Get Better At Music By Practicing Less

[Music] how to get better at music and stop wasting time by practicing less and how you should actually spend your time how's that for a controversial statement i can hear you mocking me now and it's fair to question such a statement it almost calls to mind other famously controversial musical statements like if you can play it slowly you can play it quickly which is actually a perfectly reasonable starting point but it does skip some steps but for now let's focus on the question how can you get better with less practice will you just become a

better musician over time with magic well sadly no but stick with me here because i think there are actually two ways we can improve by practicing less and the first has to do with the fact that many of us would benefit from examining what does the word practice really mean what are we actually trying to achieve when we practice and by contrasting the word practice with another word that fits better for a lot of situations and that word is learning of course musicians need to practice to improve there's no question about that practice and maintenance

are fundamental and i would never suggest that you don't spend time practicing but consider that when an experienced musician talks about preparing for a performance or a gig they might use the word practice like i have to go practice for my gig but i found that they're just as likely to say yeah me too i have to go learn my music now there's a subtle but crucial difference there because to me practice has to do with trying to get better at things you already basically know how to do but learning is the acquisition of new

knowledge or skills or at the very least preparing and becoming familiar with new material people sometimes treat these words as interchangeable but consider the following if you're a dancer you can practice a dance routine but you have to learn the choreography first you can't try to make your steps and movements faster and smoother if you haven't learned what the steps and movements are yet it just wouldn't make any sense to jump in at full speed if you don't know what to do first learn the steps first and then practice them if you're a cook you

can practice making a recipe but only if you're already basically familiar with all the vocabulary and techniques if you're making chicken pot pie from scratch you've got to know what mirepoix is and you can't ruin was it if you have no idea what that is and you've got to know how to make bechamel and pastry which are recipes unto themselves so you can't really practice the recipe until you've learned all the things the recipe is asking you to do if you're an actor you can practice your lines but only if you know how to pronounce

the words in the script and if you're playing a doctor on a starship speaking to a space wizard your lines might be absolutely filled with terms and names that are long and unfamiliar and difficult to read at first you'll have to spend time working on how to make those unfamiliar sounds into familiar sounds that you can pronounce with ease only then can you really practice your lines and craft your performance and if you're a musician and you're working on a piece of music you first need to understand what the piece is asking of you that

means you need to know how to physically play all the notes on your instrument how to read and interpret the rhythms and what all the other terms and symbols mean too novice and intermediate musicians routinely encounter new notes rhythms or other musical elements that they have to learn how to execute most new pieces will have something new they haven't seen before but even if you do understand everything there may be sections that are awkward or unfamiliar or just really dense with musical information you might find yourself struggling to even play the correct notes because there's

just so many of them and it can be a bit overwhelming you have to get familiar enough with the notes that you're not making a bunch of errors before you even worry too much about speed or even expression you have to learn the piece before you can practice it practice is the act of polishing and refining reinforcing good habits and maintaining skills and abilities of things you can already do learning is the process of acquiring skills knowledge and understanding in the first place practice is walking down a path wearing it in and moving along it

faster and smoother learning is creating the pathways in the first place and if you try to run really fast while creating a new path you might just run into a tree now you might be saying yeah yeah yeah learning practicing whatever what's the difference the goal is the same sound good and play well so who cares about what you call the process but i think there's a real danger to conflating the two terms because it seems that some musicians kind of skip the learning phase and move straight to the practice phase and they end up

wasting a ton of time they'll play a piece or passage over and over again at full tempo or close to it making the same or different mistakes each time with no particular tactic for how to improve accuracy seemingly just hoping that it will magically get better and they might play it 20 times in a row and then somehow play it correctly mostly by accident and exclaim i did it but did they really the thing that comes to mind when this happens is video games now i'm not anti-gaming at all i've owned many gaming systems and

continued to spend many hours gaming i adore a tower defense game the first plants vs zombies was a hilariously themed masterpiece but the thing about games is you only need to beat a level in a game once in order to move on you can fail 19 times in a row succeed once and finally move on to the next level or maybe beat the whole game in glorious and deeply satisfying triumph but some skills are different in music if you just played a passage wrong 19 times in a row and finally play it right once you've

still got a 95 failure rate behind you so what are the chances that you're going to play it right the next time i would say not great and you have to be really careful because the saying practice makes perfect really isn't correct if you practice a mistake you can learn it really really well have you ever learned someone's name wrong you probably hesitated when using their name for weeks afterwards learning something wrong can haunt you if you practice the wrong notes or rhythms you might very well learn them so be careful because practice doesn't make

perfect practice makes permanent if you're choosing between practicing for accuracy and practicing for speed choose accuracy over speed always because over time your performance will almost always get faster and smoother all on its own but if you practice while only caring about speed will accuracy increase maybe who knows only perfect practice makes perfect if you play a piece even extremely slowly but accurately all your teacher can really say to you is that was great practice it a bunch and make it faster but if you play it fast and it's just you know a mess where

can you even begin other than fixing the errors imagine a restaurant that advertises super fast service and you order a burger and fries and the server returns a few seconds later and excitedly presents you with a live cow and a raw potato you'd say what is this and they'd say you're dinner and you say uh this isn't what i ordered and the server would say sure it is and you'd say oh okay it isn't ready yet and the server would say maybe but wasn't it fast so the moral of the story for part one of

how to get better by practicing less is learn first then practice don't skip the learning step and jump straight to practicing because you can't really practice something until you've learned it even though some people try they're mostly just wasting time and maybe even getting worse whether you're looking at a small project or a large project remember that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step for music start by learning the notes and rhythms very carefully and accurately then learn what all the other stuff on the page means and start to work that

in and then you can practice and polish and make it good the process doesn't really change if the piece is short or long but whatever you do don't practice mistakes because you might just learn them now that we've established the importance of learning versus practice let's look at the second way to get better at music by practicing less which is to make time to learn new things if you're brand new to music everything is new and you're constantly in the learning phase you're learning notation sound production technique repertoire and all kinds of vocabulary symbols and

concepts there's a lot to learn but your songs and exercises are probably pretty short and simple covering one or two things at a time and you mostly just play each one a couple of times and move on to the next thing you need to learn but after you've learned a few things and you've got a few tunes and exercises under your belt it feels really good to play them and you probably have some favorites music is so fun and satisfying because there is a unique joy of execution it feels so good to nail a passage

and feel your body and instrument vibrating and making amazing beautiful awesome sounds and everyone likes to do things that they're good at because it makes us feel good so we often practice the same songs and scales and exercises polishing and refining over and over and over and while of course music requires maintenance and repetition we have to be careful that we don't practice old things so much that we forget to work on new things because if you only ever do the same things you never really grow or improve think of some other disciplines learning a

language requires new phrases and vocabulary not just practicing the same few phrases over and over chefs and cooks learn by challenging themselves with new ingredients new techniques and new recipes rather than just cooking the same few dishes over and over if you're working on fitness you need to push yourself to go further harder faster weight lifters know that you won't get any stronger if you just keep lifting the same weight over and over forever you have to increase the weight to get stronger and runners and cyclists know that you have to increase your speed distance

and resistance if you want to improve your performance and even if you are already quite fit it's always good to learn new exercises and movements try yoga or rock climbing or parkour it's good for your brain and your body to work different muscles in different ways now if you just play for fun now and then you know a few tunes and you're happy with that that's awesome i'm not gonna tell you you're doing music wrong music is the best maybe we can play together sometime but if you do want to improve you should really think

about challenging yourself with new scales new pieces new exercises and new repertoire not only will new challenges make you a better musician and actually help you play old repertoire even better i really believe that humans require growth we don't do well with stagnation comfort is comfortable and we love the familiar but if you only play the same songs over and over again without any novelty growth or improvement you won't grow or improve either you'll either get bored and quit or when you are confronted with a new challenge you won't know how to approach it because

you only know how to do what you already know how to do but if you do make a habit of learning new things and you learn how to learn you'll realize that every new challenge is just a puzzle to be unlocked and understood or a journey to begin and as gloriously satisfying as achieving a particular goal can be that satisfaction will fade happiness is derived from growth practice and maintenance is fundamental but always remember to grow so that's the second way you can get better by practicing less don't just practice the same things that you

already know how to do over and over forever be sure to make time to learn and grow with new and challenging exercises songs and projects finally let's take a look at how you might want to structure your time between learning and practice to improve and grow in both the short and long term and quick side note although we just made a great big deal about the difference between practice and learning when you spend time alone on your instrument working on music virtually everyone calls it practice or a practice session and calling it a learning session

is only going to annoy people so feel free to say practice but we know what you really mean of course every musician will have different needs interests and abilities but here's a general outline that should be adaptable and useful for most people your routine should be broken up into four basic sections warm-up technique projects and review warm-up is all about physically preparing to play and it involves a few different things first you need to prepare your space adjust your music stand make sure you have your music and a pencil and of course assemble and set

up your instrument with any accessories you'll need next prepare your body take a few moments to loosen up and stretch your fingers arms lips lungs feet whatever you use to actually play your instrument try to release tension and get into good posture then prepare to play make some sounds tune up and make sure you're feeling good and sounding good different musicians will have different needs in this regard some will be ready in just a few minutes and some will take a bit longer think of warm-up like boiling a pot of water it might be fast

or slow depending on a few factors but it really doesn't matter if you're an expert chef or brand new to cooking the water isn't boiling until it's boiling and you really can't rush it or skip that step if you do try to play when you're not warm you probably won't sound very good everything will be a bit more difficult and you might as well try to make spaghetti with cold water moving on warm up blends very well into the next section which is all about technique this is where you maintain and enhance mechanical things like

scales patterns and other instrument specific dexterity challenges all the things that make you a better musician by gaining a better command of your instrument review old scales to make sure they're still solid and maybe make them faster and cleaner and spend time working on new scales to build your key fluency you might even want to work on accents dynamics articulation or expanding your upper and lower register every instrument and musician will have different needs here but this section is a bit like running laps or doing push-ups or eating your vegetables it may not always be

super exciting but working on technique on a regular basis will make every other thing you do easier next is projects this is the main course of your practice session this section is all about preparing repertoire and making progress on specific pieces or songs and it can be challenging work practice is kind of easy because it's familiar material that you're trying to make even better but this can be much more effortful because by definition you're doing things that you're not very good at yet things that you either haven't learned or are in the process of learning

so allow yourself to struggle a bit and maybe sound like you don't know what you're doing because you don't yet of course that doesn't mean to sound bad or practice mistakes but try not to worry about what the person outside the practice room thinks of you with a new piece or difficult section you may be playing very slowly and awkwardly and with very little flow and that's just fine don't just play fast and hope it gets better practice deliberately and work it out if you work hard with attention to detail and general mindfulness you'll get

better and faster and smoother you may have a few different projects on the go at different levels of readiness the first two sections are mostly routine but this section is dynamic and how you approach each project may vary some things will be in the very early stages of learning while others might be further along and you'll just be working on speed or expression remember that this section is about progress just pick something that isn't performance ready and make it better than it was the final section review is kind of like dessert maintain and revisit repertoire

and play things that you're great at and that you really love you've put hard work into this practice session this is the payoff and after all that hard work on stuff that you're not very good at it's always a good idea to remind yourself of the things that you are good at music is fantastic and it can be so much fun and it's important to remember that especially when you've just finished working on a bunch of new and difficult things so that's how you can get better by practicing less number one learn first then practice

otherwise you might just be wasting a ton of time learning things wrong and number two make time to learn new things to grow and challenge yourself rather than just practicing the same stuff over and over and when you do sit down with your instrument balance your time between a proper warm-up so you sound good techniques so you can get around your instrument better projects to improve specific pieces and review to maintain repertoire and have some fun remember to like comment share and subscribe hit the bell for notifications and check the description for links to more

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