The Illusion of Learning: Rethinking Blocked Practice in Music

What is your motivation to practice?

Do you practice to enjoy making music and express yourself creatively? Are you driven by the desire to emulate your musical idols? Do you aim to perform in front of an audience, play in a band, or simply improve for your own satisfaction?

Whatever your motivation, the underlying goal of practice is almost always to improve. You want to develop new skills, overcome technical challenges, learn fresh repertoire, and achieve things you couldn’t before.

This article explores how one traditional approach to practice — blocked practice — fits into this journey and why it may not be the most effective method for long-term learning. We’ll explore what blocked practice is, why it feels effective in the short term, and how its limitations reveal the need for alternative strategies.

What is Learning?

At its core, learning is "the act or process of acquiring knowledge or skill." Whether through self-study, experience, or guidance from a teacher, learning involves updating our knowledge and skills, leading to improved behaviour and performance.

In music practice, true learning isn't about temporary gains made during a single session — it’s about retention. It’s the ability to pick up your instrument the next day, next week, or even months later and reproduce or refine the skill you've worked on. This is the benchmark of effective practice: not just immediate improvements but lasting progress.

Unfortunately, the methods that feel effective during a practice session don’t always produce the best long-term results. This brings us to blocked practice.

What is Blocked Practice?

Blocked practice, also known as massed practice, is when you focus on one task or skill for an extended period, performing the same activity repeatedly before moving on to the next. For example:

- Practising scales in one key over and over for 10 minutes before moving to the next key.

- Playing the same passage of a piece repeatedly until it feels "perfect."

A typical blocked practice session might look like this:

- Skill/piece A: AAAAA (10 minutes)

- Skill/piece B: BBBBB (10 minutes)

- Skill/piece C: CCCCC (10 minutes)

This approach often feels productive because it produces rapid improvements during the session. The repetition builds familiarity and fluency, which feels rewarding and motivates further practice.

Blocked practice has its benefits, particularly for beginners or when learning something entirely new:

1. Establishing Neural Pathways: Repetition helps the brain build the initial connections necessary to perform a skill.

2. Confidence Building: For novice learners, blocked practice can create clarity and confidence by keeping practice straightforward.

3. Short-Term Gains: Repeatedly working on one section or skill can lead to noticeable improvement in a single session.

However, these benefits come with significant limitations.

The Problem with Blocked Practice

Despite the immediate sense of improvement, blocked practice often falls short when it comes to retention — the ability to perform the skill days, weeks, or months later. Here's why:

1. Illusion of Mastery: Repeating the same task creates a false sense of competence. You’re not necessarily learning; you’re temporarily improving through repetition. This can feel satisfying in the moment but leads to frustration when those gains don’t stick.

2. Lack of Effortful Retrieval: One of the key principles of long-term learning is that effort strengthens memory. Struggling to retrieve information or execute a skill makes it more likely to be stored in long-term memory. In blocked practice, there’s little need for effortful retrieval because the skill remains fresh in your short-term memory.

3. Minimal Adaptation: Blocked practice doesn’t require your brain to adapt to new contexts or challenges. This limits your ability to apply what you’ve learned to different situations, such as playing in a performance or tackling a similar passage in a different piece.

The Science Behind Forgetting and Retention

One of the counterintuitive truths about learning is that forgetting is essential to retention.

When you step away from a skill or piece for a period of time, your brain begins to forget. While this may feel like a setback, it actually creates an opportunity for deeper learning. The effort required to recall what you’ve forgotten strengthens the neural connections associated with that skill, making it more robust in the long term.

Blocked practice, by contrast, minimizes forgetting because it focuses on immediate repetition. While this feels effective in the moment, it doesn’t give your brain the opportunity to struggle, retrieve, and reinforce what you've learned.

Research supports this:

- Bjork & Bjork (1992) introduced the concept of "desirable difficulties," emphasising that challenges like effortful retrieval and variability during practice lead to better retention and transfer of skills.

- Taylor & Rohrer (2010) found that interleaving — practicing multiple skills in a mixed order—leads to better retention and adaptability than blocked practice, even if progress feels slower during the session.

When is Blocked Practice Useful?

While blocked practice has its limitations, it isn’t without value. It can be particularly effective in the following scenarios:

1. Learning a New Skill: For beginners or when encountering a new technique, blocked practice helps establish the foundational motor patterns and mental understanding needed to execute the skill.

2. Developing Confidence: Repetition builds initial fluency and can boost confidence, especially for less experienced players.

3. Warming Up: Using blocked practice for scales, arpeggios, or technical exercises can be a great way to prepare your fingers and mind for more demanding work.

However, as soon as the basics are in place, it’s essential to move beyond blocked practice to more effective methods for long-term learning.

Alternatives to Blocked Practice

1. Interleaved Practice:

Interleaving involves mixing multiple skills or tasks within a single practice session. Instead of practicing one skill in isolation, you alternate between different activities, like this:

- Skill/piece A: A (5 minutes)

- Skill/piece B: B (5 minutes)

- Skill/piece C: C (5 minutes)

- Repeat.

For example, if you're practising scales, alternate between keys every few minutes instead of staying on one key for an extended period. If you’re working on a piece, alternate between sections or combine technical exercises with repertoire work.

Why it works: Interleaving forces your brain to retrieve information more frequently, which strengthens memory and improves your ability to adapt to new challenges.

Example: A pianist working on a Chopin Étude could interleave practice of challenging passages with sight-reading exercises or another piece in a contrasting style.

2. Spaced Practice:

Spacing involves distributing practice over multiple sessions rather than cramming it into a single block. For example, instead of practicing one passage for 30 minutes in a single session, practice it for 10 minutes over three sessions across a day or week.

Why it works: Like interleaving, spacing introduces forgetting between sessions, which makes retrieval more effortful and enhances retention.

Example: A violinist might practice a difficult passage for 10 minutes in the morning, review it briefly in the afternoon, and revisit it the following day.

3. Random Practice:

Random practice involves practicing skills in a completely unpredictable order. This is particularly effective for developing adaptability and preparing for performance, where tasks rarely occur in a predictable sequence.

Example: A drummer practicing fills could randomise the order of rhythms or combine fills with groove patterns to simulate real-world performance challenges.

How to Transition from Blocked Practice

If you’re used to blocked practice, transitioning to interleaved or spaced practice can feel uncomfortable at first. Here’s how to make the shift:

1. Start Small: Begin by interleaving just two or three activities within a session. Gradually increase the variety as you become more comfortable.

2. Plan Ahead: Create a practice schedule that includes specific blocks of time for different activities, ensuring you return to each skill multiple times.

3. Track Progress: Use a practice journal to note what you’ve worked on and when you plan to revisit it. Tracking your progress will help you stay organized and motivated.

4. Be Patient: Remember, the benefits of interleaving and spacing often feel less immediate than those of blocked practice. Trust the process and focus on long-term growth.

Conclusion

Blocked practice can feel satisfying because it produces quick, noticeable gains during a session. However, those gains are often short-lived, as the method prioritizes short-term fluency over long-term retention.

By incorporating interleaved, spaced, and random practice strategies, musicians can maximize their learning potential and achieve deeper, more lasting progress. While these methods may feel slower or more challenging, they reflect the true nature of learning: a process of effort, adaptation, and growth.

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced player, understanding and applying these principles can help you practice smarter, not harder, and ultimately achieve your musical goals.

References

• Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (1992). A new theory of disuse and an old theory of stimulus fluctuation. *From Learning Processes to Cognitive Processes*, 35–67.

• Brady, F. (2004). Contextual interference: A meta-analytic review. *Perceptual and Motor Skills, 99*(1), 116–126.

• Rawlings, D. R., & Tapper, R. (2020). Interleaving and spacing in music practice: Evidence for cognitive enhancement of learning. *Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 30*(2), 89–97.

• Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2007). The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning. *Instructional Science, 35*(6), 481–498.

• Taylor, K., & Rohrer, D. (2010). The effects of interleaved practice. *Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24*(6), 837–848.