A few words of inspiration on hanging in there through the early stages of creative work (practicing music counts) from the host of NPR’s This American Life:

This ties in a bit with being willing to sound bad, and knowing that a period of sucking as you develop a new creative skill is totally normal.  Enjoy!

Practicing an instrument is both like and not like playing video games. Discuss.

Practicing an instrument is like playing video games:

1. When you first begin, you must start at the lowest level.
2. The more you do it, the better you get.
3. If the video game in question is Pong, it sounds like this:

Practicing an instrument is not like playing video games:

1. You get to choose what section of the music you practice.
2. You can practice that section however many times you want—you are not forced to move on to the next level.
3. When practicing an instrument, your goal is to be able to perform on that instrument (there are two stages, performance and practice).  Playing a video game is both performance and practice simultaneously*.

1:  Choose your small section.

Which to choose? Whatever you need to practice—you can start with the hardest part, start at the end of the piece, alternate between easy and hard sections.  I like to start with the hardest part, because once mastered, it makes every thing else seem even easier.

How small? However small it needs to be for you to learn it.  In some cases, maybe a slow movement, it can be as long as a phrase.  In many fast passages, though, a whole phrase is too long.  I often just practice two bars at a time, sometimes just one, and yes, even less than one.

This is so important!  You cannot practice the whole piece at once**.  In order to efficiently and effectively learn a piece of music, you must break it up into small sections.  Your brain and your body can only learn so much at once.

When you are practicing small sections, you are creating and strengthening neural pathways in the brain that allow your body (and, at best, your soul) to perform that “dedicated series of acts” that Martha Graham wrote about.  Those neural pathways are best created one tiny bit at a time.

2:   Keep practicing even after you’ve “got it.”

In a video game, as soon as you successfully get through a level once, you are immediately advanced to the next level (woohoo! up from the dungeon!).  In music practice, one success is not enough—now that you know how to play it, repeat it 4 to 7 times so that you will be sure to be successful in performance.

3:  Number 2 above is only possible because in music we separate performance and practice. And we’ll talk more about that in a later entry.

It’s surprisingly easy, when practicing music, to forget that we are in the driver’s seat.  Sometimes, we think of the music as a beautiful, organic whole, and we want to just play it that way. Sometimes we think of it as a daunting, huge task that we will never be able to achieve.  Sometimes it seems like a magical force beyond our control.  Any of those ideas can stop us from practicing in an effective way.  But just remember, it’s not a like a video game because you are in control of what parts you play when, how many times you play them, and you don’t have to try and do the whole thing every time.

*OK, OK, some recent video games, like Guitar Hero, sort of let you practice, but the point here is that in music practice, YOU are in control.  In video games, the video game is always in control.

**In fact, you can’t even perform the whole piece at once.  In performance, you play every small section, in succession, without stopping, but you are still only playing it small section by small section.

I started writing this blog last fall, and publishing it in December, as is probably obvious  to you if you are reading this now.  This week, I was going to post an entry on how practicing is like and not like playing video games, but since something incredible happened this weekend, you’ll have to wait to hear about video games and music practice.

It all started with the first draft of my entry on Metronome Trick No. 1. (but as you will read, it goes back even further in time than that…) Here is a paragraph that I cut from the final entry about that metronome trick:

I learned this technique the weekend I auditioned for Eastman.  I was staying with a friend of mine from high school, and his roommate, a violinist named (I think!) Tom, told me about it.  I forget the exact context of the conversation, but what I do remember is that he made it sound like no other practice technique was worth bothering with, because this one was so superior.

So, did I make an effort to track down the identity of the mystery violinist so that he could be properly credited and included in my entry?  No, I did not.  I confess it just seemed easier to cut the paragraph from the article.

But the small world of music did the job for me.  I spent the last few days at the very awesome Chamber Music America Conference where I was talking to the cool flutist Laura Barron. When she casually mentioned that she had just run into a violinist friend from Eastman 20 years ago named Tom, I did not immediately leap on that tidbit of information (I didn’t want to appear crazy, after all.)  I bided my time, and later in the conversation I asked if she knew my friend from high school, the composer Brian Schachter, with whom I had stayed lo those many years ago.  When she said she did, I knew it had to be the same Tom.

Sure enough, I got to meet him later at the conference and solved the mystery of his moniker: it turns out his last name is Stone, and he plays with the Cypress Quartet. When I told him the story, he said, “Yeah, that sounds like me.  I had pretty strong opinions when I was a teenager.”

me, contemplating the small world we live in, writing this entry on the plane after the conference.

I cannot tell you how cool it was to re-meet someone who inadvertently had such a big effect on me.  That was the only conversation I had with Tom when I was there for my audition, but I was so green, so wanting to be in music school, and to know all the things people like Tom knew, that it had a huge effect on me.  He said it with such force and conviction — I wanted to feel that confident about playing and practicing!  He just swept into the room, anointed me with his wisdom and swept out – and didn’t even know how much he affected me.

And what a pearl of wisdom it is, people.  Metronome Trick No. 1 has been my main way of practicing ever since.  Probably 75% of my practice time is spent going up two and down one on ye olde metronome.  And there he was at the conference:  Mystery Tom, from the mists of time!  Talking to me!

So, thank you, Tom Stone, for having strong opinions when you were a teenager, and for being at the CMA Conference. And thank you, world, for twice giving me information that I needed.

So I want to talk about a key principle in good music practice:  in order to sound good, you must be willing to sound bad.

That might seem counter-intuitive.  I mean, after all, you only practice so that you can sound good, right?  There are lots of layers and implications to this idea, however:

1. In order to find the best way to play something, you have to experiment with lots of ways to play it, and some of them will sound bad—but you can’t know until you hear them.
2. You need to work on the worst aspects of your playing—I’m not saying never play things that sound good, but you need to practice and work on the things that sound bad—so you need to be willing to hear them.
3. An implication for rehearsal is that you are willing to try your colleagues’ (and your own) ideas in real time (as opposed to in your mind), even if you think they will sound bad.
4. For you professionals out there with a big personal stake in Sounding Good, you might also want to take this one step further and try out being willing to sound like a beginner.
5. It means dropping your ego about yourself (‘I always sound good!’), and putting your focus on the music (‘how will it sound if I try it this way?’)

This idea is maybe not so hard for beginners—you expect to sound bad at the beginning, and there’s nowhere to go but up.

For professionals and conservatory students, though, this can be a real stumbling block. We have such an investment in sounding Good with a capital “G.”  Particularly for conservatory students who are practicing in little rooms sandwiched right in among your colleagues, it can be very hard to let yourself sound bad in the experiment stage.

For me, this is never more true than when I am working on a new piccolo piece.  The piccolo is not easy, people! I was working on a beautiful piece by Lowell Liebermann, Forgotten Waltz [it's available in a flute version on iTunes] a few years ago.  It’s a sweet, nostalgic tune, but very soft and very high, a particularly challenging combination on the piccolo.  I was on tour with Tales & Scales at the time, and we’d all be staying in the same hotel, and I’d usually wait till everyone else was gone out to dinner to practice it, just so that I’d be the only person hearing myself play those screechy high notes!

And honestly, even then, it was hard to bring myself to practice it at all because it sounded so terrible to me…  the notes would crack, or be so loud, and SO out of tune.  Disgusting, really.  But I survived, and eventually could play it.

Now this does not mean you need to try to sound bad, or that the beginning stage of work on each new thing will sound bad, just that you have to be willing to go there.  That small mental openness can make a huge difference.  In fact, I might be go so far as to say that is one of the main differences between people who really excel at their instruments and those who only get to a certain level of skill and never progress to greatness.

After all, you have to start somewhere.  And trust me, you will sound better, but letting go of that attitude of “I always sound good” or “it’s only fun when I sound good” will go a VERY long way to allowing you to sound even better.

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/katinalynn/212094224/

We don’t become musicians (and this applies to amateurs, beginners and professionals alike) because we want to stay at home and practice.  We become musicians because music is awesome, and playing it is a powerful tool for self-expression. When we play classical music, we  collaborate with the composer (yes, even the dead ones!), expressing our own inner understanding of the music to an audience. In doing so, we can reach a transcendent communicative state between ourselves, the music and its composer, and our audience. Seriously, people, it’s the best!

Practice is what makes that expression possible, and good practice brings our actual performance closer and closer to a true representation of that inner thing we want to express.  This is why we practice: to discover the content of the music and our connection to it and to make sure our playing communicates this to the audience, every time.

Now having said all that, can practicing be fun?  Can you like it?

Good practice isn’t just a question of doing everything in the most efficient (fastest!) way possible, so you can get on with the rest of your life already.  It is mindful, attentive, and ultimately, very interesting.  It offers you the chance to get to know the music and the instrument better, but also to get to know yourself on a very detailed and intimate level.  Admittedly, that might fall a bit short of fun, but that process of discovery will carry you through a lot of practice time over the years.

At its best, I find practicing to be meditative:  the focused repetition and exploration of small ideas, one at time.  It’s kind of like combing my brain.

If you can see practice in this light, you are in good company. Here’s what Martha Graham had to say about practice:

I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing, or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated, precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which come shape of achievement, the sense of one’s being, the satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God. Practice means to perform over and over again, in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.*

That’s pretty beautiful and inspiring, right?  You already know you want to play as well and beautifully as possible.  Why not learn to practice as well and beautifully as possible? It can only help your playing and your experience of music.

So stop reading this blog and hop to it!

*Excerpt from “An Athlete of God,” written by Martha Graham. From the book THIS I BELIEVE, edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman. Copyright ©2006 by This I Believe, Inc. Reprinted by arrangement with This I Believe, Inc.  To hear Martha Graham reading this essay in its entirety, please visit: http://www.thisibelieve.org/dsp_ShowEssay.php?uid=16583.

**photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/vox_efx/3089694499/

Happy Holidays!

We’ll return next week with more ideas to put into practice.

Note:  this image is from:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/laffy4k/2313538414/

If you’ve been following along at home, you have hopefully tried Metronome Trick No. 1 by now.  Hopefully you’ve tried it more than once, hopefully everyday or practice session for a whole week.  And you’ve probably noticed that, what with all that repetition, it can take a long time to get from your starting tempo to two clicks above performance tempo.

Here’s the basic rule:  never practice any one thing more than 10 minutes at a time.

What do you mean, any one thing?

If you are working on getting a technical passage up to speed, “any one thing” means a small section of that passage that you have chosen to practice.  If you are working on the sound and expression of a slow movement, “any one thing” means a reasonable section of the movement, maybe one or two phrases.  If you are working on a technical exercise (scales or arpeggios), “any one thing” means any one exercise (i.e. for all you flutists out there in practice-land, Taffanel & Gaubert’s famous scale pattern No. 4).  If you are working on a particular skill (i.e. smooth legato leaps, “any one thing” means that particular skill.

What if it’s going to take more than 10 minutes to master?

Then come back to it during another practice session and give it another 10 minutes then.  Even if you think you could nail it in 15, you’ll get it even better if you give it two separate sessions of 10 minutes.

Really people, if any one thing deserves more than 10 minutes of your time, you might as well give it 20, and get it done for sure.

But why, and wherefore?

I invented the 10-Minute Rule in response to two things:  fear of tendonitis, and fear of going crazy.

The 10-Minute Rule can help prevent overuse/repetitive stress injury by the obvious mechanism of restricting how much repetition you do at a single stretch.  It also gives your brain a time limit on obsessing about some small detail of your playing, thus preventing craziness.

The 10-Minute Rule also has a much more subtle but equally powerful benefit:  it carries with it the assumption that there will be a next time, that you will get 10 more minutes on this particular passage, and it’ll get better then.  That assumption of a next time goes a long way toward removing the feeling of desperation that often comes with a real desire to be good at an instrument.

Seriously, though, never?

I make two, and only two, exceptions to the 10-Minute Rule:

• The 12-Minute Rule:  if you are SURE you will get your one thing mastered with just two more minutes of practice, go for it.  Once the clock strikes twelve, though, your metronome turns into a pumpkin and you have to stop, even if you’re just one click away.  Come back to it next session with another 10 minutes.  And if you are more than a few clicks away from done, don’t go past 10 at all.

• The 15 Minute Rule:  this is only for when you are memorizing something, and will be dealt with in a later article, I promise!

Note to beginners/amateurs: Try this idea as the 5-Minute Rule, as most of your issues can be solved in shorter sessions than those of more advanced players.  You can work your way up to the 10-Minute Rule as you get more experienced.

Another note: the cool picture above is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/laffy4k/367822192/

Sam Baron, grand old man of the flute and one of my teachers, used to say that working with a metronome was like taking a vitamin—you need to do it each day.  OK, maybe he actually said that vitamin thing about playing Bach, but I think it applies to metronome work, too.

The thing is, no one (and I mean NO ONE) has a truly perfect sense of time.  Except maybe Jason Marsalis, but he probably practices with a metronome too!  So, if you are not Jason Marsalis, if you are one of the rest of us, please continue reading.

Metronome Trick No. 1, along with the practice notebook, is one of the most powerful practice techniques I have ever found.  If you don’t read any more of this blog ever, if all you do is adopt the practice notebook and this trick, you will definitely improve your practicing, and therefore, your playing.

So what is it, after all this buildup?  It’s pretty simple.

1. Choose a small section to work on.
2. Choose a metronome speed that is slow enough that you can play it exactly how you want to EVERY TIME at that tempo.
3. Repeat the passage 4 to 7 times at that tempo.  (note:  professionals—4 times will usually be enough, beginners will need more)
4. Now set the metronome two clicks faster than your original tempo.
5. Repeat the passage 4 to 7 times at the new tempo.
6. Set the metronome to the tempo one click down from this faster tempo.
7. Repeat the passage 4 to 7 times at the new tempo.
8. Continue on, setting the metronome up two, then down one, repeating the passage the full 4 to 7 times at each level, until you get to a tempo that is two clicks faster than the target performance tempo.

What’s it for?  This trick is the most efficient way to learn a passage of music and get it up to performance tempo.

And, if you were following along, you will note that this method will yield A LOT of repetition of your passage.  That’s one of the reasons it works.  Here are some of the others:

Unlike the old stand-by of increasing the tempo one click at a time until you reach performance tempo, this technique has you building a very strong foundation for that eventual fast tempo.  When you just increase steadily, and never decrease, you are essentially building yourself out on a limb.  Eventually, you have nothing below you.  Up two down one is like building straight up on your strong foundation.

Another reason this technique is so effective is that it gives you a chance (in the down one) to integrate what you learned when playing it up two.  The pressure is off, you’re at a slower tempo, and you can relax and play, instead of trying like you did at up two.

Yes, it does take time to do that many repetitions.  Give it a try anyway! I assure you, when you use this trick, in conjunction with the other principles and techniques we’ll cover here, you will agree it is the most efficient way to learn a difficult passage.  None of your time on this technique will be wasted.

When you’re in performance, you want to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you can play that passage every time.  Metronome Trick No. 1 will help give you that confidence.

[NOTE:  You will need an old school metronome for this.  Trust me when I say that the tempo levels on a non-digital metronome are perfect for this technique…there will be more info in a later article on The Old School Metronome and The Human Scale.  In the meantime, for those of you with nifty new-fangled digital metronomes,  here is a clip-n-save list of ye olde metronome markings:  ye-olde-met-markings1]

So, let’s say you want to bring a passage from quarter equals 80 up to quarter equals 100. Here’s the order of metronome markings you would use, always mindfully and successfully playing the passage 4 to 7 times at each separate tempo:

1. 80
2. up to 88
3. down to 84
4. 92
5. back to 88
6. 96
7. 92
8. 100
9. 96
10. 104
11. 100
12. 108
13. you’ve got it!

[Note:  the awesome photo above is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcgladdery/2355605963/ ]

Why to write (or why I write, anyway)

Part of the value of the practice notebook is that it makes your work visible. This is of prime importance in the music world—no one pays you to practice, no one applauds when you’ve finished your scales, and though your always-growing skill is a great reward, it is often a real challenge to feel accomplished when you practice and have nothing to show for it. You know, a carpenter builds a set of shelves, and they have the shelves as proof of their work. An artist does a painting, and even if it’s still in progress after a day’s or week’s work, it’s there to see (and touch even)—a visible, tangible monument to their work and talent.

Now, I don’t expect that the Met will ever have an exhibition of the practice notebooks of the great musicians of our time, but the practice notebook can go a long way to make you feel good about the amount and quality of the work you’re doing, simply by making it visible and tangible.

But wait, there’s more!

I’d like to list a few more benefits that you can keep an eye out for as you experiment with keeping a practice notebook. Keeping a practice log allows you to:

• Keep track of what still needs to be done (write yourself a note: come back to bar 12, work on bars 234 and 235 together now, start 2nd movement tomorrow).

• Give yourself encouragement. Don’t be shy about it—remember how I said this wouldn’t be posted in front of the class? Go ahead—put a gold star every time you meet your practice goal! Or write in curse words! Or both!

• Be your own best teacher by keeping track of what works and what doesn’t

• Get to have a cool notebook.  Isn’t this one pretty?

• Have fun, later on in life, to look back at a record of your past life in music. Remember when you took that big audition? Remember when you first started working with your favorite teacher?  Here’s mine from the day I took my Tales & Scales audition:
  

A special note to the beginners out there: have you ever wished you could have your teacher there with you all week, making sure you practice right? This is a great way to learn to practice—what works, what doesn’t, what’s fun, and what isn’t. It’s especially valuable if you are not practicing every day—to help keep track of where you are, and what still needs time and attention.

A note to the professionals and conservatory students out there: I know you’re skeptical! Try it anyway!

Besides yourself and your instrument, the practice notebook is the single most important tool in your practicing.

I know, I know, those of you who have been playing for a while, or who are already in music school, or, gasp, professionals, are thinking, “Practice notebook? You mean like those charts I used to have to fill out for band practice? In fifth grade?”

Well, no, not exactly. This is not a chart you fill out and post in front of class, in order to separate the “good” students from the “bad.”

Instead, it is a notebook that you keep for yourself, where you can keep track of all of your hard work, all your ideas of things that need work, and best of all, that you can flip back through from time to time, to see how much you’ve done.

So here’s my story about practice notebooks: I ran the New York City Marathon in 1999—my one and only marathon so far. I had never trained for anything like that before, so I just followed the plan for beginners laid out by the NY Roadrunners Club—I followed it to the day, and kept track on a wall calendar of all the running I did, how far and how fast (or how slow, depending on your perspective), and how I felt each time. The deal with marathons, for beginners, is that you don’t actually ever run 26.2 miles until the race itself—your longest training run is usually 20 or 22 miles. So, as the marathon approached, I was freaking out about whether or not I was ready, since I was going to be running a distance that was a full 4 miles more than my longest run to date. So, just imagine how calming it was to flip through my calendar and see all of the running I had done, and know that I had run every run the NYRRC says to: it was proof that I was ready for the marathon.

I ran the marathon, it was fun and exhausting, and a few months later I was getting ready for a big audition for a ballet orchestra, as well as preparing for a solo competition. It was a lot to prepare, all the ballet music was new to me, and I was really having a hard time managing it all—and once again found myself pretty freaking out about whether or not I would be ready. I was bemoaning that fact to my good friend Polly, who responded by saying, “Did you learn anything from the marathon that could be helpful here?” My first reaction, honestly, was “What the hell kind of cheap do-it-yourself-life-coach question is that?” My second was “Well, it was pretty cool to write it all down.”

And so began my strong belief in the value of practice notebooks.

What to write (or what I write, that can serve as a starting point for you):

I keep track of the time of each practice session, and what I practice in each session. Usually just what piece, and maybe what movement or section I’ve been working on. A typical entry looks something like this:

21 January 2000

That’s really all you have to do to start getting a benefit from keeping these records, and that’s often all I do, as well.

HOWEVER, there are some great benefits to putting in some other commentary in your notebook. If you’ve been really struggling with something, write yourself some encouragement:

22 January 2000

Or, more enthusiastically:

29 May 2007

Sometimes I like to keep a record of how I felt, or what I would like to be better:

18 November 1999

8 October 2008

10 March 2000

And sometimes I can’t be bothered with being positive and write:

22 February 2008

Or just:

31 May 2007

Coming next time:  Why to write it