“Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.” Larry Gelwix
When I was a student at University, I was always amazed at how most musicians practiced. Walking through the practice room area of my School of Music, I noticed that most people were simply doing the same thing over and over again without thinking about the results of what they were doing; without making adjustments or trying something different if they weren’t getting the results they wanted. Have you ever listened to someone practice? Have you ever listened to yourself practice, for that matter? Record yourself during a normal practice session for an hour and listen to what the results are. Or take a walk through the practice room area at school and eavesdrop on your fellow students, or even with their permission, sit in on a lesson. What do you notice?
You’ll notice that the majority of folks practice rather mindlessly, either engaging in mere repetition, which is practicing the passage a certain amount of times or practicing a specific piece for a certain amount of minutes. It all seems to go on autopilot in kind of a mindless way. But, we are getting our practice time in, right? Rubinstein, the great pianist, stated that nobody should have to practice more than four hours a day, explaining that if you needed to practice more than four hours a day, you probably weren’t doing it right. Violinist Leopold Auer says “Practice with your fingers and you need all day. Practice with your mind and you will do as much in 1 1/2 hours.”
Here are three of the major problems with an inattentive or mindless method of practice.
1. First and foremost, it is a waste of time. Why? For one, very little productive learning takes place. This is how you can often practice a piece for hours, days, or weeks, and still not feel that you’ve improved all that much. You are continuing to strengthen your undesirable habits and errors, literally making it more likely that you will continue to “mess up” more consistently in the future. This type of practicing leaves no room for correcting these habits in your future. When and if you choose to change these habits, it will exponentially add to the conscious practice time you will need in order to eliminate these bad habits and tendencies.
2. It makes you less confident.
Practicing this way undermines your confidence, because you know where the weakest areas are, leaving you with no viable way to consistently get through them with the results you want. You can never be sure that the difficult passages, extreme high or low notes will be there on demand because you have never practiced them consciously and on purpose. You don’t know exactly why you either got lucky and nailed them, or missed them and blew your audition or performance. You spend the whole piece worrying about those trouble spots instead of being free to tell the story through your character for those listening, whether in an audition or performance.
3. It is tedious and boring.
Practicing mindlessly is a chore because you are not conscious of what you are doing, how you are doing it and have a way to measure your results. It’s not about practicing for an hour a day or going over a particular passage 10-20 times. What you really need are more specific outcome goals and a way to measure your results as you work developing a solid vocal technique will allow you the freedom to perform at your peak.
So what to do??? You need to learn how to practice deliberately and on purpose, measuring your results not by how many hours you practice but by the consistent results you get. Deliberate practice is a systematic and highly structured activity, which is, for lack of a better word, scientific.
Instead of mindless trial and error, deliberate practice involves monitoring an active and thoughtful process of making sound with clear goals and expectations in real-time, exactly like the model you want to get under your belt. It then becomes a consistent and reliable habit that will continue to solidify and improve your vocal technique and performance skills. This means really feeling physically what is happening, so that you can tell yourself exactly what went wrong, where and why. Are you only doing the physical process or are you listening to how you sound and making judgments from that? If it doesn’t feel the same each time you make your sound no matter what the venue, then you need to stop immediately and start from square one as you continue to strengthen this new process until it becomes automatic.
Here is Daniel Coyle’s formula for creating deliberate practice habits. It’s from his amazing book, “The Talent Code”. (This is definitely one for your personal library.)
1. Reach for it
2. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach
3. Return to step one
Simple, not easy! It doesn’t matter if you are talking about perfecting vocal technique, or experimenting with interpretations of a song or aria. Any model which encourages conscious, smarter, more systematic, active thought, and clearly articulated goals will help cut down on wasted, ineffective practice time.
So stop practicing unconsciously. It just won’t work when you have to change gears and move to conscious mode when performing. Your brain will end up freaking out because it doesn’t recognize the instructions you have given it. It’s used to working in a different mode and won’t work well in the new “on demand” mode of performance. And remember that it doesn’t really matter how much time you spend practicing something. The only thing that matters is that you know how to produce the results you want, and can do so consistently, and most importantly, on demand.
Avanti until next time. Now let me know what you think about practicing. Ciao, Carol
