Musical Development 301 - Part III: Practicing (Archives)

When Charlie Vervalin and I first discussed my writing a musical development article, the original title was "How to Practice," the idea being that concentrated, effective practice yields big results, even with a small daily investment in time. It grew into "Musical Development 301," of which this particular installment, Getting the Notes Under Your Fingers, or Practicing, covers the original subject matter. First we’ll discuss some general concepts and principles, then get down to some hands-on strategies. While we’ll be using guitar terms every once in a while, the principles can be applied to any instrument.

Practicing is a skill in itself. Practicing is one area where classically-trained players often have a distinct advantage. Besides learning playing techniques that maximize their technical potential, they learn how to practice, which is in itself a critical skill. While it’s usually something that’s learned over years of study under an oppressive, small-minded, egotistical, stuffed-shirt professor of limited musical talent at a large university in Tallahassee, Florida—hypothetically speaking, of course—we’re going to compress all that learning and bittern… wisdom into a few pages. Which is just about right.

Practicing versus playing. If someone says "I practiced four hours yesterday," I tend to wonder if they really practiced four hours, or if they just played their instrument for that period. Four hours of practice is just about indistinguishable from Hell. One hour of real, focused and concentrated practice is a lot. Even a half hour of real practice a day will yield big results.

Isolate and improve. When you go out and play softball with friends, it’s about the same as playing a song you know well. It’s just for fun, you’re not really concentrating on any one skill, and you’re just executing all the different pieces as well as is easy. Now, if you say, "I want to improve my hitting," there are a number of things you can do to improve. First, you can put your glove down and pick up the bat (BIG plus). You can watch the ball more closely, so you can better distinguish a good pitch. You can practice your swing itself, so that you place the bat right on the ball, and your swing is smooth and accurate. You can practice timing your swing, so that you can be more selective about where you hit it, hopefully dropping it out behind the right fielder. You can reinforce these changes by repeated and concentrated practice. And finally, you can go so far as to lift weights to strengthen those muscles which operate the bat.

You apply the same process in isolating and improving your musical chops. Isolation can be done to several different levels of detail, from concentrating on a particular section of a piece, all the way down to working the change between two chords or notes. Once isolated, improving the physical skill involves mental work (concentrating on the sequence of notes), neural improvement (timing and directing the muscles), and muscle development (to minimize the percentage of effort required). There are some instruments for which strength is less critical and fine-motor control are more critical, such as violin, keyboards, etc. For those, the skills are more concentrated in the neural—timing and touch—area.

OK, the point of all this painful detail is just to illustrate that there is a lot of detail that most folks never consider in learning their instrument. There’s no way we can cover all the different aspects of practicing here, but there are ways to quickly improve almost any component of your playing if you really isolate and improve it.

The Fundamentals. Just a few words about that which everybody hates. In the classical world, fundamentals are the poor player’s nightmare, and, well, absolutely fundamental to being a great player. Proper posture, hand position, relaxation, articulation, tone, etc. are critical, not just to allow the musician to play expressively, but often just for executing an otherwise-impossible series of notes.

In the non-classical world, there’s rarely such a thing as a "fundamentally proper" hand position. Often we see these famous musicians who have no clue of fundamentals, yet they’re incredible players. If they don’t need fundamentals, we don’t either, right? Don’t kid yourself. These great players are, by and large, mutants who not only can operate a touch-tone phone with their elbows, but they generally have some debilitating character flaw which renders them the social equivalent of okra. You and I more normal types will generally find that the more effectively we incorporate the classical fundamentals into our playing habits, the easier lots of things will be.

My wife Marcia points out that playing with poor fundamentals is like running a race in high heels. If you’re racing against a five-year-old, you can probably win, but given any real challenge, like someone your own age, you don’t stand a chance. I prefer pumps myself.

If you have any doubts about the value of fundamentals, go take lessons on your instrument from a classical teacher for a while. First, as you re-align your playing with the fundamentals, you’ll feel like you can’t do anything right. Then, after 6 weeks—or months—of angst and self-loathing, you’ll start discovering a whole new set of skills that weren’t available to you previously, and the net result will be greatly increased facility. And, of course, self-loathing.

Use something to keep time. If you forget everything else in this article, remember this. I could spend an entire newsletter just on Your Friend, The Metronome, but I’ll try to keep it brief if you promise to believe every single the word I’m about to tell you. See the FAE (Frequently Articulated Excuses) if you just can’t play with a metronome.

These days, besides the tried-and-true standard of the metronome, there are drum machines available, as well as some great music-learning software (see the related article on Band in a Box). They all work; for the purposes of this discussion, let’s just call it a metronome.

A metronome is not to make you play faster, at least not directly. Its most important function is to slow you down to a speed where you can execute the notes accurately; then, as your accuracy improves, you can gradually speed it up. It’s also to keep your rhythm steady and highlight the places where you’re cheating the notes, either by playing them too fast, or by just not playing them clearly.

If you don’t own a metronome, get one. There are a lot of good ones out there; I prefer the electronic

FAE (Frequently Articulated Excuses). There are always a few reasons you just can’t get better on your instrument. My two favorites:

"My fingers are too short."
Have you ever seen Andres Segovia’s fingers? Steve Kaufman’s? They’re like Vienna sausages. You’ll have to do better than that.

"But I can’t play with a metronome; it throws me off."
No, you throw yourself off. If you "rush" a set of notes, yes, you’re going to get ahead of the metronome, and you’re then going to have a problem slowing down to re-align with it. This needs to be fixed, period. The goal is to not rush those beats, and that’s where you should concentrate your effort. There is an absolute and direct correlation between good players and accurate rhythm: the better your rhythm, the more people will want to play with you. If you can’t play along with your metronome, it’s a safe bet that few others will want to play with you, either.

ones, but many aren’t loud enough. Don’t get one that beeps. Get one with a loud click or pop. I got the Korg KDM-1, and it’s great; it’s specifically designed to be loud. It’s about $45 discounted on the Internet, and I think I got it for the same price locally at Rice Music.

Practice extremes. You want to build your capabilities so that normal playing requires a smaller percentage of your maximum physical, neural, and muscular capabilities. How to do this? By practicing extremes. Play loud—I mean really loud—and slow, and fast, and quiet, and if that bar chord is hard, play that same chord up and down the neck, getting all the notes to sound each time.

The underlying principle here is very simple, but very rarely do we relate it to music: the smaller the percentage of total effort—mental, neural, or muscular—required to do something, the more "brain cycles" you can devote to other things, like thinking ahead to the next section, singing, or just enjoying the music. Sound engineers might call this "headroom," the difference between the effort required and the total potential; more headroom is better. When you pick up a heavy trash can, it takes all you’ve got—you probably don’t even think of anything else—but when you’re carrying groceries into the house, you can hook any number of those plastic bags onto different fingers, carry them in, and exhort your kids to get back outside and help you. If you’re struggling to get that pinky on the B string, it’s a safe bet that everything else is going to get short shrift, like the next chord, or the words to the song.

Problems versus opportunities. A few years ago, they were fond of this euphemism in my workplace, and maybe yours; they’d refer to every problem as an "opportunity." Yeah, right, and I believe everything I see on the "X-Files," too. However, in playing music, that is how I view things. If I can’t get through a particular passage because of a technical problem, I know that if I fix that problem, the increased measure of control and facility will carry over into other areas of my playing. So, let’s say you’re trying to play a chord which is too much of a stretch. If, instead of walking away from it, you practice that stretch until it becomes easy, you’ll be amazed at how much easier several other chords are.

Don’t Practice Mistakes. This happens all the time; we all do it. You play a passage five times and make the same mistake each time. The sixth time, you get it right. Oh, you’ve got it now! You can go on, right? NO. You practiced playing it correctly once, and practiced playing it incorrectly five times. Which lesson did your nerves and muscles learn?

Don’t "do it ‘til you get it right." Do it until you can’t get it wrong. If you play it incorrectly once, fine, then play it five times correctly.

Good tone forces good technique. If you strive to get a good tone, the physical movements you perform to achieve it will invariably result in good technique, so that speed, strength and accuracy fall into place as well.

Simplify, simplify. If a passage continues to be difficult, rethink it. Do you really need all those notes? Can you use an easier fingering? The best players are also the best "cheaters." They play only what’s necessary, and you’d often be amazed at how little that is.

Schedule a time to concentrate. Find a time when you can practice without distractions. Best time for me is early in the morning before the rest of the family gets up. It’s the prettiest time of day, too.

Let’s now discuss a few cookbook-type methods for improving your accuracy, speed, strength, and dynamics (soft-to-loud). These are only a few examples, but you should be able to extrapolate them into other exercises, as you identify those parts of your playing that you want to improve.

Accuracy. Let’s improve your accuracy on a passage that you currently have trouble with. It could be playing a melody, a solo or just a difficult transition from one chord to another.

This whole process should take five to ten minutes, maximum. You may still not be able to play it accurately at your target speed. That’s OK; you couldn’t before, either, but now you’ve made considerable progress which will be evident in just a few days. For now, concentrate on something else for a while; maybe another passage, or just playing for fun.

Tomorrow, repeat the process. Set the metronome back to the original slow speed and do the play/increment thing again in the same fashion. This time it should be easier to handle each increased rate of speed and you might wind up playing it even faster.

After just a few days, you will see results—not only will you be able to play faster and more accurately, but it will require much less effort. Eventually, you want to increase the metronome significantly past your desired speed, so that playing at the desired speed is relatively effortless.

Sound oppressive? Yes, if you do it for four hours. But not if you do it for the prescribed 5-10 minutes, then play for fun for a while, and you’ll see big results in a short time. By the way, there’s no shame in playing slowly; there’s plenty of shame in playing with bad rhythm.

Speed. This is an extension of the accuracy exercise above, but with a few twists. The point here is to get your nerves and muscles used to the idea of moving quickly, so we’re going to use short bursts of speed.

Strength. On some instruments such as guitars and string basses, strength is an issue. For guitarists, it’s bar (or barre) chords. You don’t want to be strong enough that you can execute this particular bar chord; you want to be strong enough that it requires only a portion of your total potential. OK, a barred G chord is difficult, so let’s isolate and exercise it.

By the way, I do not advocate any sort of strengthening other than on the instrument. For example, there are "Gripmaster" squeezy-thing devices designed to improve a guitarist’s grip. However, they don’t really simulate a guitar neck, and misuse can result in tendon problems. There may be external-to-instrument strength training exercises that work, but I’m not aware of them. Also, be sure to distinguish between muscular pain (good) and joint pain (bad). If you experience joint pain, STOP doing what’s causing it, now. Either change the notes you’re playing or the way you’re playing them. Joint problems—damage to ligaments and tendons—don’t go away with repetition, only rest.

Dynamics. Extremely loud practice, if coupled with good timing, will benefit not only your dynamic range (soft-to-loud) but your rhythmic accuracy. Even if you’re just playing rhythm chords to a song, this is very effective in improving your "headroom" as it relates to dynamics and accuracy.

You’ll find that if you do this, in a short time, not only will your rhythm be much better, but your accuracy will be greatly improved and everything will be easier at normal volume and speed.

Invent your own exercises. The above are just some examples of ways you can isolate and improve your playing. Next time you have difficulty with something, slow it down, find out where the problem lies, and make your own exercise to fix it.

Can’t I just play for fun? Good grief, yes! Don’t ever lose sight of enjoying music, and always be sure to allow yourself to play for fun. But, if and when you practice, concentrate your effort. Successful practice, for me, is very rewarding, because I can see the results quickly. If you really concentrate, you will too.