Monday 7 July 2014

Practicing practicing...

Maybe it's my background in classical trumpet that taught me how to practice. Or perhaps it's my acquisition, over the years, of various technical but ultimately useless skills such as juggling, fire staff, nunchucks, rock climbing, BMX and the various instruments I have learned such as didgeridoo, acoustic guitar and djembe. It might even be through my work as a teacher (of music, psychology and statistics) that I have come to understand the process of acquiring a skill through effective practice. Whatever the source though, it has become more and more apparent to me over the years that many people do not achieve their full potential in their chosen discipline due to the fact that they do not understand what constitutes effective practice.

This is particularly apparent amongst amateur musicians who are self-taught. Without the discipline of a teacher adhering to a particular system it is all too easy to acquire bad habits that become more and more embedded over the years. Furthermore without a teacher to push you one can easily become good enough to gain enjoyment whilst avoiding those difficult techniques that are no fun to practice and make you feel rubbish again - we all have those techniques that scare us...so we shy away from them.

In many ways the music that I play today is the antithesis of the Western classical system. With its emphasis on repeated cyclical patterns and improvised variations around a theme, semi-improvised solo and an aural system of learning (the music is never written down) West African drumming is about as far from classical trumpet as one can get. Whilst I eschew many aspects of the classical system that I was immersed in as a child (such as an over-reliance on written score) I am eternally grateful for one thing: classical music teaches you how to practice.

Of course I didn't realize that at the time. As an eight-year old the exercises I was given to practice in between my weekly lessons were akin to the maths homework I had to do. I didn't fully understand why I was doing what I was doing but I trusted my teacher when she said that scales were just something you had to learn, like learning the alphabet in English or verbs in French. As a kid it's a bit like being told to eat your greens: You hate it at the time but trust it will be good for you in the long run!

Self-taught musicians often do not know their scales because, let's face it, it is incredibly boring and unless you are forced to do it most of us won't bother...so an ability to do very boring exercises over and over again is something that I developed at a young age. After enough years of being told to do something you eventually develop the ability to tell yourself to do it...to become your own teacher if you like.

Of course you can always turn a boring exercise into something more interesting by using it as the basis for a composition. At its most basic this could be going up to the ninth note of a scale before returning back down...try it...it turns the scale into a simple piece of music and that makes it much less boring to practice! I do this a lot on djembe: Rather than play a difficult exercise over and over in isolation I often embed it into a pattern with a longer cycle, so the exercise becomes a little flourish or variation. I can and do play these patterns for hours, cycling through the variations and working on my technique whilst playing something musical. Here are some examples of how I embed rolls in echauffements to make them more interesting:



Another technique that is bread and butter to a classical musician is to slow a very small section of a piece right down and practice it in isolation; then you practice the next section at a similar pace; then you join the two sections together and so on. It seems so obvious but it is amazing how many musicians do not do this. I have lost count of the amount of times someone has said that they can't play something, then watch them play it once I have slowed it down sufficiently. It's different for everyone but I can confidently state that almost anyone (with a basic grasp of their instrument) can play almost anything if they play it slowly enough. I mean really slowly. No seriously I mean really, really slowly. It doesn't matter how slowly you are playing something you can always play it slower! So keep slowing and slowing and slowing until you find a speed that you can play it. The trick is to maintain the feel, which becomes increasingly difficult the slower you play, but this in itself is a skill that can be acquired. It's not, as they say, rocket science (I strongly suspect that even rocket science is not rocket science when you know how it's done...). Once you have played a section through at a consistent speed a few times (any speed, as long as you maintain it consistently throughout the section you are learning) you will be amazed at how quickly you can speed it up until very soon you are playing at a speed that seemed impossible just five or ten minutes ago.

So forcing yourself to play boring, technical exercises, turning these exercises into musical pieces to make them more interesting, and slowing sections down are three crucial aspects of effective practice. However, these three techniques presuppose something else that many people simply do not do: Practice! I've met many musicians over the years who do not practice. That is not to say that they do not play often. Indeed a common reason for not practicing is not having the time because one is always playing! Then there are those who think they practice but don't really. Many people fall into this category for the simple reason that playing is not the same as practicing. Playing is important and may form part of your practice session but it is not the way to acquire new, technical skills. Rather it is a way to embed known techniques and phrases, to gain fluency and stamina and so on. To get that niggly tricky thing that's eluded you for years you need a different type of playing. You need to practice!

This all begs the question of what exactly practice is. Well it's not rocket science for a start! At its most basic practice is structure. If you have an hour to practice djembe you might start with five or ten minutes of free playing to warm up. Then you might spend ten minutes or so working on single hand slaps and tones, moving on to practice patterns and echauffements that focus on clear slap / tone distinction. Now fully warmed up you might spend ten minutes working on tricky rolls and flams and so on, followed by a bit of learned solo practice to finish. The point is to structure your time effectively to cover all the aspects that need covering. If you are weak in a particular area then far from shying away you need to focus on that. Honestly you will be surprised how quickly things come when you start practicing effectively! About 4 or 5 years ago I realized that my technique was so inconsistent that all the solo I was learning was pointless until I got control of my sounds. So I started only practicing technique...over the summer holidays when work was sparse I was practicing for 3 hours a day and sometimes I'd get lost in an hour-long echauffement just working my slaps and tones. Then I got frustrated that despite all my work my left hand was still incredibly weak and inconsistent (to the point that it was spoiling my solo) so I incorporated 30 minutes of left-hand only practice into every practice session, created various exercises that forced me to focus on my left hand and started forcing myself to play accompaniment and solo left handed. Make no mistake this was not fun but I did it. I saw no effect for months and years but I did it. And it has started to work...when I play I am aware of my left hand in a way that I wasn't before. I am quite sure that I have increased the representation of my left hand in my brain (actually I know this to be the case, although I can't prove it...). But more importantly the pleasure I get from playing with good technique is immeasurable and indescribable. Maybe if you achieve a fairly high standard in snooker or golf, race car driving or skateboarding then you'll understand the pleasure you get from pulling off a move perfectly...its beautiful...and in those moments it's as if there's no conscious 'I' in between you and the activity...you are, to use an overused cliché, in the moment. Was it worth it? Definitely! It gives me an experience that I get in no other area of my life and it is an experience shared only by those dedicated enough to put a lot of time into one activity. I don't tell you this to make you feel guilty. I tell you this to show you the power of effective practice.

Of course we haven't all got two or three hours to devote to practice every day. Don't worry though, if you only have five minutes here and there...that's enough. As long as you create and repeat exercises rather than just playing then you will improve the things you are practicing.

In the vein of teaching a man to fish and all that, teaching a student to practice effectively is the greatest thing I can give, because it gives them the ability to teach themselves. To be their own hard task master and set themselves work. To practice practicing...

So get practicing and remember that practice is itself a skill that needs...erm...well practicing!

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