8. Practice Time Management

In this chapter so far we’ve explored a number of paradigm-shifting ideas about music practice, and for all their power and potential, they do come with a catch: the risk of overwhelm. The traditional model of having a “music practice routine” may be deeply flawed in terms of its effectiveness and how quickly it allows you to learn… but it does at least mean you can sit down each day feeling confident that you know how you’ll spend your practice time.

In this section we’ll explore a handful of ways to approach the question of “How can I design my music practice to best leverage Superlearning techniques?”

The reason there’s a risk of overwhelm when diving into Superlearning isn’t just that there are lots of options, nor that we’re removing that pre-determined “Play X for Y minutes” routine. It’s also that the entire topic involves a shift in responsibility. Rather than relying on a teacher, or a course, or some blog article to tell you how to spend your practice time, Superlearning empowers you to make all those choices yourself.

At first, that responsibility may be unnerving. Recognise the Heart challenge of stepping into that role, and really owning that your activities and results are entirely up to you. You may find it useful to jot down the thoughts and emotions it stirs up, and reflect on them.

Throughout the ages, writers, painters, musicians and all those involved in creative pursuits have faced the challenge of the “blank page” and its unlimited possibilities.

Let’s equip you with some options and ways of thinking about how to start sketching structure onto that “blank page” of the practice session. I encourage you to experiment with each for a week or two, to discover which are most useful as your regular approach, and which may be useful just occasionally.

Organisation

Before we look at ways to approach or structure things within each practice session, we must first consider the overall organisation of your music learning.

If you’re like most musicians, then up until now you’ve probably relied on outside sources to direct your music learning. That might be a teacher, a course, a website, a book, a series of grade exams, or perhaps a musician friend who mentors you.

Just like the Pillar Belief of Musical Inside And Out is about empowering you to bring music out from inside you rather than always relying on other people to tell you which notes to play when, Superlearning brings with it the opportunity to design your own music learning journey in a way that’s truly aligned with you, your background, and your own musical aspirations.

Skills

Hopefully you went through the Big Picture Vision exercise in Chapter 2: Mindset and so you have that clear “North Star” to guide you. That chapter (and the entirety of this book) is intended to provide you with a comprehensive map of all that’s possible for you, to turn that vision into reality. The H4 Model can serve as a useful way to self-evaluate. As noted in that earlier section, we use this to help musicians create a “snapshot” of their abilities each quarter inside the Next Level program, which then guides their focus in the following quarter.

The idea here isn’t to throw out all those external sources of plans and “routes”. There’s still huge value in them. But remember another of the Pillar Beliefs, Universal Potential, which says not just that we are all capable of achieving great things in music, but also that each individual musician’s path will be different. This is why all our training programs at Musical U are always designed to be highly flexible and personalisable, and why your learning journey must be too.

So you don’t need to design your own music-learning curriculum from scratch. Instead, it’s simply about that shift in responsibility and authority, empowering you to use the Plan-Play-Reflect cycle to adapt and pivot and refine your path as you go. As long as you’re drawing on good, proven resources or instruction for the Plan phase, and taking the time to really Reflect, you can avoid the plateaus, sticking points, and loss of momentum that typically happen when you blindly follow an A-Z one-size-fits-all path or course.

Repertoire

When it comes to learning new pieces or songs, the traditional approach tends to look something like this:

• Choose a piece or song that’s at your current playing level or slightly beyond it.
• Spend a few weeks or months learning and practicing it each day with a “massed repetitions” approach, perhaps leading up to some planned performance.
• Have a few pieces or songs you’re currently working on, along with some scales or other technical exercises that help you improve your playing technique, hopefully aligned with the music you’re learning (e.g. scales corresponding to the keys of the music you’re focused on).
• During practice you follow a set routine (e.g. start by warming up with scales and exercises, then work on Piece A for 10 minutes, then Piece B for 10 minutes, then Piece C for 10 minutes).
• Once you feel you’ve got the hang of those, move on to some new ones. Maybe go back to older pieces once in a while.

A typical Superlearning approach would be different in a number of key ways:

• We needn’t restrict ourselves as much when choosing new music to work on, since Deliberate Practice and Contextual Interference allow us to tackle more challenging passages more reliably and quickly.
• We’ll consciously organise our practice of pieces based on whether they are in the Encoding or the Retrieval Practice phase of being learned. You’ll want to keep a written list of which pieces are currently in which phase, and update that as needed after each practice session as part of an end-of-session Reflect step.
• We’ll be systematic about scheduling and rotating pieces which are in the Retrieval Practice phase so as to make most efficient use of our practice time and keep a far larger repertoire at a “reliably playable” level.
• If our goal is to get the music “off book”, we’ll be designing for that—either as an integrated process from the start, or a secondary process of Encoding and Retrieval Practice.
• Practice time can be sequenced in a variety of ways (examples below) but always following the Plan-Play-Reflect loop of Deliberate Practice.
• During practice we are particularly strict about limiting distractions (e.g. turn phone notifications off!) since we’ll need our full brainpower at all times. We will be especially present and mindful of what’s happening, each time around our Plan-Play-Reflect loop. We’ll make use of a metronome and audio/video recording to maximise our results.
• We’ll blur the lines between “practicing” and “performing” back towards simply “playing” and incorporate musicality-enhancing exercises like those in the previous section, so that our “learning repertoire” is not separate from our “musicality training”.

Now that we have a sense of how to organise our practice overall, let’s look at some good ways to think about how to spend time during each practice session.

Two things to remember:

1. The most important principle is simply to apply Deliberate Practice. If you made no changes to the traditional practice routine described above, but you spent the time continually going around the Plan-Play-Reflect loop during each activity, you would already see dramatically better results! Everything else we’re discussing is just further optimisation of that fundamental change.
2. The suggestions below about how to allocate time are all aimed at Encoding. Retrieval Practice defines its own best timing, so you’ll want to factor that in, but not necessarily apply the ideas below directly to pieces in the Retrieval Practice stage. For example, you can use the Interleaving method we’re about to cover by including the single play-through of a piece from your Retrieval Practice list, but you wouldn’t keep interleaving multiple play-throughs of that piece because that wouldn’t be Retrieval Practice.

Example Superlearning Session

Let’s begin with an illustration of what a practice session could look like, leveraging various Superlearning principles and techniques.

You’ve chosen what to practice and separated your choices into categories. Rather than having one huge “project” piece, you’ll have a range of repertoire in the “pipeline”.

You’ve chosen seven musical pieces/segments, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, and defined five categories:

1. A. New pieces needing slow and careful Deliberate Practice
2. Somewhat-encoded pieces, ready for more Contextual Interference
3. Short retrieval (one or two retrievals per day)
4. Long retrieval (one retrieval every 2-3 days)
5. Maintenance retrieval (one retrieval every week or two)

Thinking about the 7 pieces, you have categorised them like this:

Category	Pieces
A: Just Starting	1, 3
B: Contextual Interference	2, 7
C: Short Retrieval	6
D: Long Retrieval	5
E: Maintenance Retrieval	4

Then, during each practice session you alternate between the different categories to keep your brain fully engaged (see Interleaving below). For example:

1. Let’s say you begin with piece 1. You’re just starting with this piece, but have been listening to it a lot. So your first task may be to read through the notation slowly, reflecting and marking out the measures which you believe will be more challenging.
2. Then perhaps you switch gears to one of your “short retrieval” pieces, let’s say piece 6. You play it straight through without stopping, and make a mental note of what you’d like your brain to work on remembering, reflecting that you want to take some time later to audiate that rough spot in the pre-chorus.
3. You switch to some Contextual Interference using dotted rhythms on those rapid sixteenth notes in measures 42-47 in piece 7, noting your starting and ending top speeds.
4. Then you pick a long retrieval, piece 5, playing through once and reflecting on the progress you’ve made.
5. You then move back to piece 3, where perhaps you’re learning the melody by ear. You focus on listening and singing, again making notes on where you might want to come back later and dig deeper.
6. At this point, you come back to piece 7, but focusing this time on the expression and tone in measures 31-37.

… and so on. Always allowing your Plan-Play-Reflect cycle to determine the path of your practice.

This “jumping around” during a practice session might initially seem strange and scatter-brained to you, but in fact there’s good reason to allocate practice time like this…