Deliberate Practice Part II
In the first part of our series on effective practice methods, I looked at the concept of “Deliberate Practice” by Anders Ericsson. I outlined what it actually is, and the characteristics associated with this form of learning. Hopefully it set off some light bulbs for a few of you, and has helped to create a clearer and more effective practice routine this past week. If you missed the post, then check it out here.
Today we’ll dive a bit deeper into how Deliberate Practice works in the practice room, and the actions you can take to implement it on a daily basis. Let’s have a closer look at each step:
1. Define the goal
Before you play a note on your instrument, you want to first develop a crystal clear idea of what you are aiming for.
· What do you want a particular passage to sound like?
· What is the character or emotion of the section?
· How do you want to phrase it?
· What specific articulations do you want to use?
· What tone colours? Tempo? Dynamics? Vibrato? Rubato? Etc. etc.
Without a strong and specific idea of what you are aiming at, you’ll just be stabbing in the dark and hoping for the best. It’s like playing darts blindfolded! This is why a clearly defined goal is an essential starting point.
Leon Fleischer articulates this point beautifully in this short video clip.
2. Reach for that goal
Once you’ve worked out what your ideal version sounds like in your head, GO FOR IT and try to recreate it on your instrument. A clear mental representation of what you want to sound like will give you the confidence to play with certainty and conviction. A strong mental image creates strong outcomes, especially under stressful circumstances.
As the great brass pedagogue Arnold Jacobs once said: “Issue statements, don’t ask questions”, meaning that you are playing YOUR version of the piece or excerpt, stating to the audience how YOU think it should sound. So push yourself and reach high for your ideal version, and see how close you can get!
3. Evaluate results and identify problems
This is often the easy part of anyone’s practice routine – working out what went according to plan, and what didn’t. Thanks to our natural critical ear we tend to hear every slight imperfection that inevitably crops up. But it’s this step where we can get stuck quite easily. If things aren’t running smoothly, frustration and desperation builds and progress stalls. Yes, it is important to work out what you need to improve on, but moving through this step quickly and without self-judgement is a critical skill to develop.
Often we might label our playing as good or bad (or somewhere in-between). But if you can treat your mistakes not as technical deficiencies, but as golden opportunities to learn and improve, then you will gain a much healthier and facilitative perspective.
“Mistakes are neither good nor bad, they are just information.”
So how can you learn from the mistakes that you make? By taking the next step…
4. Identify the cause of the problems
I see this as perhaps the most important part of the learning process, yet is a step that many musicians don’t take the time to understand thoroughly enough.
In my experience I’ve seen countless students play through a passage, make a few mistakes, and then immediately attempt to play the same passage again without stopping. They leave no time for evaluation, clarification of musical or technical ideas, and no time to accurately identify the underlying issues in their playing. They don’t take the time to work out WHY they got the result that they got!
Whilst the emphasis on repetition in your practice is extremely useful, taking some time between repetitions is crucial in effectively assessing your playing. Research has indicated that motor skill development increases when there is between 5 to 20 seconds between repetitions, as opposed to less than 1 second between takes. This means that taking time to think between repetitions will actually speed up improvement in the long run.
Spending a few seconds thinking about possible underlying causes of an issue will give you time to come up with more appropriate solutions. If you don’t take this time, then adjustments and corrections will tend to be less accurate for future run-throughs. This can cause you to reinforce the same errors through further repetition.
So this step is where you can ask yourself plenty of questions, in order to find out exactly what is going on.
· Why did I get the result that I did? (Good or not-so-good)
· What did I do to make any particular mistakes?
· What happened just before I made those mistakes?
· What was I thinking about before and during any tricky passages?
Even if you’re not sure of the answers right away, you will begin to create a shift in your thinking to go beyond evaluation, and move towards positive problem solving instead.
5. Come up with potential solutions and test them out
Once you have an idea of the cause of the problems you’re dealing with, you can treat your practice room as a laboratory, and have fun exploring possible solutions. Curiously approaching each problem with an open and flexible mind will give you the freedom to experiment and find out what strategies work best.
This is where a lot of trial-and-error learning takes place. Your teacher would have provided you with guidance of tried-and-tested strategies, but use your practice time to find out what works best for YOU! You know yourself better than anyone else; so don’t be afraid to experiment with lots of different ideas to find the right fit. Ask other teachers, colleagues, or students how they might tackle similar issues. Go onto YouTube and search for some recordings of the piece or excerpt. Or check out interviews of world-class performers talking about their practice strategies.
There is so much information out there. You just need to find the right piece that will fit into your puzzle.
6. Integrate your learning into the overall process
When something works, don’t forget it…write it down!
Learning is all about retaining useful information and repeating it until it becomes automatic. Countless times I have done something that works really well in my practice, only to have forgotten what I did the following day. It’s like finding the Willy Wonka golden ticket, and throwing it straight in the bin!
A great way to retain as much information as possible is to keep a practice journal. Write down your daily discoveries and breakthroughs, record the amount of practice you’ve done, which goals you’ve been working towards, and any other important information along the way. This makes it so easy to flip back to previous notes to jog your memory, and use the same effective strategies that have worked in the past.
So there you have it, Deliberate Practice step-by-step. Download and print out the step-by-step guide to use in your practice studio, and let me know how you go! All the best with Deliberate Practice, good luck!
