I talk a lot about using a metronome to practice–but how do you practice musical gestures that aren’t metronomic, like accelerations and ritards?  Today, we have a guest post on that very topic from the wonderful flutist Linda Chatterton.

Hi, I am delighted to be your guest blogger for the day! Many thanks to Zara for inviting me.

Zara asked me to write a bit about how to learn music that doesn’t lend itself well to strict metronome practice. For example, in Edie Hill’s Harvest Moon and Tide from “This Floating World” the flutist is asked to evoke the rising and falling of tidal waters:

When faced with a passage like this, you need to do two things: present the music that makes logical sense to you and the listener, and capture the musical gesture.

For the first, know that we process music in “chunks.” When we hear a piece of music, we naturally want to group notes into phrases, phrases into sections, sections into pieces. This is similar to language (letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and before you know it you have made your way through War and Peace.)

In the passage above, the natural grouping, in my mind, is 4 notes + 4 notes + 5 notes.  (This also helps with the acceleration into the e-flat dotted quarter note, because you will naturally play the five-note group a little faster that the four-note groups.)

When I started learning the piece, I practiced it with that rhythmic framework in mind; within those groupings, I made sure the notes were technically even – no finger glitches or rhythmic stumbles.

Once that was done, I went on to step two: capturing the musical gesture. Edie has made it easy to do this, as she is both a very gifted composer and gave really clear indication what the music should feel like. So I (literally) played around with the phrase, experimenting with the pace and the acceleration, until I found something that I liked. And I generally keep it like that, through many performances of the piece. But I have to add that, having performed Harvest Moon and Tide at least a hundred times, I am so comfortable with the piece that I do tweak the phrases in performances depending on my mood. These differences are very subtle, but they serve to keep the music sounding spontaneous without sacrificing either the composer’s intent or the technical parameters.

What to do if a passage still sounds awkward to your ear despite everything? In that case, I would record myself using different note groupings, if that’s the issue. If it’s a musical issue in that something doesn’t “feel” right, again, I would record myself, experimenting with different patterns of acceleration/ritard/rubato, maybe different dynamics, different phrasing, whatever. Play around with it and then listen to the results. Many times what I thought sounded one way to myself as the performer sounded different when I was the listener. If we take away our instrument and just simply listen to the music and trust our own musical instincts, we’ll find the phrasing that feels right to us.

You can check out Linda’s performance of Harvest Moon and Tide from “This Floating World” by Edie Hill at

Or hear her live:

• Wednesday, October 27, at 8:00 pm, Williams College, Williamstown, MA
• November 11-13, Texas tour including:  Texas Women’s University, the University of North Texas and as a guest artist with the Texas Flute Society
• Tuesday, November 16, at 7:00 pm Schmitt Music, Burnsville, MN, talk on overcoming performance anxiety and attaining peak performance, “It Sounded Better at Home!” sponsored by Yamaha Flutes.

Linda’s website is www.lindachatterton.com – bio, sound clips, her own blog, concert schedule, and more!

I had a great learning experience recently.  It was the night before a big performance, a featured spot at the National Flute Association’s Annual Convention . The event was called The Flute on its Feet and combined several staged and choreographed works for solo flute with workshop activities to introduce the audience to interdisciplinary performance.

I was having a pretty typical night-before-the-big-show practice session.  I felt good about my preparation up to that point: I had put in many hours of practice and rehearsal, done quite a few practice performances, and I was really excited to be able to present this material at the Flute Convention.  That night, however, I found myself making mistake after mistake, and getting more and more wound up as time passed–not exactly what you want in a final practice session.

I was rehearsing my version of Density 21.5. It starts with me telling the story of the piece, alternating phrases of speaking with phrases of music.  Here’s the funny thing:  I wrote the words and crafted the performance myself, but that night I was stumbling over the words and saying them wrong, or awkwardly. It was really unnerving the night before a show!

I needed to solve this problem, but practicing speaking is a little different than practicing playing.  I don’t know any good tricks for speaking like I do for playing (such as Metronome Trick No 1), so the only thing I could think of to try was to slow it down.

It solved my verbal flubs INSTANTLY!  It also made my shoulders relax noticeably, and gave me more expressive possibilities.  It’s always cool when a technical fix opens up more communicative horizons.

Next I moved on to Lowell Liebermann’s Eight Pieces, some of the most challenging music I’ve ever memorized.  Take a look at the first half of No. 2 for example (complete with my markings):

As you can see, it’s got a lot of notes, and if you look closely, they repeat themselves, but not quite (for example, just compare the ends of the first two lines).  There are many opportunities to go through the wrong door mentally, and many opportunities for your fingers to end up in a knot instead of a note. By the night before the show, I had been performing these pieces well and consistently.  But what do you know?  My night-before nerves were at it again, and I couldn’t get through a single one of the eight pieces without crashing and burning.

I tried the “slow down fix” again and it worked.  It was almost like magic: I’m used to incremental improvement, but this was an instant solution.

And again, it fixed more than just the technique.  The benefits were musical:  it was like space was opened up in each phrase, and expression and beauty were welcomed in.  It also fixed my anxiety:  with each passing mistake, I had been feeling worse and worse about the next day’s performance.  But by slowing it down, I felt in control, relaxed, and even joyful.  I was literally giving myself time to enjoy the music.

Hopefully everyone already knows to start slow.  The lesson of my experience at the Flute Convention is that sometimes it’s good to finish that way as well.  If you’ve been doing good practice, and you know you can play a particular passage well, but find yourself having sudden, unexplained problems with it or anxiety about it, try it slower.  If possible, use a metronome to make sure you keep it slower for the duration of your practice session.  Performance jitters can do all sorts of crazy stuff to our perception, so rely on a metronome to keep you slow when you’re nervous.  It’ll feel like magically creating space in time.

Photo Credit: suika*2009

One of the keys to successful and pain-free memorization is to only memorize very small sections at a time.

The Problem

Working on only small sections sounds simple enough, but memorization is a tricky business.  It can be really tough, psychologically, to make yourself concentrate on only a very small section at time when you really want to be playing the whole piece.  Good music has a certain feeling of inevitability about it:  one phrase naturally leads to the next and seamlessly carries you and the audience through time.  And the better the music, the stronger that sense of inevitability.  So it can be really hard to make yourself stop at the end of a single phrase.

Flutists, try the first page of the Martin Ballade, and you’ll know what I mean.

If the music is very complicated, with lots of notes and accidentals, you might find yourself deciding to work on memorizing only a portion of a phrase.  And that, my friends, is an even tougher discipline:  to play, over and over, just half of a phrase!

The Solution

So what’s a flutist (or any other musician trying to memorize) to do?  My solution is to put blinders on, just like one puts on a horse drawing a carriage.  The easiest way I’ve found to do this is with Post-its:  I cover up the music that I am not memorizing, making it way easier to focus on only the section I’ve chosen.

Usually it’s enough to just cover the next few notes with a single Post-it:

But if I’m really having a hard time focusing, I’ll cover up the whole next phrase, and even some of the previous one:

A Related Problem

Another common memorization pitfall is giving in to anxiety about learning the entire piece, when what you need to be doing is simply concentrating on a small section.  This is totally normal, of course:  who hasn’t said, or heard a colleague say, “I can play the little sections, it’s playing the whole thing that’s hard?”

When I get caught up in that particular brand of anxiety, my inner monologue goes something like this:  Well, this phrase may be important, but what about the next one?  And the one after that?  And that tricky one at the end? I sometimes get so caught up in the enormity of the task (Play the entire Ibert Concerto from memory?  Seriously?), that it’s hard to concentrate on the small, manageable task of learning one small section at a time, even though in this blog I’m always singing the praises of small sections.

The Same Solution

The Post-it trick is not just a visual focus aid, it also helps you psychologically by hiding the enormity of the job.  It’s similar to when long-distance runners use “short focus:” they look only a few steps ahead at a time, and then can run a whole marathon that way.  It’s also a great trick for getting up hills, since at a short focus, it’s hard to perceive the slope of the hill.  Which is just like using the Post-it trick to keep you looking only at a small section, and not thinking about the whole piece.

Some Details

I’ve also learned to use Post-its in dark colors, or to use two of the light yellow ones, so that I’m not tempted to just read the music through the Post-it.  Another good way to maximize Post-it opacity is to put the sticky part a little above the music you want to hide, as the part of the Post-it that sticks off the music is less see-through.

If you don’t have a stack of Post-its at the ready, you can just use folded up scrap paper:

Horses wear blinders so that they don’t get spooked by other traffic on the road, and musicians need them for a similar reason.  By putting Post-it blinders on, you make it easier to concentrate on the small section you want to practice.  And, perhaps more importantly, this keeps you from getting spooked by the things you are choosing not to concentrate on.

P.S.

In this photo, the horse is you.  The people on the motorcycle are the phrase after the one you’re practicing, and the tanker is the looming fear of playing the whole piece from memory…I think you get the picture!

Photo Credits: Black and white photo of horse: DMahendra Color photo of horse in traffic: Randy Son of Robert Other photos: me!

When I was first starting to do a lot of playing from memory (preparing for a big competition in my first year of graduate school), I wanted to have some sort of method that would help me feel certain that I had studied the music enough to know it for sure.   I thought that if the process of memorization felt systematic, I could be sure my preparation was thorough, which would translate into more confidence on stage.

I developed the following system at that time, and it has served me well in the years since.  I will devote future articles to some of its finer points, and why it works.  For today, however, I’ll cover the basic steps, so you can start using this system immediately.

The first thing you need to do is choose a short passage to memorize.  The principle of small sections is absolutely crucial to successful memorization – I can’t stress this enough! Please read my previous post on the topic of small sections if you need more information.

Once you’ve chosen your section, here’s what you do:

First stage:  Learning the passage mentally

1.    Play the passage twice through, reading it from the music, with the metronome on.
2.    Now, without looking at the music, think the passage through once at tempo (i.e., keep the metronome on).
3.    Play the passage once more while reading the music, noting anything that you forgot or didn’t know when you thought it through.
4.    Look away from the music, and think the passage at tempo another two times.

Total:  six times, three times playing from the music, three times thinking it through without the music

Second stage:  learning the passage physically

1.    Play the passage twice through, reading it from the music, with the metronome on.
2.    Now, without looking at the music, play the passage once through at tempo (keep the metronome on).
3.    Play the passage once more while reading the music, noting anything that you forgot or didn’t know when you thought it through.
4.    Look away from the music, and play the passage at tempo another two times.

Total:  six times through, three times playing from the music, three times playing from memory

Grand total:  twelve times through

For a slow passage, one or two times through this whole process is often enough to get it memorized.  Even if this process takes less than 10 minutes, I only do it one time through in a single practice session.  I come back to it the next day if I feel the passage needs another cycle through the memorization process.

For a fast passage that is technically challenging, here’s my routine:

1. First I do the whole process, all twelve repetitions, at a slow tempo (often a tempo even slower than where I would start if I were merely working on the passage technically)
2. Then I work on the passage using Metronome Trick No. 1, and at every tempo level I do the following:

a.    One time through mentally, at tempo
b.    Two times through playing while reading
c.    One time through playing from memory
d.    One time through playing while reading
e.    Two times through playing from memory

Basically, at each tempo level you go through the passage once mentally, and then go through the entire second stage of memorization.

If you would like a cheat sheet that lists the basic steps of this memorization technique, here it is: memorization-cheat-sheet (click to download as a pdf).

As you try this technique, know that your skill with it will develop slowly, but it will improve over time. If at first you don’t succeed, try again with a shorter section of music.  There have been occasions (most notably complicated music like the Ibert Concerto) when I have memorized one beat at a time!

I find that working from memory is like developing any other skill—it gets easier as you get more proficient.  Your memory, just like your muscles, can be ‘in shape,’ and when it is, memorization happens faster.  And when you’re just starting, you need to start with small units, just as you would start with small weights for your first day at the gym.

NOTE:  This is the first in a series of articles about memorization.  If there are any particular aspects of working from memory that are of interest to you, or you have questions about the techniques I share, please leave a comment below, and I will endeavor to answer those questions in future posts.

Photo Credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/derricksphotos/2172690132/

Here’s a trick for working on certain difficult technical passages. I say “certain” because this only works for passages that begin and end on the same note – as I will demonstrate later in this post. But first, the trick:

It’s simple–just take the passage, and make it into a loop. Play it through, and when you get to the end, that is the same as the beginning, just keep going like a tape loop.

Here is a phrase that I’ve been working on recently that works well this way. It’s from Judith Sainte Croix’s beautiful and mysterious piece for solo alto flute, Arctic Wind, written for and premiered by Andrew Bolowtosky, and I will be performing it in March (see end of post for details):

My goal was to get it to quarter note equals 92, so you can see that the 32nd note passage would be very fast. It conveniently ends just like it begins, so I was able to practice it as a loop, playing bar 58 over and over, like so:

I practiced it using Metronome Trick No. 1, and at each tempo level repeated the loop at least 4 times.

Making a loop is effective for two reasons. First, it takes the passage out of context, and makes it an abstract unit. This makes it easier for your brain to conquer. As you repeat the unit, it creates a particular neural pathway (maybe this one was called Arctic Wind, bar 58), and because you are looping it, this neural pathway gets super-strong, even stronger than it would be just repeating it in the context of the phrase. Looping a passage out of context relieves some of the anxiety associated with its difficulty, making it easier for your brain to focus on how to play it, rather than how daunting the task is.

The second reason is that playing something several times in a loop is harder than playing it once by itself. It’s kind of like when baseball players get warmed up by swinging several bats at once. Once you’ve mastered the phrase as a loop, it’ll seem easy-peasy in context.

Sometimes a tricky phrase is too tricky for this trick! Check out this passage from Righteous Babe by Randall Woolf:

You could loop it, repeating bar 100 a number of times before going on to 101. However, the goal tempo of this passage is quarter equals 96. Only a bit faster than the Sainte Croix, but even more difficult for two reasons:
1. The fingerings are very awkward (flutists, give it a try, you’ll see what I mean!)
2. There are no slower notes in the loop, like the dotted eighths in the Sainte Croix) where you can get a break.

So, I did eventually practice this as a loop, but not before practicing it just two quarters at a time, and then 4:

You may be wondering why bother to loop it if you can play it all 4 beats already … Since this is one of the most technically difficult passages of the piece, I wanted to feel extra confident that I had it down, and looping it gave me that peace of mind.

So, the next time you are faced with a particularly difficult passage that happens to end the way it begins, give this method a try. Become a live-action tape loop in your practice, and enjoy increased confidence and success in your performance.

Note: If you’re in the New York area and you’d like to hear Arctic Wind and Righteous Babe, please come to one of the following performances:
• 7 March 2009, 7pm, South Nyack Recital Series
• 15 March 2009, 3pm, Rockland Conservatory of Music Faculty Recital

Another note: The reel-to-reel photo is from:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/fridgemonkey/3294979647/

So, if you’ve read my entry on why you should listen to me, you might remember that I alluded to some embarrassing moments when I was learning these practice techniques.  Here, both to satisfy your curiosity and to illustrate the point that a metronome only works if you listen to it, are two of those stories.

Picture this: the young Zara Lawler, in her first semester of music school, studying with the renowned flutist Carol Wincenc at Indiana University (now the Jacobs School of Music).  I was so psyched to be there!  I practiced all day, tried to play like the grad students, was early for my lessons, and called my teacher “Ms. Wincenc” – I felt much too shy to call her “Carol” like everyone else did.  Basically, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Ms. Wincenc assigned me an etude a week from Andersen Op. 15.  I worked really hard on them, but always found them very difficult.  At one lesson, we had the following exchange:

Ms. Wincenc:  Did you practice this etude with a metronome?
Me:  Yes, of course.
Ms. Wincenc:  Then why doesn’t it sound like you did?

While that might sound harsh, it was an “a-ha” moment for me.  I knew right away what had gone wrong: I had been practicing with the metronome on, but not listening to it.  It’s amazing that it’s even possible to ignore something as insistent as a metronome, yet, that’s exactly what I had been doing.

Story number two takes place earlier in my schooling, while I was at the BUTI Flute Institute, the summer after my senior year in high school.  I was again eager to do my best, in my bright-eyed and bushy-tailed way, in master classes all day long with Doriot Anthony Dwyer and Leone Buyse (then principal and associate principal flutes of the Boston Symphony, people).

So there I was, in front of the class, playing a different Andersen etude.  This one was running 16th notes in ¾ time:

(click on this link for the first few bars of Andersen Op 15 No 1, played as written in three-four)

Ms. Buyse (of course I called her “Ms. Buyse!”) stopped me and said it sounded like I was playing in 6/8, not ¾. Here’s the same section of music, played in 6/8—I’m sure you can hear the difference:

(click here for the same passage played in six-eight)

So I started again, and she stopped me again, and said it STILL sounded like 6/8.  I tried a third time, and she stopped me a third time — you can see how this is getting embarrassing, right?  Well it gets worse, because eighties fashion plays a key role in this story:

I was wearing a Swatch.  Remember Swatches? If you’ve ever seen one, you’ve probably noticed how loud they tick.  Well, the Swatch in question was ticking out seconds, which I was hearing as dotted quarter = 60, exactly the tempo that you would play this in 6/8.

Here is that same passage again, but with a metronome on, so you can really hear the effect (it’s really too bad I don’t have the Swatch anymore, so I can’t use it as the second metronome. Heh. )

(click here for Andersen Op 15, No 1 in three-four, with metronome)

(click here to hear it in six-eight, with the metronome)

So it was the opposite problem of the first story.  At IU, I was working with a metronome but not listening to it.  At BUTI, I was listening to a metronome without realizing it. But the moral of both these stories is the same:  a metronome only works if you listen to it.  It is not enough to just have it on in the same room with you.  You must learn to listen to it, and play with it. Losing the 80s fashion doesn’t hurt either, though I hear it’s coming back.

[Note:  The videos in this entry were shot by the multi-talented Mary Dicken.  The Swatch photo is from http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoonabar/363501100/]

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.

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/ ]