The Sign That You Are Not Practicing Correctly

You walk into a music store to the sound of someone jamming to their favorite song with the latest super gear of the month. They like the sound of the gear. They are sounding good. Then, sooner then you can say, "is that Eric Clapton?", they completely mess up what they are playing. In an effort to save face, they then add a little made up riff to make it seem like they intended to do that. It is too late though. We all know what happened. They did not take time to practice the song correctly. Does this sound familiar? I see it every time I walk into a music store. It is the sign of poor practice.

This is a common problem. We have all seen it happen and we have all let it happen to us. How do we stop it from happening? Here are a few tricks I have found to help avoid this poor practice syndrome.

Start With the End First

This is a concept I found in Kenny Werner's book Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within, Book & CD. He points out that most musicians can play the beginning of a song well but tend to fall apart at the ending. His suggestion is to learn the ending first.

Most people will practice music from the beginning to the point where they have trouble. After they work on the trouble part, they start from the beginning of the song again. By the time they have worked through the whole song, they have practiced the beginning hundreds of times more than the ending. The result is a feeling a confidence at the beginning of the song and a growing lack of confidence as they play the piece. This is not a good feeling.

To break out of this, start with the ending. Play the last measure. Once you have that down, play the second to the last measure and the last measure. Keep progressing backwards through the measures until you can play the whole song.

Make the Tricky Sections the Easy Sections

I used this trick recently to get a difficult bass line down before a gig. The concept is to find a difficult section then practice that section till it is one of the parts of the song you know the best. Here is how it works.

1. Set a metronome at a speed you can play the song comfortably. For this example, let's say that is 80 BPM and we are playing "Big Sciota" (notation above).
2. Play the whole song. Increase the tempo gradually, no more than 4 BPM, till you notice sections that are difficult at that speed. Do not stop on the difficult sections. Make a mental note of them but keep playing the song till the end. For this example, we will say that at 88 BPM you have trouble with the 4th measure. 
3. Now that you have identified a difficult section. Determine a way to practice in and out of that section. This is because starting in the middle of a section does not train your brain for the continuity of the music. For this example, it would be best to start the section on the pick up into the 4th measure, beat 4 of the 3rd measure, and play through the 5th measure.
4. Here is the trick. Work on playing that section until you are more comfortable with that section than the rest of the song. Do this by slowing the metronome down and focus on playing this section correctly. Once you get it down at that speed, pick up the pace a little. Keep doing that until you can play it much faster than what you have been practicing the whole song. For instance, work at it till you can play that section perfectly at 100 BPM. 
5. Once you are comfortable with that trouble section, move the metronome to be a little slower than you started having trouble, for instance 84 BPM, and repeat this process. 

Hack Your Brain

This trick has to do with how we learn and retain information. The trick is to practice the song regularly enough so that you can do it from memory. If it has been a few days since you last played the song and you can no longer play it from memory, you waited too long from the last time you practiced it. If you can play it from memory, without mistakes then you can increase the time between practicing the song. But, if you increase the duration between practicing to where you cannot remember the whole song, you went to far. You need to start back at practicing it every day.

Let's say that I want to memorize "Big Sciota" from the example above. Once I have the song down, I might play it once every day for 1 week. After that, I might play it every other day for 3 weeks. Then, I might play it once a week for a month. This repetition helps retains the song in the brain.

Those are just a few tips for developing the skills to play a song perfectly from start to finish. What has helped you?


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