Go from beginner to intermediate
musician with eight ways double your practice results
These suggestions will get you more improvement on your instrument for your practice time investment. It will help you move from focusing intently on hitting the right notes at the right time to being able to focus on the subtleties and emotional impact of the music you play. Special thanks to Charles Wolzien and Darren Jacobson who pointed out several of the following insights.
The metronome is the first and most fundamental tool for practicing. You should have the metronome running 80% of the time as you practice. The metronome not only improves your sense of time, it keeps you honest. One of the most common mistakes a beginner makes as he practices is to play the easy parts at tempo and to slow down in the difficult sections.
The recorder allows you to listen to what you are playing. As a beginning musician you will be very focused on getting the right notes out at the right time. This makes it difficult to listen to what you are playing. You can use the sound recorder on your laptop, your cell phone’s voice recorder, the greeting recorder on your answering machine, or you can purchase a portable digital recorder. It helps immensely to hear yourself played back, even if it isn’t high fidelity, to determine what aspects and portions of the piece you need to work on.
Practice the portions and practice the performance of your music. Spend 50% of your time practicing sections of the music. Spend 20% of the time practicing the performance of an entire piece without stopping (no matter what) as though you had an audience. Spend 10% of your time listening to what you have recorded. The rest of the time can be reserved for scales, long tones and instrument specific activities not related to the pieces you are learning.
Structure your practice based on the amount of time you plan to practice. Determine which pieces you will practice, which sections of which pieces you will focus on and how much time you will practice your performance before you start. This allows you to focus your practice and make the time allocations described above.
Practice perfect music. If you slow the metronome enough, you can hit the right notes at the right time for most pieces. Do not increase the speed of the metronome until you have played the section perfectly three times. This will ensure you are practicing the music perfectly and not learning it with your repeated mistakes built in.
Break it down into tiny pieces. Do not play the entire measure or bar that gives you trouble. Play just the three note pattern that gives you trouble. This will allow you to practice the trouble spot one hundred times instead of just ten times in three minutes. Use the metronome as you do this and do not increase tempo until you play the three notes perfectly at the current speed ten times. If you make a mistake twice in a row, drop the metronome speed by a few ticks per second.
Break a section of music down as many ways as possible until you can play it perfect. Start with just the rhythm without the pitch, or just the left hand, or just the right hand or without the harmony part. Pull out as many pieces as possible, until you can do it perfectly. Add the other pieces of the puzzle back in when you can play just the rhythm or left hand perfectly. Once you can play with good rhythm, pitch, timbre and dynamics then start increasing the metronome speed.
Start from the end of the piece. You will invariable play the first part of the piece twice as often as the end of a piece. So break the piece into two to sixteen measure portions and start perfecting the last portion first. Work your way backwards through the piece. Remember don’t spend too much time on a four measure section if what really gives you trouble is a couple of three note combinations.
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