How to Train Like the Best Musicians
How do you make music? Do you sit down and play a certain piece over and over again? You do what you start at the beginning of the piece, play until you make a mistake, repeat that part until you’ve played it perfectly, and move on – only to make the same mistake on the next workout?
I have had sixteen years of piano lessons, so I am very familiar with both of these methods. These days, my “piano practice” is more about playing – I run through already familiar pieces just for fun, or tell myself that if I work through a new piece enough times, mistakes will be eliminated over time. disappear by themselves.
And of course, if it’s easy enough, they’ll do it. But I’m not getting better at my music. I don’t play anything more difficult than what I studied in high school (although I did a much more complex repertoire in college).
This is largely because I am not practicing correctly.
The best musicians focus their practice time on the hardest parts of the music.
Performance expert Cal Newport recently shared some thoughts from one pianist on what makes good musicians different from ordinary ones:
The mistake of most weak pianists is to play, not practice. If you walk into the music hall of the local university, you will hear people “play” as they cycle through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists practice the most difficult parts of their music, seldom, if ever, playing them in full.
The state of flow that many of us aspire to when we sit down to play music that isn’t too hard to deal with (or play music that is a little beyond our skill level and hopefully the bugs will eventually go away) is actually it actually prevents us from becoming better musicians. We do not want our practice sessions to be continuous; we want to focus on the most difficult aspects of the subjects we are trying to learn.
This is in line with last month’s post about the difference between play and work : when testing a process is more important than creating a product, you play; when the product is more important than the pleasure of the process, you work.
Right now, all my piano lessons are about playing. If I want to become a better pianist, they have to change.
The best musicians move towards a specific goal
Here’s another piece of advice from the pianist: Less experienced musicians focus their rehearsals on how to get through the piece without making any mistakes, while the best musicians focus on how to make the piece sound the way they see it in their head.
This is, no doubt, partly due to the fact that the “best musicians” have already developed a certain skill set; It’s hard to get to the point where you can decide how you want the piece to sound if you’re still wondering where your fingers should go.
But if a musician with an average level of training (like me) approached his training on the principle of “how I want this piece to sound, what part is currently preventing me from achieving that sound, and what should I do?” to fix it, ”I could probably get much better results.
It’s about what you practice, not how long you practice.
If you’re currently thinking, “Well, that’s great for people who have hours of practice time, but I’m lucky if I can squeeze out 30 minutes a day,” a recent study by the Royal Society of Open Science found that the number of hours what you spend is less important than the work you do during those hours.
As The Guardian explains:
A study of violinists found that just good players practice as much, if not more, than the best players, leaving other factors such as training quality, training skills, and perhaps natural talent to explain the difference.
Okay, it’s more like “the work you do during these hours, the teacher you can afford to hire, and the talent you were born with.” Yet – for all of us intermediate to moderately skilled musicians looking to improve, why not start by improving our practice?
I know that when I sit down at the piano today, I will approach my music a little differently. Rather than playing the piece over and over and hoping that mistakes will correct over time, I’m going to focus on one part until it sounds the way I want it to.
And then I will continue this practice until, as they say, she does everything perfectly.