Why Practice Doesn’t Always Translate Into Better Playing
1. Being Busy
When writing these Monday Music Tips, I’m always in search of the most valuable thing I can write about to help improve your playing and understanding of music. The truth is, learning an instrument is made up of many different things that you need to learn at different stages of the process. However, there is one thing that I think is the single most impactful change any musician can make.
Typically when a musician begins learning an instrument it starts as an endeavour with ambition. The intention is to play something meaningful. That doesn’t necessarily mean playing in a particularly melancholy or sad way, but it means that you convey the intentions of the music (whatever that may be).
Yet for many, particularly those that learn in the more traditional way (exams, learning to read music, learning pieces that are progressively more challenging etc.), in the vast majority of cases, learning music inevitably becomes a procedural task. What starts with the correct intentions becomes more thoughtless; repeating pieces, fixing surface mistakes and playing from start to finish many times.
This is perfectly understandable! As you spend more time learning, your thoughts might change from “this is a cool piece, I like how it sounds” to “I keep playing the wrong note, I need to play a 4th finger here…”. While both may be true, the first thought is one that cares about what the piece sounds like and the second one cares about the execution.
2. What’'s Missing
This is a perfectly normal thing to think and there does need to be some procedural practice in order to improve. However, what I often see is that learning a piece of music becomes ONLY procedural. It becomes a game of execution rather than music.
But, how do you practice the music part when you need to get your fingers to do the right thing?
Well, that comes from understanding what the purpose of the music is and what in the music tells us that. This can help you marry both of these two elements together.
So, what many musicians inevitably learn to do (usually much later in their playing career) is to add an extra step into their practice. Typically, for early players, practice becomes this thought process:
1. What are the notes
2. Play the notes
Whereas the process should look something more like this:
1. What are the notes
2. What do those notes mean? (What are the chords, what’s the context? What is the harmonic direction? Where is the tension and release? How is this section phrased? What does that tell us about what the music is trying to do?)
3. Play the notes (in a way that reflects step 2)
Not only does this convert your music from a series of notes that you are pressing to something that has meaning and purpose, but it also helps you learn much faster because our brain learns faster when actions have context and meaning.
3. Practice With Purpose
So you may be asking yourself, what if I don’t know what the chords are? What the context is? What the harmonic direction is? Where the tension and release is? How the section is phrased?
Well this is why it becomes much easier to fall back on just pressing the correct notes in the correct order.
The real answer is; start with what you do know! Is the piece/song major or minor? What speed is the piece? Is it loud or quiet? Is it spread across the piano or in one place on the piano?
All of these questions can help you determine the sentiment of the piece of music and help you to start learning music in a more “meaning first” way.
Ultimately understanding the meaning of a piece of music comes down to a combination of knowledge and practice. Over time, I’ve found that the biggest shift in my own playing came when I stopped treating practice as a procedural task and started treating it as an interpretation task that my technique had to facilitate. When you understand what the music is doing, why it’s written the way it is, and what it’s trying to express, practice becomes far more focused and far less frustrating.
For those that do want to learn more about exactly how to interpret pieces of music. This is exactly what my new course is about, The Art of Understanding Music. It’s designed to help you interpret music more confidently by understanding the theory you actually need and using it to work out what story a piece is telling.
If practice ever feels like hard work without clear direction, this might be the missing piece of the puzzle. If you’d like to check it out then feel free to do so with the link here: The Art of Understanding Music
Matthew Cawood
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