Metronome and Mental Representations

We’ve been talking about trying to form the “ideal” mental representation in the brain. If we imagine ourselves able to successfully perform a piece at the target tempo, that ability exists in the brain as a set of neural pathways which enable our body to carry out the actions required to pull it off.

The metronome can help us by creating a type of sonic “grid” in our brain that helps us to organise where all our notes go relative to the beat. This happens at both a conscious and subconscious level.

This function can be completely separated from the idea of speed. Instead, we focus on lining everything up with the beat until our brains have a crystal-clear idea of the placement of each musical event. In other words, we can use the metronome to tidy up the rhythm of our mental representation of the music, which actually produces greater confidence and relaxation.

Once this is done, changing tempo (faster or slower) becomes a separate task, and is much easier and more enjoyable!

Again, many of the problems and mistakes which crop up when we try playing a piece faster don’t come from some physical limitation of our bodies. They come from our brain’s mental representation of the music being too fuzzy. A large part of that fuzziness tends to be the rhythms and how they relate to the “grid” of the beat.

Re-introducing Metronome: Your Practice Buddy and Jam Partner

It’s understandable why many musicians see the metronome as a tyrant and an enemy. But the metronome is there to teach us about the beautiful dance between beat and rhythm. While it may seem to be just a machine, the metronome helpfully shows us where the beat is, which is the thing that all our rhythms relate to.

So celebrate this relationship and shift your attitude to the metronome. Pay attention to the sound and timbre of the click, and jam with it as if it were your best musical friend sitting in the room with you. In your mind, make that click a part of the musical experience, and engage fully in your musical conversation with the metronome.

You’ll enjoy yourself more, and internalise your own inner sense of the beat on a profound level, which will accelerate all your rhythm learning.

A great way to get started with this is as follows:

Notice that these kinds of exercises do not require clicking up faster and faster! Yet the more you do this kind of exercise, the more you improve your sense of the interplay between beat and rhythm, and the easier you’ll find it to play music at faster tempos. In other words, even without leveraging the various Superlearning techniques introduced below, simply practicing more mindfully with the metronome will help you achieve more success faster in learning new music.

It’s also worth noting that often the difference between a good-sounding musician and a great-sounding musician comes down largely to their rhythmic precision. As listeners, we tend to appreciate the difference subconsciously, but just imagine a player who always places each and every note in exactly the right place in time to perfectly synchronise with the other musicians and convey just the right groove or most impactful phrasing. That’s what spending time “jamming” mindfully with your metronome can unlock for you.

Click Up, Click Down

When we separate the tasks of rhythmic precision and speed, our brains seem to breathe a sigh of relief! We are saying to our brains that no matter how fast or slow the metronome goes, everything is still locked in place.

The traditional way of using the metronome to increase speed is to keep clicking it up, faster and faster. This creates tension, as each faster speed is expected to be “harder”—and tension is just the opposite of what we need to play quickly and joyfully.

Here’s a simple but magical exercise which reinforces the message that rhythmic precision is the same at any tempo, and does marvels to keep us from tensing up at faster speeds:

We have found it to be surprisingly effective if you don’t make huge leaps, but instead wiggle around in “close quarters”. For example, 102, 103, 101, 105, 107, 104 etc.

Don’t worry if your repetitions are not perfect! Just play through once at each tempo and move on. If you find yourself tensing up, you may want to wiggle the speed downwards. If not, try wiggling upwards until you are at your target speed (and faster).

It’s also quite possible that slower speeds will be more difficult. What this tells you is that you still haven’t locked in the separation between the speed of the beat and the precision of where the rhythms fall inside it. If this is your experience, you’ll be surprised how much good wiggling around at slow tempos does for your high-speed playing.

One final comment on the topic of metronomes and tempo. We’ll be exploring this further in Chapter 18: Performance, but it’s valuable to know now that if you want to be able to reliably perform a piece at a certain tempo, you’ll actually want to aim for 10-20% above that tempo during practice. This adds further resilience to your playing abilities, since if you can comfortably and reliably play a 100 BPM piece at 120 BPM during practice, to play it at “just” 100 BPM will feel far more relaxed than if you’ve only ever got it up to 100 BPM during practice. In other words, it adds a buffer which can help shield you against a variety of performance-time challenges.

It takes courage to truly engage with the metronome like this, and examine precisely how well you are playing at different speeds. As you start to play around with the metronome in this more exploratory and creative way, you will find your relationship with it changing, as it helps you to uncover hidden problem spots and resolve them effectively.

Believe in Yourself

The Dunning-Kruger Effect (over-estimating your own expertise) seems to have grim implications, but it has a powerful upside potential too.

In Greek mythology, the sculptor Pygmalion carves a statue so beautiful that he falls in love with his creation, beyond all realistic hopes. The Goddess Aphrodite sees his plight and brings the statue to life so it can return his love.

Psychologists have noted that those who have high, even unrealistic expectations, tend to achieve greatly improved performance—often beyond what an outside observer may have thought possible. They call this the “Pygmalion Effect”.

So how do we reconcile the “emperor has no clothes” aspect of Dunning-Kruger with the limitless potential of Pygmalion?

Simply believing in yourself can be more powerful than either one.

If you chose to pick up this book and read this far, you must believe in yourself enough to think that you might be capable of the wild-sounding promises of dramatically faster music learning and becoming something like the “Complete Musician” we described in Chapter 1: Musicality.

So when the going gets tough, remind yourself of the belief that first set you on this new journey: that there is, in fact, a better way to learn music and achieve your musical dreams, and that you can and will find that better way for yourself.

Plan-Play-Reflect All The Things, All The Time

The most common interpretation and application of Deliberate Practice is for small-scale, minute-to-minute practicing during a practice session. And it is indeed a tremendous process for that. Using it in that way alone will transform the effectiveness of every minute you spend practicing.

However, as you start to tune in to the Deliberate Practice way of thinking, you’ll soon realise that this Plan-Play-Reflect process can exist on all timescales and at all levels of your musical life.

For example, when you have a big recital or performance coming up, naturally you’ll Plan for it, and then you’ll Play (i.e. do the performance itself). But how often do you bother to really Reflect afterwards? You could make it a habit to take even a few minutes after each performance to self-assess, or possibly even listen back to a recording, and make the observations that can feed into preparing to make your next performance even better (i.e. your next “Plan”).

Another example would be in organising your musicality training. Guided by the “North Star” of your Big Picture Vision, you should have a clear sense of the direction you want to go. Reading through this book will arm you with a whole array of options for exploring in that direction. Next you’ll need to Plan what you’re actually going to put into action. You’ll need to follow through on that (i.e. Play, in both the musical and the playground sense of the word!) And then you’ll want to periodically Reflect, perhaps each day, week, month or quarter, to assess how the Plan is working out and what adjustments might be helpful.

So you see, this Plan-Play-Reflect cycle of Deliberate Practice is more than just a practice room routine. It’s really an iterative optimisation process that can be applied throughout your musical journey, to help you have more success faster in every area.

I’ll mention the key point one more time: most of us already Plan and Play by default. It’s adding that intentional “Reflect” step and feeding the observations back into a revised Plan which makes all the difference in the results you’ll enjoy.