Effective Home Practice

By Nana Gaskins Vaughn

​Home practice is crucial to making good progress, but a lot of young students don’t have the self discipline or perhaps the executive function to make this happen effectively. Many times, I see students come in making the same mistakes week after week without meaningful improvement in areas that we have worked on repeatedly in the lessons. This makes lessons more frustrating for both teacher and student, because we are essentially using the lessons for practice sessions instead of making meaningful progress and music making.

This week, I studied several students practicing while I sat quietly in the room without comment. Here are some of the common traits I observed. Students who have trouble making progress:​

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• Practice large sections with very little stopping, or may correct just one or two notes
• Slow down or hesitate for harder sections, speed up for easier sections
• Fix only the note that is out of tune or incorrect, but don’t practice the notes preceding the mistake which are often what causes the difficulty (for example, a shift or difficult interval)
• ​May try to correct wrong notes or rhythms, making several attempts to get it right. When they finally play it correctly once, they leave that section and move on to something new
• Play too fast
• Play using incorrect technique, such as poor posture, bow hold, or left hand technique without concentrated effort to improve

Unfortunately, students who practice poorly will find that they continue to make the same mistakes for weeks or even months, no matter how much time they spend practicing. Of course, everyone wants to just enjoy music - that’s why we choose to play our instruments, after all! But it can be very frustrating to feel that you’re putting so much time into your instrument with little noticeable progress.

In contrast, good practice technique may seem a bit tedious or boring at first, but by practicing more effectively, students learn more quickly. This leads to a much greater sense of accomplishment and enjoyment.

Mrs. Vaughn’s Totally Made-Up, But Probably Pretty Accurate Chart of Good Vs. Bad Practice

The blue column features bad practicing and the red column features good practice. Notice that the same hours of practice yields far greater results if you practice effectively.

Here are some tips on how to practice more effectively:

• If possible, listen to professional or high quality recordings of the piece you are working on. Having an idea of what the piece should sound like is essential to good musicianship. Imagine trying to learn a foreign language with good pronunciation just by reading the language without hearing anyone speak the language. Sound impossible? Likewise, music is more easily learned if you regularly listen to examples.
• ​Always play with correct technique, such as good posture, bow technique, and left hand technique. I always recommend practicing while standing, not sitting, using a music stand at eye level height.
• Don’t ignore the exercises I assign - a big part of playing an instrument is muscle memory. If I asked you to practice playing long open strings in front of a mirror, or practice with your upper arm against a wall, do it. These exercises are very important in training your muscles to move correctly.
• Utilize the “chunking” strategy - practice in small chunks, even as small as two or three notes, or a single measure. Then practice the next small chunk. Put the chunks together to make a larger chunk. Practice the next small chunks, using the same strategy. Put the larger chunks together.
• Follow the 10/90 strategy - ten percent of your music needs 90% of your effort. The other ninety percent of your music probably only needs about 10% of your effort. That is because most of your music is probably fairly easy and there are only a few difficult spots. Find those spots and spend most of your time on them.
• Along those lines, less is more - instead of practicing the entire piece, focus intensely on one section of the music in your practice section. The next day, focus on a different section.
• Slow down - if you hesitate or slow down at hard spots, you are taking it too fast. Practice slower than you think you need to, and do it with a metronome. Gradually speed up as you master it at a slow speed. A hesitation is almost the same as a wrong note, and should be practiced and corrected.
• Number of times practicing correctly should outnumber the number of times you practice incorrectly. So if you practice something difficult and after 20 repetitions, you finally get it right, that’s not the time to move on to something new. You have just practiced incorrectly 20 times and correctly only once - so what do you think your brain will remember next time? If you practiced it incorrectly 20 times before you got it right, then practice it correctly 40 times. This will create the new neural pathways needed to really learn the correction.
• Practice every day - your muscle memory is reinforced when you practice every day rather than in larger chunks a couple of times per week
• Invaluable practice tools include a mirror, metronome, a tuner, recording equipment to record oneself and listen back, musical examples available on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, etc.
• ​Run-throughs do have their place. You also need to practice how to perform. Once per day, allow yourself to play straight through your piece and just enjoy it! As you get better and better at your music, your balance of time spent on run-throughs versus intense practice can start to favor run-throughs more and more….at least until you start working on something new.

Happy Practicing!