To Be Successful at Something, Practice Less Often.
All musicians have different approaches to becoming the best, but whatever your practice, it will inevitably involve some version of a running scale. Being good enough to keep up with inspiration is very exhausting. Unfortunately, for many, this has turned into a miserable day for children being pressured into a keyboard. But now we are adults. Let’s practice wisely, not hard.
On the subreddit / r / ProLifeTips, user U / banana__phone brought up the old tip they would have received from their former piano teacher in the position :
My piano teacher told me that it is better to practice a skill for 20 minutes every day than 60 minutes every 3 days or so.
At least it helped me. Especially if you postpone the timer. It stays in me longer, and I find that I improve much faster if I take time each day to do what I want to be better at.
The commentators responded that this is called “distributed practice,” and music teacher Robert Woody wrote an article about it in Psychology Today. He cites several reasons why it is better to exercise often, but for relatively short periods of time.
Motivation
You want to be a great artist! Everything is worth the sacrifice! But heck, you’re kind of depressed after a day of working on your art. Woody believes that people who exercise too much suppress their enthusiasm for their work, and this is a huge mistake:
Some people who have made music may feel internal pressure to practice. Constantly thinking about everything they need to practice – scales, basics exercises, listening, technical exercises, etudes, repertoire – they may think they never have time. An obsessive practice orientation was associated with feelings of guilt and anger, as well as a general dissatisfaction with their musical life.
If you are doing something that is so tedious, horrible, and tedious, you will not want to do it. And then you won’t practice much at all.
Trauma, damage
Too much practice can mean injuries that are difficult to recover from because they arise from the fact that you wear out your body over time. You need rest:
Even with the will to do so, a lot of practice comes with other risks. Physical loss can lead to undue injury to instrumentalists and singers’ vocal nodes. These conditions limit the benefits of the practice and can ultimately lead to the music being stopped playing for the body to recover.
Woody also warns that avoiding sleep so that you can stay up all night with your cello, or waking up too early isn’t always the best way to use your time effectively. Better to be harsh from sleep than running around yawning. If you are mentally and physically tired, you are not learning anything.
Quality is more important than quantity
So why do people choose to do endless exercise when they can shorten their workout time? Because it actually takes less mental analysis. If you take a step back and really think about what you need to work on, you will set more specific goals.
Good practice begins with thoughtful goal setting. Musicians should not only start training with a sequencing plan (eg 1. warm-up, 2. running scale, 3. trouble spots in concert pieces, etc.), they should focus on aspects of the performance that need improvement. … General goals such as “I want to sound better” are not as useful as specific goals, such as “I want the arpeggios to have even rhythms in both fast and slow tempo.”
Maintaining this focus and concreteness is not as easy as doing something by heart over and over again. But it will free your life and make you better overall.
So does it work?
Well, according to research, it depends on the skills you develop. The opposite of distributed practice is “mass practice” – doing the same thing over and over for a long time. In a textbook on Physical Skills, Motor Learning, and Development, researchers Pamela Haybach, Greg Reid, and Douglas Collier write that numerous studies show that with skills like music, distributed practice is where it is:
Continuous skills are better learned with a distributed class schedule than with a mass one, while the opposite is true for discrete skills. Thus, swimming, dancing, and skiing will benefit from distributed practice, while hitting a golf ball or baseball can be effectively learned from mass training.
A discrete skill is something concise that you do over and over again, with well-defined start and end points. A continuous skill is a movement movement without a definite beginning or end, such as playing the violin. Do it briefly every day so you can do it (well) all the time.