Practice! Steve Schneider

Practice. A four-letter word to some. Others cringe when they hear it or think it, always ready to offer excuses as to why they didn't, or why they couldn't, or why they only did just it a little. For me it's often an idea, an abstraction, a thing of the past and/or the future. It's something I'm certainly not doing right now. But is that really true? I'm not sure that I'm not practicing right now, even as I'm writing this at my computer. I'm certainly practicing something: gathering thoughts into a cohesive whole, deepening my understanding of practicing, and certainly my typing is not getting worse. More on this later.>

I have found a philosophy and some strategies for optimizing practice that have worked to some degree for me and most of my students (you know who you are!). They include the following:

1) Develop the attitude that practicing is not a chore. Most often it's an unaffordable luxury. It is work, but when practiced well, the rewards are vast, long-lasting, and often immediate. What could be better?

2) Find concrete and reasonable goals and rewards for your practice. Establish a goal for each practice session, and try your best to meet it. You can offer yourself a reward (no kidding--it works for some). Pay yourself with M&Ms if that's what you like. Just don't give yourself a hard time for not practicing or for not meeting your goals.

3) Practice does not make perfect. If anything, it makes for greater fluency, smoothness, musicality, confidence, and the ability to more spontaneously create and express in (and out of) the moment. It's also a time for one to enjoy a creative solitude which can be very satisfying.

4) Develop strategies that work for you. Long ago, I worked with a psychotherapist to deal with my "stuff", stuff that was getting in the way of my music, including not practicing. I would sit at the piano and suddenly remember (aha! what a coincidence!) that phone call I needed to make or that something I needed to take care of. He had me tie one end of a rope around one ankle, and the other around a piano leg so that if and when I got up, I had to consciously untie the rope. This was designed to make it a conscious choice on my part to interrupt the process. Just from sheer embarrassment alone, it didn't last too long. [True story.]

5) Get the help, assistance, or support you need. For some, learning music alone is often lonely, frightening, awesome, and confusing.

6) Some ideas that have worked for me:
a) Keep a notebook of your practice sessions. Include the date and what you worked on. This becomes your "bible" and lets you know what you've been working on so that you can continue over time.
b) Tape record yourself and listen back to your playing. Date the tapes so that you can chart your progress over time.
c) Always devote part of your practice sessions to real practice (isolating trouble spots and working on them, scales, arpeggios, etc.) and real music-making (playing pieces through without stopping)
d) Always play everything as though it was really music (even scales, arpeggios and fiddle tunes). Incorporate accents, strong beats, weak beats, variations in tempo, dynamics, etc.
e) Exaggerate during practice. Play pieces or phrases very slow or very fast or very loud or very soft.
f) If possible, create playing/performance opportunities to give you something concrete (with a deadline) to practice for.
g) Create a workable and accessible practice space with your instrument near at hands.
h) Practice meaningful musical ideas not just "notes." Try to practice music as a whole experience, not a meaningless series of scale steps and skips. This way, by the time you get to incorporate a scale in a piece of music, you're already playing it musically.
i) Keep a daily and weekly calendar, and make sure that you have reasonable and realistic time in your day or week to practice.
j) Give yourself a break. If you can't get to practice, allow yourself the luxury of not practicing. We learn even when we don't practice. Practicing is much more than just spending time with your instrument. It has to do with being and developing yourself as a person; the music is merely an expression of that person. Give yourself permission to not practice, and never again apologize or confess to teachers that you didn't do it enough. It really doesn't matter; we really don't care. It's actually healthy and healthful to regularly (and irregularly) get away from our missions, goals, and habits.
k) Enjoy yourself.

Steve Schneider is a musician living in New York. Do you have comments or questions about his article? Contact Mr. Schneider directly by e-mail. To learn more about him, see the Contributors section of Sweet Music Index.