Hello, everybody!

I’ll be back soon with more practice ideas and techniques.  In the meantime, check out this cool radio program I just heard.  It’s an episode of the Leonard Lopate Show, one of our favorite NPR shows here in New York.  Lopate’s guest is Matthew Syed, a sports columnist and the author of Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success.

With a title like that, it’s obvious why this book is of interest here at The Practice Notebook.  One of the main topics Syed and Lopate discuss is the great debate about which contributes more to success:  talent or practice.  Syed comes down quite squarely on the practice side of the debate, and has quite a bit of scientific evidence to back up his argument.

So take a moment to listen–I think you’ll find it inspiring.

Greetings, all, and happy spring!

Thanks to all who have been reading, and sending in questions and comments.  I intend to post some more reader-inspired articles from time to time.  So, if you have a question, feel free to email it, or add it as a comment to a post.  I will try my best to reply (though as Richard, today’s question author, can attest, it may take a while).

Below is Richard’s email on a very interesting topic:  adjusting to a new instrument.  He has kindly accepted my request to post his email and my response.

Hi Zara,

I came across your website while trying to answer a question for myself.  I recently got a good flute – a Muramatsu DS – and am finding that it is teaching me a lot.  I’ve never had a good flute so it is quite eye-opening.  I can find a great sound on every note, but it seems I don’t get to the point of the sound being fairly consistently good until I’ve played for 45 minutes or so.  I think the flute may be forcing me to work my embouchure in ways that my previous flute did not. It rewards me for the work – eventually  – with a great sound – but I think I’m also fatiguing my embouchure – over practicing a bit.  Oddly enough it’s feels more like it’s my lower lip – not my upper lip – that gets fatigued.   My lower lip seems to not be able to hold the position it needs to get a good sound.

Does any of this sound familiar?  Is it possible to over practice and fatigue the embouchure?  Thanks for any advice you might have, particularly how I can get to the point where I can practice 2 – 3 hours and just be fine.

Richard

P.S. – If you have CDs I can buy please let me know.

Dear Richard,

Thank you for your email and question.  I want to apologize for taking so long to get back to you by way of saying, yes, that does sound familiar.  In fact, I spent part of the month of January over-practicing myself!  Hence the decreased time for keeping up with my blog and for writing thoughtful replies to good questions like yours.  Sigh.

First of all, congratulations on your new flute!  A good instrument can be a good teacher, as you are finding out.  I’m guessing that some of your frustration is due to a phenomenon that I haven’t covered in my blog yet:  your brain is ahead of your body.  Now that you have a new flute, and you hear yourself sounding so much better than you have in the past, your brain has made a cognitive leap, and decided that you should sound that good, or even better, all the time.  And trust me, with your drive and willingness to work, you will.

The problem is that it takes your body a lot longer to learn a new skill than it takes your brain to set a new standard.  Your ear hears yourself sound even marginally better on your Muramatsu, and instantly your brain gets all sorts of grand ideas about how you should sound all the time.  It might take your body weeks or months to learn how to sound that way—not only to figure out what the various muscles of your embouchure need to do, but to develop the strength to do them consistently.  In the meantime, though, your lips are straining to achieve that sound all the time, and getting fatigued in the process.

If you have friends who play brass instruments, you’ve probably heard from them about how over-practicing can really harm their “chops” and compromise the quality of their sound.  The same is definitely true for flute players.  I think, though, that because our embouchure is, by definition, more gentle (we don’t buzz, we are not squashing our entire embouchure against the mouth piece, the air pressure we use is so much less, etc), we can generally go much longer than brass players before this happens, and that’s why you don’t hear about it for flute players so often.

This is one of the reasons I stick by the 30-Minute Rule .  Even on days that I practice 4 hours, I take breaks every 30 minutes, because without them, my sound starts to suffer, because my lips (and brain) start to get overtired.

Every once in a while I break the 30-Minute Rule, and I always notice that my sound gets worse, and I start to go a little crazy. This January I was trying to learn some new pieces for a recital, so I kept saying to myself, “Well, I’ll just practice a few more minutes, since I REALLY need to learn this music…”  And after a few sessions like that, I find myself thinking, “Wow, why do I sound so bad?  With all this practicing, I should be sounding great.”  Then I remember the 30-Minute Rule, and get back to it, and suddenly I sound better again.

So, when you say that you’d like to be able to play 2 to 3 hours at a time, I counsel you strongly to integrate breaks into those hours.  If you think about it, a professional orchestral flutist not only has breaks written into her contract, but she isn’t playing for every moment of the rehearsal.  There are rests written into the score; the conductor takes time to work with the strings alone; etc. You need to build that same kind of rest time into your practice routine.

Try sticking to the 30-Minute Rule, and working regular breaks into your practice time.  Try taking the long view, and trusting that your physical abilities will develop over time to match your new instrument’s potential.  If after another couple of weeks you are still feeling this same frustration, particularly that it takes you so long to get to the point of feeling warmed up, then it may be that you need a better warm up routine, or some other fix.

Hang in there, and enjoy your new instrument.

Sincerely,

Zara

PS.  At the moment, I don’t have any CD’s for purchase, but I hope to have one in the next year.  I’ll keep you posted.  In the mean time, you might enjoy this webcast of a recent concert.

Photo Credit:  D Sharon Pruitt

Are you wondering how much to practice?  And how to organize your practice time so that you get the most out of it?  You know you’re supposed to take breaks every once in a while, but how often?  How do you keep yourself from practicing too much at one sitting, when you’re really on a roll?

For me, part of the answer is the 30-Minute Rule.  I practice in sessions of 30 minutes, separated by breaks of 5 or more minutes.

I find that anything longer than 30 minutes starts to yield diminishing returns—my mind wanders and my sound gets bad, usually around the 32-minute mark.  I know that sounds comically precise, but I’ve been keeping track of these things in my handy practice notebook for years, so I know!  In fact, every once in a while I break the 30 minute rule when I’m feeling desperate to learn a lot of music, and it ALWAYS yields the same things:  more frustration and a bad sound.

Knowing that there is a time limit to your session can help keep your mind focused.  Practicing may be challenging, but you know it’ll be over soon.

It can also make it easier to start your session—OK, today I really have to tackle those nasty octave slurs, but it’ll be over in half an hour.  I mean really, you could probably do anything for half an hour, if you had to.

The 30-Minute Rule is also for your physical well-being.  Playing a musical instrument is physically intense and your body, just like your mind, needs regular breaks from the rigors of practice.  Breaks help you to recover, and need to be built into the structure of your practice day.

Back in ye olden times, I used to try and practice at least 45 minutes or an hour at a stretch.  The thing is, when I tried to practice that much in one sitting, I usually found myself staring blankly out the window for any number of those 45 minutes—effectively I was taking a break.  Then I would berate myself for spacing out, and force myself back to work.  Eventually, I figured, why not just make it official, and work 30 minutes at a time, then take a real break?

The 30-Minute Rule also fits very nicely with the 10-Minute Rule.  You can do 3 10-minute segments within one larger 30-Minute session.  This can give you a good idea of what you can reasonably accomplish in your practice session. Knowing what you can do in 30 minutes will help you know how much you need to practice all together, and you can use your 10-minute units to divide up the time sensibly.

If you are professional musician, or music school student, give the 30- and 10-Minute Rules a try for a week or so and see if they are the right time units for you (brass players, for example, might want to plan breaks after a shorter time period).  While you’re experimenting, listen to your body, and adjust until you find your ideal practice time unit.  Then give it a fancy name (i.e. The 27 and 1/2 Minute Rule) and stick to it.

If you are an amateur or younger student, start with a smaller unit of time for your session of practice, maybe only 20 minutes, and divide it into shorter segments that make sense and feel good to you.  Then you can work up to longer sessions.  Remember, two sessions of 20 minutes with a break in between will yield far better results than 40 minutes in a row.

Keep an eye out for more on how to organize your practice in following posts.  And for more on breaks, see What to do on Breaks.

Happy Practicing!

Photo Credit: apesara

It’s that time of year again, the beginning of the school year.  Time for new backpacks, new notebooks, and new projects. And for many of us, it’s time to get back into practicing after a summer hiatus.

I always find getting back into playing shape after a break rather arduous.  Inertia is a powerful obstacle, and when I’ve gotten out of the habit of practicing it is hard to get back on many levels:  I don’t sound good, I don’t feel good, and I don’t think good neither!

With that in mind, and hopefully with better grammar, I’ve compiled a list of tips for getting back into shape.  They deal with the musical, physical, and psychological aspects of the process.  Many of the tips, as you might expect, are gentle reminders of good, basic practice technique.  A few of them (see No’s 4 through 6) are just the opposite of what I usually prescribe, and only apply for those first few practice sessions after a break.

1. Know that all your skills will come back.  The first few practice sessions after a break are ALWAYS tricky (for me, day 3 is the worst), but trust me and your past experience: you’ll get back to where you were before.
2. External motivation always trumps inertia, so give yourself a reason to get back into practicing. If you are a student, schedule a lesson.  If you are a professional, find yourself a low-stakes gig (like playing at a retirement home or for friends in a salon setting).
3. Make sure you do your physical warm-ups.  This is so important, it warrants two exclamation points!!  Jumping right back into practice after a break is an easy way to get hurt, and physical warm-ups go a long way toward preventing injury.
4. Speaking of preventing injury, make your first few practice sessions shorter than normal.  For example, my normal warm-up routine (stretches, long tones, scales, etc) takes 50 minutes to an hour.  After a hiatus, I do a “best-of” version that takes just under 30 minutes:  stretches, condensed long-tones, and my two favorite scale patterns.
5. Play something you like, not something you love.  For me, one of the main obstacles to getting back into practicing is how bad I sound, so playing a piece of music that I have a big emotional investment in feels too discouraging.
6. Don’t practice the hardest part first.  Ordinarily, that’s a great way to practice a piece, but not for your first few sessions back.  It can be disheartening, and can lead to the kind of poor practice technique that leads to injury. For me, this means no memorization work—it’s just too challenging right off the bat.
7. Have you been thinking about something you’d like to change in your playing? Now is a good time to start experimenting with it.  Just remember tip No. 8:
8. Go easy on yourself! The first few days back from a break are NOT the time to be berating yourself for lack of discipline, and they are definitely not the time to try and judge whether or not you are “talented” or “a good flutist.”  They are exactly the time to do whatever corny thing you can think of to make it nicer to get over the hump:  give your self a gold star in your notebook, take yourself out to ice cream after day 3, practice in your pajamas while lying in bed, whatever it takes!

In a manual transmission car, first gear has only one function: to overcome inertia and take the car from still to moving.  The first few days of practice after a break are like first gear.  Their only function is to get you back at your instrument, and start you getting back into playing shape.  Don’t expect to solve any big problems on those few days, and don’t expect to learn volumes of music either.  Just getting over inertia is enough. You can shift into high gear in a few days.

Photo credits: School girls by zedzap, Gear stick by johnmarchan

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.

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/