10 Tips on Practicing
If there’s one thing musicians are known for, it’s being exhausted all the time. One of the biggest reasons for this exhaustion is the obsessive and compulsive need to practice that stressed out musicians exhibit. To these musicians I say: practice smarter, not harder.
In this spirit, I’ve organized this piece into a bunch of mini essays that explain some of my thoughts on how to accomplish this. Ultimately, the best way to practice is going to come down to lots of experimentation (not repetition) on the part of the practicer. Stick with what works best for you, as any regimen anyone comes up with (including your teacher) will ultimately not be as helpful as one you come up with yourself. I might add to this list with another piece in the future, but in the mean time, I hope you find the following tips, tricks, and thoughts helpful.
Tip #1: Find Your Music Philosophy
There is a trend among musicians to constantly be obsessed with music as if it were the only thing they ever think about. They define themselves by the instrument they play and by how good they are at it. I’ve heard the advice tossed around that nobody should define themselves by what they do—and fair enough, you probably shouldn’t—but what should define you, then?
To answer this question it might be helpful to ask another: why do you like music in the first place? And why do you like that? And why do you think that way? And keep following that train of thought until you get to something immutable about yourself and maybe you should let that fundamental belief define you. That is your raison d'être. Once you’ve found your music philosophy, keep that in the front of your mind when you perform. Too many people play music as if it were its own end, but it’s really not. Playing music is about communication. So what are you communicating? If you don’t know, then you’re not going to be a successful musician. No matter how hard you practice.
Tip #2: Analyze Good Performances
I’ve seen performances on YouTube that immediately taught me more about music and musicianship than months of private lessons and labor in the practice room. Seek out the best performances, and listen to them carefully. Ask yourself what makes this performance as good as it is.
Another helpful habit is to analyze the songs you like to listen to. What parts of this song make you like it? Why are these parts what make the song good? Are some parts better than others? What makes these parts better than others? Is this song as good as another song by the same artist? Watching other people review music might be helpful as well. Even if they’re bad critics, you can still learn. What are they wrong about? Why are they wrong? Are they right about anything?
Ask your friends (even the non-musicians!) for recommendations of good things to listen to. Ironically, musicians are the some of the people who listen to music the least, in my experience, mostly because they spend so long in the practice room. Obviously, listening to yourself for hours in the practice room can be narcissistic. So stop that, and go listen to someone else for a change.
Tip #3: Take Care of Yourself
Sleep, eat, stay hydrated, stop stressing out about things. Seriously. Your life can’t be neglected in favor of practicing. Taking care of yourself seems like an obvious one, but I’ve known too many musicians who sacrifice eating in favor of practicing to not mention this. Please don’t be a tyrant to yourself. This kind of behavior is antihuman and is a psychosis.
Treat yourself like an athlete. When athletes get injured, do they gaslight themselves into thinking that their injuries are made up? Obviously not. But for some reason, musicians do this all the time. For instance, I once had a lot of trouble sight reading music, but I realized eventually that I had major eye strain that was the main source of the problem. Turns out that staring at music all day in a basement with no windows isn’t exactly conducive to healthy eyesight. If you encounter a problem in your playing that isn’t able to be solved in a relatively short period of time, check in with your body to make sure you’re not holding tension that’s preventing you from playing correctly.
Notice when you’re experiencing sensory overload. Have you ever been petting a cat and all of a sudden it starts fighting and biting you? Chances are, that’s because the cat is overstimulated. Cats like being pet on the head, not all over their bodies, and they set very clear boundaries (scratching, biting) around not being overstimulated. Unlike cats, people do not set their boundaries with scratching and biting and, in fact, sometimes do not set boundaries at all. Hours and hours in the practice room almost invariably lead to overstimulation. This happens because of sensory exhaustion. Take a break when this happens. If you don’t, then you’ll fall into the nefarious trap of repeating things endlessly (and uselessly) which inevitably leads to disaster.
Tip #4: Practice Something Else
If you find yourself getting stuck while practicing, go practice something else. Pull out a different piece, switch genres, switch instruments, or try composing something. Musicians waste a lot of energy by forcing themselves to practice things that they’re stuck on. For as corny as it sounds, go wherever the musical vibes take you.
Bad habits (even musical ones) are broken more frequently by ingenuity than by banging your head against the wall trying to get yourself to stop doing something. If you’re cleaning your bathtub and a stain won’t come out, the answer is not more elbow grease. The answer is using a different tool.
If you’re stuck, work on something else. And if you’re so stuck that you feel like you can’t practice anymore, then don’t.
Tip #5: Identify Specific Problems
Many musicians have trouble practicing because that word is hopelessly unspecific, and teachers seldom specify what they mean when they say this. Remove this non-specific idea of “practice” and replace it with “solve problems.” When you’re more interested in a specific goal of “solving problems” you almost immediately have a better idea of what to do.
But how do you know which problems to solve? The first thing to do is gather information on what problems to solve. Where exactly are you messing up? Which fingers are messing up? Are they too fast or too slow or at the wrong angle? Can you fix it? If you can’t, what’s preventing you? Are you holding tension somewhere? Where is the tension? Can you fix it? These are the sorts of questions that can actually turn feedback from your instrument into useful information.
Knowing what the problem is usually more than half the battle. If you spend your entire practice session trying to figure out what the problem is, you’ll be way better off than someone who spends the entire time playing random things trying to fix the problem without the specificity you just figured out.
Tip #6: Listen. To Everything. All the Time.
To the people you’re talking to. What are they saying? How fast are they saying it? Is their voice higher or lower than normal? Is their voice strained? What words are they using? What do they mean by them?
To your surroundings. Are you next to a busy road? Can you tell how many cars are going by? How big are the cars? Are there birds nearby? How many birds? How many different species? Where are the sounds coming from? Are they bouncing off a nearby building? What frequencies are being reflected vs. absorbed?
To your instrument while practicing. How do you sound? Do you sound better than yesterday? What about your technique? Is it better or worse than yesterday? Why is it worse?
Sharpen your listening skills. The better a listener you are, the better a musician you will be.
Tip #7: Ask People for Their Advice
Ask people what they think of your playing. Some of the most valuable advice that was ever given to me about my own playing was a single comment from a random bass player I happened to be playing with. That one piece of advice was more helpful than months of private lessons. Teachers can be helpful, but they tend to fall into old habits of giving the same advice over and over exceedingly frequently.
Also don’t be afraid to ask yourself what you think you should practice. Don’t be afraid to try new things that none of your teachers have told you before. Playing music isn’t some esoteric mystery wherein you can only be deemed qualified to interpret music by the priest-class teachers. It’s just for fun, so feel free to experiment. What do you like in your music? How do you think it should sound? Of course, this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try to play music with the composer’s intent in mind, or that we shouldn’t listen to valid advice from teachers. I think we absolutely should, but just because your teacher told you to play it a certain way doesn’t mean that’s the only correct way or that they’re even explaining it correctly.
Tip #8: Help Your Teachers Teach
Anyone who has taken private lessons for any reasonable amount of time can relate with the following scenario: you show up for lessons, and you play your piece of music that you’ve been working on. Your teacher stops your playing and tells you the exact same thing that they told you last week. This is very frustrating because you thought you practiced that all week long, and here they are bringing it up again.
Here’s what’s going on:
Your teacher thinks they are being very specific and helpful in the advice they’re giving you, but they are not actually being very specific at all. Teachers really like to use vague words to express a general idea of what they mean instead of very specific words most of the time. Unfortunately, this leads to you being very confused, and your teacher being very frustrated because it seems like you aren’t listening. In short, this is a miscommunication.
Here is the fix:
You must insist that your teacher uses more specific words when they give you feedback. Do they mean that you’re playing too slow? Too fast? Too choppy? What do they mean by choppy? Is the mistake at the beginning of the note, or the end? Are your rhythms off? Do not let your teachers get away with sloppy descriptions.
At the end of the day, if your teacher can’t give you this level of detail, stop listening to them. If they’re not going to engage with you in your learning, I’m afraid you’re on your own. But better to be on your own than to be listening to half-baked advice that doesn’t really mean anything.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that your teacher should need to tell you every single minute detail to help your playing. The goal here is succinct, clear, direct communication. Teachers usually don’t know how to do this, so you’re going to have to be the leader here.
Tip #9: Take Yourself Off of Autopilot
Have you ever been playing your instrument somewhat casually, and then right in the middle of your playing you forget completely how to play your instrument or where you are or what you were just playing or what year it is? And then when you go back and try to play the same passage you were just playing, you all of a sudden can’t do it anymore?
That is a sure sign that you’re on autopilot.
This is also known as the “yips” in sports, where suddenly you can’t do something that you’re normally very good at. If you’ve got the yips, then chances are you’ve probably been on autopilot for a very long time before that. The yips happen when all of a sudden you start paying attention again, and you can’t remember how it’s done, meaning that you’ve not been paying attention for a long time before this moment.
So how do you take yourself off of auto pilot? Easy. Pay attention. Every positive changes begins with noticing.
Taking yourself off of autopilot is also an effective way to do everything on a daily basis. Many people fall into a sort-of routine and they don’t ever deviate from this. This isn’t to say that routines aren’t helpful—they are absolutely helpful or else or lives would be chaos—but try to strike the perfect balance between finding new and exciting ways to do things, and finding time to rest and rejuvenate. Remember: boredom is a sign that something is wrong; exhaustion is a sign that something is wrong
Tip #10: On How to Remember Important Things
In my experience, the concept of remembering things gets way over complicated really quickly when people talk about “mnemonic devices,” “neuro-plasticity,” “long term, short term memory,” “white matter, gray matter,” and the list goes on. There’s a whole plethora of science that’s been done on the topic of memory, and most of it seems to confusing, inconclusive, and unhelpful.
So in the hopes of being helpful rather than unhelpful, here is the only thing regarding the topic of memory that I’ve actually found useful: connect the things you learn to things you already know. Notably, this can only be done by you. This is why people telling you things over and over is an ineffective way to teach (all teaching is self-teaching at the end of the day.) The best way to do this is to find a way to make someone else’s words your own words. Change facts into concepts, sterilized factoids into human stories. Human beings think of things not in terms of facts, but in terms of stories. This is why art is so important, people.
Needless to say, treating yourself like a computer where you just upload information by cramming it into your head is dumb. You’re not a computer. You’re way better than that. So when you find something out in your practicing, integrate it into the story of your life and your inner philosophy. Get it to become a part of you. Learn it so well that you can explain it in multiple different ways, and then you won’t have any problems remembering things.
This concept is also helpful if you’re preparing a piece to perform. Learn the piece so well that when you play it, the notes are your own, the emotions are your own, the composition is your own. This is also the way to fill a piece with emotion without being affectatious.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, becoming a good musician relies on you learning to be responsible for your own musicianship. No one else can take this responsibility for you—and that notion is both worrying and empowering. So let us embrace the latter of those adjectives and face the challenge of excellent musicianship with courage and intelligence.