Here’s an example schedule for Encoding and doing Retrieval Practice on a new piece of music, or most likely a particular segment of a piece:
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Stage 1: Encoding Off Instrument (1-3 days)
Before bringing in the instrument, it’s a good idea to get to know the music as much as possible.
Goal: to gain as much mental and emotional familiarity with the music as possible before beginning with instrument.
You can use any or all of the following:
- Active Listening to a recording (if available)
- Active Listening with notation (if available)
- Singing
- Audiating
Stage 2: Encoding On Instrument (1-3 days)
Step 1:
Goal: full comprehension of the rhythms and pitches at a playable tempos.
- Sight-reading (and/or Playing By Ear)
- Slow playing with Deliberate Practice
Step 2:
Goal: music playable all the way through, at ~50% or more of target tempo.
Add various Contextual Interference techniques, metronome techniques, and Deliberate Practice to be able to play the whole thing at a certain tempo (no matter how slow) with about 80-90% accuracy.
Optional: if your intent is to get “off book” (i.e. play without notation in front of you), this stage is the best time to start! It may take a little longer, but it will be easier in the long run than if you wait until after your first round of Retrieval Practice.
Decision point:
Listen to the message of your mistakes. Are you making identifiable mistakes consistently in certain places more than 50% of the time? If so, return to Step 1 for those segments.
Are your mistakes more random? If so, move on to Stage 3: Retrieval Practice.
Stage 3: Retrieval Practice
Remember, no matter what happens, you will only play the piece once per retrieval. No stopping, and no “going over” anything. Contrary to Master Yoda’s wisdom, trying does count!
- Day 1: Interleave 3 retrievals with other things you’re practicing, with at least 10 minutes between retrievals.
- Day 2: Retrieve twice, with 30 minutes to several hours between retrievals.
- Days 3-6: Retrieve just once per day.
- Day 7: Retrieve once, reflect, then play through several times at different tempos (faster and slower). Reflect and do some Deliberate Practice for any opportunities which came up. Then play through again.
- Day 8: Decision point: Listen to the message of your mistakes.
Are you playing at a satisfactory tempo with very few mistakes? Hooray! Put the piece into longer cycles of Retrieval to keep it in your repertoire. Alternately, you may want to return to Deliberate Practice targeting certain aspects of expression, emotion, etc.
Are you still making random mistakes? Continue Retrieval Practice, perhaps lengthening the time between retrievals to two days or more.
Are there certain sections that are still troublesome? Cycle them through Stage 1 and Stage 2.
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Notice that once a piece moves into Retrieval Practice, the total number of retrievals (i.e. play-throughs) is actually very small, compared with the traditional “massed repetition” approach, where you might try playing it 3-5 times a day, every day, for weeks before a big performance. This is where the huge efficiency gains come from.
Remember at the beginning of this section, when we talked about the struggle of building up your repertoire, because so much time needs to be spent just keeping it all “fresh”? Spaced Repetitions provide the solution. As you can see, it’s possible to keep far more music in the later stages of Retrieval Practice, and continually “fresh”, because so many fewer repetitions are required when they are spaced efficiently.
And that coaching client I mentioned, who’d been spending 2-3 hours a day just keeping her repertoire playable? Once she switched to this approach, she found she could easily keep everything “fresh” with just a fraction of the practice time each day.
Now clearly this is a very different way to approach “learning new music”. Don’t let that overwhelm you!
As a starting point, try taking an inventory of the various music you’ve learned to play so far, and categorise which are currently in the “Encoding” phase, which could be moved to “Retrieval” phase, and which you can reliably Retrieve. Then you can start designing your practice to include the right kind of practice on the right items, and get more and more of them to the point where you can successfully play them any time you like, at the drop of a hat.
Remember to stay agile. With everything mentioned above, Creative Superlearning is ultimately about developing the art of practicing, through the experience and wisdom gained through a Deliberate Practice mindset. Trying things, seeing what they do, making adjustments, and so on, taking full ownership of and responsibility for your learning journey.
First Retrieval
There’s one final important thing to be aware of when doing Spaced Repetitions, and Retrieval Practice in general. We mentioned above that we expect play-throughs to be a bit rocky each time you practice retrieving the music from memory. That’s to be expected, and exactly what is necessary to gradually firm up that mental representation.
However, this can also happen when you “dust off” an old piece for the first time in a long time… and that doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten it!
For example, suppose you’ve gone through the Retrieval Practice process described above and you think you’ve got a piece locked in tight. A few weeks pass, and you decide to play it again. You find yourself stumbling, hesitating, playing wrong notes.
At this point it’s easy to think you haven’t successfully Encoded it, or haven’t done enough Retrieval Practice.
But that so-called “first retrieval” is a special case. You have to re-awaken the parts of the brain that were storing that mental representation, or “dust off the cobwebs” so to speak. The first play-through will do that for you, but your playing may not come out perfectly.
The good news is that once that “first retrieval” has been done, subsequent play-throughs immediately after should go far more smoothly. (If they don’t, then you may indeed need to put the piece back into the “Retrieval Practice” phase, or possibly even back to further Encoding.)
If you’re preparing for a big performance, simply playing through the music in the hour or two before showtime will serve as that “first retrieval” and make sure the memories are fresh enough to enable a successful play-through when the time comes.
As you start making use of the Retrieval Practice process described above, this is just something to be aware of: the first retrieval isn’t generally representative of how well you’ve learned the music. So don’t be discouraged if you thought you’d really learned something well and then find yourself stumbling again when you return to it. Most likely you have learned it well, and just need to allow that “First Retrieval” to refresh the mental representation you had successfully stored.