Practice like you play

Hands up if you practice a piece or exercise by starting from the start, working your way through a section with lots of repetition, and feeling like it all sounds a lot better than it did to start with? My hand is up!

Now hands up if you come back to that same section the next day and it is like you have never seen the music before? You feel like you have to start from scratch again!? My hand is still up!

This is a classic case of a traditional practising method being shown to be quite inefficient when it comes to attention, learning, and memory retention. According to performance psychology and neuroscience, our brains retain more information when we pay attention to change and difference, as opposed to doing the same thing over and over again. When our repetition is done all in one block, our brain slowly switches off the more times we play the same thing, leading to less and less retention (and more boredom!).

Enter “Interleaved Practice!” This type of practice is designed to break up the monotony by jumbling up our repetitions and interspersing them between each other. This means that you are always restarting different sections and never getting in a groove. You have to struggle a bit to remember what you did previously and how the section goes. It feels like you’re making less progress (which can be frustrating I know!), but your brain is actually retaining more than double the information than it did before. It forces you to be more focused and engaged, and keeps boredom and mindless repetition at bay.

Not only is this a great technique for the practice room, but also significantly helps your performance preparation by creating a more realistic performance environment. When performing you only get one shot at anything, you don’t have the chance to get in a groove, so this way of practice helps train this extremely well.

Have a go at Interleaved Practice this week and let me know how you go! Write your comments below, did you find it easy or a struggle? Did you feel more focused, or are you still getting the hang of it?

Here's a short video on "Interleaved Learning". You can apply this concept to basically any sort of learning, not just music practice. It's especially good for those of you with tests and exams coming up!

It's all in the brain! 🧠