Is It Better to Play for 30 Minutes…or Practice for 5?
1. Playing
In many of my Monday Music Tips I’ve drawn a distinction between what is “playing” and what is “practicing”. For many players these two ways of approaching the piano either get mixed into one or inadvertently become “playing” heavy.
Sitting down and playing a piece of music through, although it feels productive, is a very slow way of making progress. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you won’t progress at all, but the mistakes and problems you make get revisited much less, and playing through a mistake is not the best methodology for fixing it or ensuring that it applies to your general playing as a whole.
In fact, in some cases it could even be detrimental to your playing because playing through mistakes in the same way can repeatedly reinforce whatever habits you already have. This is why if you learn a piece without dynamics, it’s harder to then implement them after the fact (for example).
There is also the fact that after a while your brain becomes less analytical when you are playing through a piece. You can switch into autopilot and stop thinking about mistakes at all.
The reason I think many people fall into this way of trying to learn is because there is much more mental resistance to practicing. It requires your brain to be active, making decisions, problem solving and dealing with repeated failure. Yet it is objectively a far quicker way to learn.
2. Practice
Let’s try to use some maths to work out what the discrepancy actually is. Let’s say you are learning a piece that is 1 minute long. In a 30 minute practice session, if you play that piece from start to finish, you can maybe play it 28 times (allowing for a couple of minutes collectively spent in between each playing). This means that each mistake is played 28 times in that session without any targeted fixing. This is without considering the problem of reinforcing the mistake.
Now, let’s say instead you practice and you are attempting to solve a technical problem in 1 bar of the music. You can perhaps play that bar very slowly, focusing on hand movement 1 time every 6 seconds (maybe 4 seconds to play, 2 seconds before playing again). This would mean that it would take less than 3 minutes to not only have played the problem more times than if you play the entire piece through in 30 minutes, but your methodology and approach to fixing it would be much more specific (at a slower speed, playing just the notes before and after the problem, focusing on fingers etc.).
This shows that not only do you solve each problem much quicker by targeting and problem solving, but you can also be much more specific about your approach. If we extrapolate that over 30 minutes, that gives you the potential to fix (or at least begin to fix) 10 different problems within the same amount of time. These problems will also have a direct impact on future pieces of music.
This isn’t to say that this is exactly how practice works. Of course some things are harder or easier to fix than others, and some things will take multiple practice sessions to solve. However, compounded over time and many, many practice sessions, it shows that if you practice rather than play through pieces then you will improve at a significantly faster rate.
3. Both
So, is there a place for playing or should you always just practice?
There is definitely a place for playing and it really depends on why you are doing it. If you occasionally just want to play the piano and you aren’t hoping to improve in that session then that makes complete sense. Also if you are performing, playing for someone, recording yourself… any of these are perfectly valid reasons to play.
Another great reason to just play is if you want to play through the piece once at the start of a practice session in order to identify things to practice. Playing can give you a bird’s-eye view of a piece of music and it can help you find your list of objectives for the session.
I suppose the real takeaway from this Monday Music Tip is that practicing is separate from playing and practicing is much more effective for improvement. Many players fall into the trap of unintentionally playing and not realising it. So the key is to be intentional about when and why you are playing and practicing if you want to see those big jumps in progress.
Matt
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