In 2010 I read a book that marked the beginning of what I might term my true musical awakening. It was not something from music history or theory. Not even Quantz! It was the book Bounce by Matthew Syed, an Olympic-champion table tennis player. The book explores the neuroscience behind human achievement, and I cannot possibly recommend it highly enough. It was this book that started me on the road to codifying my ideas about musicianship and practice. The final golden rule, discussed below, was one of the first of these developed ideas.

Around the same time I read Bounce, I had begun to wonder how I could help my private students improve more effectively. Their progress in lessons was great, but they often seemed to stall between our sessions. This led me to believe that there was something in the way my students were practicing that wasn't helping them attain lasting improvement. This hypothesis resulted in what I call the "practicing lesson," a tool I still use today.

In a practicing lesson, I would take 40-50% of the lesson time to watch a student practice and make notes of good and bad habits that impacted their learning. In the remainder of the lesson, I walked them through an alternative practice session, highlighting good habits and correcting bad habits. The real lesson for me, as the teacher, was the degree to which my students needed these sessions, given how little they seemed to know about practicing. And why should they know anything about practicing? No one, including me, had taught them how to practice! TEACHER FAIL.

In short, my students truly believed that any and all time spent at home with flute in hand = practicing. However, as every pro knows, this is not the case, as vividly stated by Syed in Bounce, building upon the writings of Malcolm Gladwell: "Purposeful practice also builds new neural connections, increases the size of specific sections of the brain, and enables the expert to co-opt new areas of gray matter in the quest to improve.... We can now see that the very process of building knowledge transforms the hardware in which the knowledge is stored and operated.... You can purchase access to this prime neural real estate only by building up a bank deposit of thousands of hours of purposeful practice. That, if you like, is the price of excellence."

It was the "purposeful" part that was missing from my students' practicing. Instead of giving their practice purpose by systematically addressing and fixing problems/mistakes (as I discuss at length in The Scientific Method of Practicing), students were either playing through problematic passages repeatedly, hoping the problems would fix themselves (violating Golden Rule #1 of Practicing) or worse, playing through exercises, etudes, pieces, etc., and ignoring problems altogether (which, when done repeatedly, breaks Golden Rule #4 of Practicing).

This led to a simple maxim, which I gave to my students and which has now become the final Golden Rule.

Golden Rule #5 of Practicing: Playing is not practicing.

I love that what we do as musicians is generally referred to as "play." This descriptor directly recalls the sense of joy I presume we have all felt when we have made music, and we should set aside time with our instruments simply to play and explore, when the only purpose is enjoyment. As essential as it is, however, this act in no way approximates the painstaking process of setting and achieving goals that is practice. While playing and practicing are well worth our time, for those of us willing to pay Syed's "price of excellence," more of our temporal currency must be spent on practicing.

As I tell my students, "Practicing might not be as fun as playing, but do you know what is fun? BEING A TOTAL BOSS ON YOUR INSTRUMENT. And that's what happens when you bank enough hours practicing."

With that, let the church say, "Amen." Happy Holidays!

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Need a boost in your practicing? I am now available for practicing lessons in person in Dallas and online via Skype! Contact me for information and rates.

Finally, if you like this post, then you'll love The Scientific Method of Practicing, where the underlying information is covered in detail. Head over to the publications page to pick up a copy.

"Perfect practice makes perfect." Or "If you never make a mistake, you'll never make a mistake." Thus spaketh many great musicians and teachers, past and present. And while I am a proponent of making friends with mistakes, as I discussed briefly last week and write about at some length in The Scientific Method of Practicing, there is a central kernel of truth in these epigrams. While actively trying to avoid mistakes is itself to be avoided, it is perhaps worse to repeat them (see Golden Rule #1 of Practicing). Ergo, the next golden rule, a corollary of Rule #1:

Golden Rule of Practicing #4: Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat--but only when it's right.

Repetition has a hallowed place in the practice of effective musicians (as well as artists of any stripe, scientists, mathematicians, historians, etc.). Dr. Robert Duke, Head of Music and Human Learning at The University of Texas at Austin, writes about this from a psychological point of view in his excellent book, Intelligent Music Teaching: "Repetition is the mechanism through which habit strength develops. The more often we repeat a given behavior, the more that behavior becomes a part of what we do."

This statement is so true that it plays out on a biological level in our brains, thanks to a material called myelin. Daniel Coyle writes about this phenomenon in his influential book, The Talent Code: "Every human skill...is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse.... [The neural insulator] myelin's vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster.... When we fire our circuits in the right way--when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note--our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become."

In other words, Dr. Duke could just as well have said that what we do repeatedly becomes part of us, so it is important that we repeat what we want to be and don't repeat what we don't want to be. If we want to be great musicians, we have to play great, repeatedly. However, it is impossible to do that without embracing and processing our problems. In certain circumstances, as Noa Kageyama cites in his indispensable blog, The Bulletproof Musician, this process can be jump started by--gasp!--purposely exaggerating our mistakes.

Once we truly understand our problems, we can begin to choose to play differently, to play better, and that's the choice we should make over and over, starting on the scale of the individual problem. We should play any formerly problematic passage well, repeatedly, immediately after fixing it.

How much is repeatedly? Some teachers say five times in a row; others say seven or ten. I like to go for broke and set the bar at 15-20 times, allowing for one or two outliers. However, out of 15-20 attempts, if more than one or two go astray, I consider the problem not to be fixed after all and set about solving it again. After all, as Dave Booth commented on my Golden Rule #1 of Practicing, from his teacher Rupert Neary: "If you play it wrong once, remember that, and don't do it again. But if you forget, and play it wrong twice, mark it, because if you play it wrong three times, you are practicing it."

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If you want info like this regularly, subscribe to Dr. Tim's Teaching Tips on the right! I promise you'll only be emailed with new blog posts, never spam. You can also add the blog to your RSS feed.

Finally, if you like this post, then you'll love The Scientific Method of Practicing, where the underlying information is covered in detail. Head over to the publications page to pick up a copy.

Happy December, everyone! Picking up where we left off last time, and in the spirit of the shopping season, I'm giving you a two-for-one special. To start:

Golden Rule #2 of Practicing: You must understand the problem before you can fix the problem.

Mindfulness, our old friend! We meet again. We cannot fix problems if we are not aware that they are happening, as discussed last time. This relies on the development of a discerning ear, which is best guided by studying with a great teacher, one who will lovingly bug students about every little problem.

Once we begin to perceive problems, however, we must deepen our awareness. Where exactly is the problem? What exactly is the problem? Do we know what might be causing the problem? Questions like these lead us to understand the issues encapsulated by problems. After all, many problems we hear are just symptoms of greater, underlying problems. "Cracked note? Well, you're going to keep cracking notes until we get that air support in order!" (This could lead me down one of my favorite rabbit holes, the importance of daily fundamentals, but I'll choose not to digress just now.)

We must therefore seriously examine a problem before it can be solved, a fact that escapes many students in their rush to jump in and make improvements. Neglecting such examination frequently results in misdirected effort and, consequently, misspent time, as we haphazardly try out solutions to problems we do not fully understand. In these instances, if a worthy solution is found, it is thanks to luck, rather than wisdom or skill, and there is no guarantee that the problem won't recur. This is precisely why we should make friends with our mistakes, as I discuss in The Scientific Method of Practicing: the better we understand our problems, the more likely it is we can fix them for good.

This brings us to:

Golden Rule #3 of Practicing: Always practice the smallest amount you can to fix a problem.

Years of using the questions above to analyze playing problems has led me to this truth: 90% of problems (a conservative estimate) are rooted in the performance of 1-2 notes. Despite this, many students will play extended passages over and over again, hoping for improvement. Convincing students (including ourselves) to invest time and energy in the 1-2 notes that constitute the heart of a problem can be surprisingly difficult. Many feel as though the volume of work they have in front of them simply won't allow for the luxury of spending precious practice minutes on 1-2 notes at a time, a sentiment related to the previously described impulse to jump in and fix a problem before understanding it.

However, what the seasoned pros know is that small-scale practice is not a luxury; rather, it is exactly what creates lasting improvement. Once we have taken the necessary steps to fix a problem, we can plug those 1-2 notes back into the longer passage. If the problem is well and truly fixed, the passage will be smooth sailing, and much time that might have been spent hammering away at the whole passage ad infinitum will have been saved. If the problem persists, zoom back in, work through the problem again (perhaps using different strategies), then zoom back out to the passage. Such back-and-forth is a necessity in effective practicing. To put it another way, we can't take in the beauty of the forest if each tree isn't in its place. Given this, some rewording might be in order: "To fix a problem, always practice the smallest amount you can."

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If you want to read stuff like this regularly, subscribe to Dr. Tim's Teaching Tips on the right! I promise you'll only be emailed with new blog posts, never spam. You can also add the blog to your RSS feed.

Finally, if you like this post, then you'll love The Scientific Method of Practicing, where the underlying information is covered in detail. Head over to the publications page to pick up a copy.