Music Practice Tips

So you’ve sight-read the notes, and learnt them quickly, you’ve got it right the first time, and you’re in the cementing process. You’ve put it to a pressure test, and survived that. But what now?

You might consider wanting to cement it a bit more, you know, just to make sure it will never fail. However, this can be an unending cycle that you’ll keep on working on and never finish. It will end up lengthening your practice turnover times, and that’s not what we’re working towards. Instead, you need to find a way to close what it is that you’re doing so that you can move onto the next thing.

Closure

Closure is knowing when to stop. But it’s more than that, it’s knowing when to stop, and knowing why you’re stopping. You’ll want to stop for good reasons and bad reasons. The bad reasons are thing such as being “sick” of that bit, saying “That’ll do”, thinking that because you’ve spent so much time on it, it’s right, or finally getting it right (after a number of bad times). First of all, most of these don’t tell you that the aspect is right, it just tells you that you’ve done some work on it.

Instead, you need to know some good reasons to stop practicing. By far, the best one is knowing that the passage is ready - whether that be lesson ready or performance ready. The best way to do this is through Pressure Testing, during which you will have seriously put it to the test, and made sure that it’ll be right. That way, you can be sure that if you stop practicing, it will be right.

Another time you might want to stop practicing is if it’s just not getting better. If it’s not improving, then any extra time going over it will just be wasted time. Often what we need is a break to do other things, to focus on something else and when we come back to it with a fresh mind, we’ll find a breakthrough.

Finally, if you have something else that you need to complete, then it might be an idea to go and do that. However, you might want to prioritise your goals, to make sure that you’re getting the most important ones done. I’m currently pondering a system which is based on Leo’s Zen to Done (ZTD) system of productivity, and will post about this soon.

Triggers

Instead of asking yourself have you completed everything, it might work better for you if you have a pre-defined trigger to know when you’ve finished. For example, you might want to move on once you have memorised the passage, or as soon as you have played the passage with the metronome at 140bpm, or when you’ve made one passage correctly 5 times in a row. Once you’ve defined it, you can keep an eye out for it and move on without guilt or delay.

What’s some of your favourite triggers to close out your practice session? Or how do you close your sessions?