I’ve been teaching my course on practicing, and something has come up that is one of the great mysteries of practice – no matter how good we get at practicing, and we’re using the best that is available, it takes time to get to where we want to be, even though we make much greater progress, much more quickly.
It is something I’ve thought about for years, and it, or at least some of it, is coming into focus for me. Since I’ve heard no other plausible explanation, or any at all, I thought I’d share it with you.
I’ll also got some solutions you can try.
Some background – I’m just wrapping up a course in which we’ve learned how to develop retrieval practice, contextual interference and deliberate practice meaningfully into our work. Heck, we spend four weeks on spacing alone!
By the time we get to the last week we’ve put the whole, first level, picture together. A process, like a conveyor belt, through which all problems in our playing can go through and come out better, a lot better.
But what if that doesn’t get things to the final tempo? After all that work, and all that improvement – it sounds better, cleaner, smoother, is easier to play, and much faster – what do we do now?
The answer is not obvious, but then again if the answers to practicing were obvious most of us wouldn’t be searching for answers.
I searched for years, and tens of thousands of hours. I’ll save you some of that time!
There is a formula we can go through to make far greater progress in practice than most anyone knows about, but it still takes months and years to get to much higher levels of playing
The formula, at the end of the day, is making demonstrable improvement every practice, while simultaneously pursuing higher level development over longer time periods by doing things such as spacing, punctuated by even longer periods away from previous material, leading to what feels like a sudden, large, overall improvement in ability.
The map of the progression looks a bit like a staircase of levels in which we make huge leaps in our ability, with little ‘plateaus’ in which we make regular, smaller, but significant, progress in between.
When we are doing the ‘dance’ between strategies for improving tough sections in our music the last step of the first phase is to take 5-7 days off from playing or practicing it. Don’t touch it. Then bring it back and see what has happened.
We’ll find that putting things aside, and not working on them in strategic ways after having worked very hard, and with the right strategies, for a long period, will actually provide surprising improvement.
In fact, we all do this in some non-strategic ways.
One thing that happens, inevitably, over time, is learning new music. At some point we get bored and move on, or our teacher moves us on, or it is a new semester in music school and we start new music, but over time we always move on to new things.
If we think about it, any music we learn at that point is contextual interference for the music on which we have worked previously.
It is on the same instrument, uses the same notes, fingerings, etc, THE SAME MOTOR SKILLS with little intellectual/technical variations in wildly different ways.
Exposure to a lot of new music while taking significant time off other music, even learning some music quickly to about 85% accuracy in performance, then moving on, is great for our overall, long-term development.
Why do we allow this to happen to us randomly? Why don’t we control it and get everything we can out of this by doing it in strategic ways in our practice?
And that brings us to a solution for overall development of at tempo, excellent performance over longer periods of time.
Returning to previous music after spending a long time off working on new material makes us better at everything from wherever we left off.
Why not pull out some old music you have not played in a long time and try this – slowly play it all the way through with, or without, the music at two different times in practice. Accept all mistakes and confusion. Don’t work on it.
If you can’t play some of it just go past that, and pick up where you can. This will be hard because you will not play well. Your retrieval will be weak.
Then do that again for two more practices. Go very slow. In the fourth practice see where you are and do some work on it. You are going to be surprised.
Try it with one thing. What do you have to lose?
Learn a lot of new music that is easy or at least a good bit easier than some of the other stuff you are trying to play. The work you have to do in learning it is the contextual interference, and you also get to participate in the all too rare event of playing something from start to finish as it should be played. There is a lot to be said for that.
I’ve also noticed that we get a library of movements in long term memory of certain patterns. The more of these we learn, and then test out in different contexts, the better we get at them. Whether it is a really common basic chord on the guitar or piano, or basic arpeggio fingering on a flute or clarinet, when we see it while learning music we learn that part more quickly than less common, or completely new, things. Like an open C chord on the guitar in a classical guitar arpeggio.
The more things we learn, the more exposure we have to a huge variety of movements, the bigger our library even if we encounter them in ‘easier’ music (and get them into long term memory).
All of this applies to our mental model as well. The more we learn and experience about practicing, the more we can see and hear things that we could not before, and the better solutions we generate for problems.
Another reason it takes so long to develop is that we have to find, by luck and picking up tips and tricks, the many things we can do to practice best. It can take years.
It happens that The Practiclass™ (a monthly masterclass on practicing) can be a significant part of this short and long term growth. You’ll see these techniques applied in different ways, with different levels of players, in different styles on different instruments.
This is called ‘multivariate experience’ in the learning research, and is crucial, but can be hard to come by.
So I explain the unique strategies I design at the moment, and how we can all do this in practice.
Two hours of learning. For the first hour two people get personal coaching to find unique solutions to problems they face in their practice. We won’t know what we instrument, music, or level of learner (beginning to professional) we’re dealing with until it starts, and you’ll see the development of unique strategies, developed by a leading expert, in real item. While this happens observers are taught how to do it in their practice, and the basics of the underlying neuro and cognitive science.
Coaching is by volunteer, so you can apply for the one to one coaching, and solve a longstanding problem
It is the best value in music learning, by far.
Here is a Special Offer for anyone reading this post.
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