
The Science and Art of Practicing - yonibot
http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20146/15906/
======
deadfece
I found a lot of improvement in my guitar practicing by reading "Fundamentals
of Piano Practice."

The author made it available for free at
[http://pianopractice.org/](http://pianopractice.org/)

As I play fingerstyle I study hands separated by separating the bass and
melody as thumb and fingers, then move to hands together.

I also analyze the piece to find the hardest as well as the most repetitive
measures, work those out and pick up the rest of the piece. You also work
these measures with transitions, by playing the preceding measure or half
measure leading in and out of the measure you're practicing.

I typically don't get a lot of time to practice so I will pick up my guitar at
random and play measures that I'm working on.

------
noname123
Awesome article. But tbh still very vague, I'd love to hear about some of your
guys' specific practice schedule. Below is mine,

Guitar Practice: I do repertoire, technique and improvisation. For repertoire,
I usually focus on the hardest passage and run it three times to the best
ability and then connect the whole song together for 3 goes before I finish.
For technique, I usually rotate on scales patterns/licks/ear training; review
the last pattern I learned and learn a new pattern. For improvisation, I just
doodle with jam track and listen and try to iterate on how I can improve
(e.g., better timing on stressing notes on chord changes, building tension).

Dota Practice: I sometimes watch youtube casts on warding and laning. Also
what different heroes are good to counter different heroes. But mostly I just
play ranked games and try different heroes.

~~~
kevan
I play trumpet, my routine usually starts with long tones and slow
articulation exercises. As I get warmed up I extend into lip slurs, faster
articulation, and flexibility. After I'm completely warmed up then I go into a
mix of technique work, etudes for fun, and whatever other repertoire I need to
work on for performance.

Repertoire that I'm just maintaining is a mix of full runthroughs and
reinforcing small segments. For new repertoire I usually work through it
measure by measure, mixing air+valves reps with playing reps to save my lips.

------
tokenadult
Good advice. My wife (a pianist and piano teacher) just read the article
kindly submitted here and said that that is how she practices. I've heard over
the years about how she advises her students, and, sure enough, one of the key
ideas is to distribute practice across multiple days each week rather than
piling into one lump of time just before the lesson.

After my reading of the article, I have to say that getting a good night's
sleep each night is definitely crucial for learning anything challenging.
Sleep makes connections and consolidates learning.

The one thing I don't see mentioned in this article that my wife tells most of
her students, after learning about it from one of her university music
teachers, is how important it can be to analyze a new piece of music through
multiple modalities. My wife's university teacher has a book about "music
mapping,"[1] an approach to reading musical scores and adding visual notations
to them, which is highly individualizable and works wonderfully for helping
musicians learn where the music is in a new piece of music. Playing with
musicality rather than just memorizing notes is always the key idea.

[1]
[https://www.areditions.com/books/rs001.html](https://www.areditions.com/books/rs001.html)

~~~
MrDom
> getting a good night's sleep each night is definitely crucial for learning
> anything challenging.

That makes me wonder why sleep deprivation is such a large part of the college
experience.

~~~
wallflower
I think pulling 'all nighters' (seriously, being in the computer lab when the
sun comes up in totally not cool - especially with the gradual lightening of
the sky and realization that you are bone tired and still have 2 hours left of
work...) is part of the culture that college students expect at some but not
all schools. Similar to binge drinking, there is a lot of peer pressure to
'pull an all nighter' or 'do a funnel (of beer)'.

Peer pressure doesn't stop after high school. In fact, it might not "stop". As
some of us grow older, your peers change until they reflect what you really
want in life (for most, in my experience, that means having peers who are
settling down and having two kids and a family). I'm sure there is definitely
peer pressure at senior citizen/assisted living homes to be 'cool' (whatever
the norm is).

Startup culture is similar in the bubble of San Francisco. The norm is so
skewed from the median/average of what most people in a business environment
do.

As David Foster Wallace said, the fish doesn't know it is in water. [1]

[1]
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607)

------
read
_In one study, where they tried learning both ways, people felt like blocked
practice was better, even though their ultimate performance was measurably
better after the random practice!_

 _Though you might improve at a task during practice, you’re less able to
carry forth that improvement to the next day._

 _Studies have shown that consistently getting a full night’s sleep (eight
hours) plays a huge role in learning motor and auditory skills_

 _The surprising parts are usually the places that they did not account for in
their mental practice._

 _Forget about the nasty passages for now. Instead, spend two weeks getting in
touch with the musical aspect of the piece and practice it through, just for
musicality._

The linked essay in the article also gives a timeline on how long in takes for
neurons to connect: it takes about a week to happen.

[http://mollygebrian.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/what-
musicia...](http://mollygebrian.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/what-musicians-
can-learn-about-practicing-from-current-brain-research.pdf)

Also: _You will be much better off practicing your orchestra music for 15
minutes a day until the concert, rather than “wood-shedding” the day before
the concert. Why? Because you’ll have all those nights of sleep for your brain
to process the new music._

------
gtani
Good article, i discovered it right after i bought my violin (could have been
after i got a viola, can't remember). I think you can apply these tips to
learning, say, rust programming, or convex optimization. I also think a random
beat generator is sort of similar to backing tracks i record in Garage band or
ableton, and you should leave pieces/charts you're learning out on the stand
next to your computers, and look at them often, 5x/hour.

Another tip, always remember the first time you tried to play a clarinet,
cello or violin (if you can). Those for me were special moments.

Here's some other (comprehensive) books about practicing, which go from
mechanical prescriptions about washing hands and brushing teeth beforehand, to
the zen, in the vein of the motorcycle and archery books, like long tones/long
bows/drone notes/son filé (the last is Galamian's term, his violin technique
book highly recommended).

Kenny Werner, [http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-
Master-M...](http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-Master-
Musician/dp/156224003X) (recommends pianists practice long tones ?!)

Sterner: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Practicing-Mind-Developing-
Discipl...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Practicing-Mind-Developing-
Discipline/dp/1608680908)

Bruser: [http://artofpracticing.com/book/](http://artofpracticing.com/book/)
(Gerald Klickstein' book is also good, i remember)

Julie Lieberman has soem good violin-specific eg
[http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.do?itemid=6954...](http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.do?itemid=695420)

~~~
graycat
Galamian's book -- loved it!

> convex optimization

I assume you are minimizing -- maximizing is easily NP-hard.

So, get some supporting hyperplanes of the convex _epigraph_ and use linear
programming to minimize subject to those hyperplanes as constraints. Then add
a constraint and try again. There is also a cute way to do _central cutting
planes_ that can be better numerically.

So, for many non-linear problems, if are maximizing, then the dual is a convex
minimization, and that can help. This can be called _Lagrangian relaxation_.

I never thought that how to do violin practice was so tricky -- just work to
get the fingers on the notes, in time and in tune, and then do it a lot until
get a lot of facility ( _hear_ the note(s) just before playing them),
sometimes return and play very slowly and deliberately, and then work on
expression -- the fun part.

But then I never made much progress. The best I did was the D major section of
the Bach "Chaconne", and that was fantastic fun -- I played the repeated notes
that made them sound _insistent_! I regard the end of the D major section as
the climax of the piece and find it fantastic.

~~~
gtani
That reminds me, somebody borrowed my Galamian and never returned it... I want
to read that bit about vowels and consonants again.

I think all of this is about you need to figure out how to practice or learn
CUDA or Mandarin or whatever for yourself. My dad's advice on learning math
was simple "Stare at the book til something sinks in, do the problems, figure
out if the answers in the answer key are right". For some students, that's all
they need to be told

What this guy talks about at the bottom of page is similar, i.e. there are
people who know the materials and teaching methods that have worked int he
past, but the only person who can teach yourself is yourself:
[http://www.allaboutjazz.com/janek-gwizdala-cooking-up-a-
litt...](http://www.allaboutjazz.com/janek-gwizdala-cooking-up-a-little-bass-
magic-janek-gwizdala-by-ian-patterson.php)

~~~
wallflower
> "Stare at the book til something sinks in, do the problems, figure out if
> the answers in the answer key are right"

In Rafe Esquith's classroom, he talks about how they take that a step further.
They knock the ball out of the park on standardized testing because they
specifically try to come up with _wrong_ answers for a math question. They
learn the psychology of making test answers by doing - and don't fall into the
traps.

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OZ0NRG/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OZ0NRG/)

------
ytturbed
>When she does this with students, she asks them afterwards, “Was anything
fuzzy?” It’s usually the part that they were messing up that’s fuzzy.

This is genius. Reminds me of the rule that if something feels fuzzy _at the
instrument_ it's always a conceptual error about the piece rather than poor
coordination or poor finger strength.

>Why is it better to practice every day for an hour, instead of seven hours on
one day of the week?

For the same reason that it's better to practice for 10 minutes several times
per day instead of one hour straight.

~~~
vshan
Not the same reason, as it is better to practice one hour every day of the
week instead of seven hours on one day because of the sleep you have.

~~~
ytturbed
Sleep is a given. The brain is learning continuously, not just during sleep.
Go back to a section of a piece after 15 minutes doing something else and
notice it has become easier.

~~~
cheepin
Sometimes it's even easier after just 1 minute away. I code and play music,
and I've made a habit of occasionally walking around the house, petting the
dog, then back to where I'm working/practicing. It doesn't take long, but it
works strangely well.

~~~
ytturbed
Yes. There's something about _walking_ isn't there? Returning attention back
to the body and the senses amounts to _relaxing_ after hard concentration.
Perhaps petting the dog enhances that, the body being where emotions are felt.
Scientists seem to suspect that walking or just standing occasionally is
important for health.

To complete the argument about learning: you play the tough section,
correcting a few errors. Then you go away for a bit, and during that period
the brain updates its hardware to include those corrections. The mistake is to
hammer/saw away repeatedly and interfere with _what you have already achieved_
, wasting time and effort. I think the OP kinda acknowledged this by
recommending switching at whim between different tasks _within_ a practice
session.

------
chipgap98
I found this article very interesting, but I'm not a musician. I know they
mention sports briefly, but I'd love to see a more detailed account of this
advice applied to other topics.

------
ianamartin
I don't find this to very useful, and I think the approach of this study is
probably not so great. My background on this is that I'm a professional
violinist. I started playing when I was 4 and was performing professionally
when I was 8. I'm 35 now, and I still play as a soloist, in chamber music, and
with an orchestra. I happen to make most of my money by writing code, but the
violin is still a big part of my life. I teach kids, and they win big
important violin competitions.

My specific issue with this article is that it seems to think of practicing as
one monolithic event--as though you are really just doing one big thing when
you practice: getting better at what you are practicing. I think the concept
of randomizing tasks is sort of getting at a good point, but it's really not
all the way there. And also, you have to understand that you are, in fact,
getting something extremely valuable out of the block practicing: the ability
to focus on a singular task for a long period of time. That's a skill itself.
You will never do well in a 3-5 hour rehearsal with a string quartet or an
orchestra if this is not something you are accustomed to doing on a regular
basis.

Here are some more details.

The big thing to do when I was a kid was to send your children to a practice
camp like Meadowmount, where all the Juilliard School teachers spent their
summers teaching kids like me. That was all block practice. 5-8 hours a day,
and a lesson every day or so. That kind of block practicing went exactly as
described in the article. An hour of scales, and hour of etudes, an hour on a
piece of music, etc.

In my opinion, that's a mixed bag. You need to be able to pull a scale out and
just lay it down. Any scale. Any time. It's a kind of a musical Fizz-Buzz
problem. You just need to be able to do it even if it's not really
interesting. Although, it's not like Fizz Buzz because scales are actually
really hard. Etudes are a sort of micro-problem to solve. You isolate a
particular bow or finger technique, and you spend some time every day working
out that physical skill--the logistics of getting x fingers from point a to
point b in the requisite amount of time.

Putting in a block of time on your musical piece is also important in itself
because you have to commit that music to memory. Not just the notes and the
finger motions involved, but all the little things like the bowings and
phrasings and dynamics and stuff. The parts that take notes and turn them into
"music."

The reason I think the study is flawed is that I think it's studying a
strawman of an idea. No great players actually practice in the way that this
article describes. There's this idea of a mindless slaving away that we do for
hour after endless hour. That's not real. I mean, it's probably real for some
people. But great players don't do that to begin with. And good teachers don't
recommend this approach.

There are some popular methods of learning difficult things. There's a thing
that people do to tackle a difficult bit of notes where you just practice
slowly with a metronome and you gradually increase the tempo. Start with a
tempo slow enough for you to get the notes out, no matter how slow. Then you
just gradually make it faster and faster. This should work, right? No. It
should not work. And it doesn't work.

\--a brief interlude before I explain why that doesn't work--

What you're doing when you play a musical instrument is that you're solving
physical problems--usually without the necessary tools. You are working a
variety of physical challnges. The logistics of moving fingers from one place
to another, you're solving acoustical problems by managing the friction
between your bow and your string(s). Or if you're a wind player, you're
dealing with the physical properties of your breath interacting with a
vibrating reed or you're vibrating your lips when you play a horn of some
kind. There are two parts of every musical problem. 1. There's the conceptual
problem: "How should I be trying to execute this solution?" 2\. The physical
part: "How do I train my fingers, arms, hands, lips, whatever to perform this
solution?"

Tempo matters when you are planning out these solutions. A slow tempo uses
different physical motions, and it takes a different mindset. Slow tempos
(yes, tempi, I know, but I don't feel like the word is so foreign that I need
to pluralize it in Italian, so tempos) allow for larger motions and gestures.
Slow tempos do not need to have efficient motions the way fast ones do.

\--back to my point--

Practicing slowly will never get you to perform things quickly. You are
practicing the wrong thing. If you want to learn to play things quickly, you
have to practice them quickly. But in small chunk. Take 2 or 3 or 5 notes.
Play them even faster than you ever intend to perform them, and do it with a
metronome, so your rhythm is good. Chain them together, and gradually slow
down and enlarge your motions.

I don't know the details of this study: who were the participants, where they
came from, or what their experience is. But to me, this seems like a situation
where the block practicers are basically dumb practicers. Because no good
musicians practice that way. I think you would have positive results doing
absolutely anything to break up this kind of a thoughtless, put-in-some-time-
and-hope-I-get-better kind of a routine. Random exercises are probably better
than that.

I can see how these results make sense. Randomization is probably a good thing
for a certain type of musician. But I would argue that it's definitely not
better than a thoughtful, focused, problem-solving approach applied for long
periods of time.

Anyway, just thought I would throw some things out there. Cheers.

~~~
alinajaf
This is a fantastic comment. I'd love to hear more about your experiences and
any other insights you have about musical practice.

Since you program too, do you think there is much crossover? Some analogous
form of practice that makes you a more effective coder?

~~~
ianamartin
Some thoughts about what crosses over:

One of the most unexpected things to me is how good I am at hitting deadlines.
But it makes sense. As a musician, deadlines don't move. You're playing a
concerto with an orchestra on such and such a day . . . that concert is going
to happen whether you are ready or not. Your choices are to get up there and
play like a badass or get up there and fail in front of a thousands of people.
You learn that when you're 8, and it sticks with you. When I moved over to
coding, I never thought twice about it. A deadline is a deadline. It doesn't
move. That's a thing that's been consistently talked about in my career. I
nail my deadlines. Not because of any magic about me as a programmer, just a
mental inability to view those as flexible. I can see, however, that this
would be a weakness for me if I were to get into management: I'm awfully
impatient with people who don't hit deadlines.

Dealing with toxic environments. I read about brogrammers and silicon valley
startups with all kinds of ego problems and sexism all the time. We all do.
I've even worked for a startup or two that styled itself that way. I've never
met anyone with the kind of ego that professional musicians have. Not all,
mind you. It's been my experience that the best people in any field are quite
kind and wonderful and humble. And the worst are the ones who are actually
just mediocre. But there are tons of mediocre performers who have terrible
sexist, racist, and generally toxic attitudes. I managed an orchestra while I
was studying statistics after I dropped out of my music degree because it
seemed like a good idea. I've never seen such a wretched hive of scum and
villainy. As far as I'm concerned, even the most obnoxious of the party-boy,
popped-collar, douchebag bros I've ever worked with are basically nothing
compared to you run-of-the-mill regional orchestra player jerk.

Being willing to learn from anyone. There are many musicians (particularly
string players) who subscribe to a certain philosophy of playing. All other
methods of playing are ipso facto wrong. My best teacher is a violinist, Bruce
Berg, who studied with Galamian, Gingold, and Dorothy DeLay. He did an
undergrad, grad, and doctorate at the Julliard School. Where he claims to have
learned very little (I doubt this is true). After finishing his doctorate, he
went and studied with a Cellist--heresy!--named George Neikreug. What could a
violinist with these credentials possibly have to learn from a Cellist? To
this day, Bruce claims that he never actually learned to play the violin well
until he studied with George. I've taken that same approach, (and I picked up
a lot of George's techniques from Bruce), both in music and in technology, and
I think it has served me well. Go to the dark side for advice some times. Go
learn a language that you don't like. Go talk to people you don't think have
anything to offer you. Go with an open mind and a warm heart. And a couple
hundred bucks. Because people often charge money for their knowledge. But I've
learned as much about programming from reading Marco Arment talk about how he
does all his web apps in PHP because his needs are simple as I have learned
from reading Eevee about how much PHP is a hammer with the claw part on both
ends.

I could continue on about this just as much as the earlier topic. But I should
probably shut it down. So I'll close with this:

Don't be afraid to contact big important people and ask them for help. I
remember when I was just learning python, I was writing an extension for SPSS
to do some statistical junk that we couldn't do with the interface as it
existed. So I just went and wrote one that shouldn't have worked but did and
emailed him the code and asked why it worked. I got completely schooled by a
total master. It didn't really work. Slightly embarrassing, but since I didn't
bring an ego to that situation, I learned a ton. John Peck is a really great
guy.

------
larrym
"Mental Practice" Now there lies the key to the door...

