FRANCISCO CHAVES
B l o g
The ultimate guide to practice - Part 1
"How many hours should I practice?" "Which songs should I practice?" "Should I buy a book, watch Youtube tutorials or have private lessons?" "Should I learn easy or hard songs?" "I practice a lot but I don't seem to get better! What should I do?". These questions are common among the music learners. I will try to do my best to reply them in a two part article.
Deconstructing everything!
My secret in learning ANYTHING boils down to one thing: "Deconstruction". When you listen to music it can be quite overwhelming and you might think you will never be able to achieve this. There is melody, chords, rhythm and hand coordination. So much stuff to think about! The secret is simple: Isolate each component. Don't attempt to do melody and rhythm at the same time! Only focus on one thing at a time. By doing that, you will be able to understand better what is actually challenging to do and where the difficulty lies. Many times people say: "This section in the song is hard." Ok, but WHY is it hard? Is it the chord change? Is it the speed? Is it the rhythm? Instead of just saying "This is hard", you need to understand WHY it is hard, only then can you start the necessary steps for improvement.
Deconstructing the notes
In this lesson I will use a very easy song that ANYONE can learn, regardless of your musical talent. You need a guitar to do it. It is Nirvana's riff of "Come as you are". A staple for beginner guitarists. Here is the score with the TAB and the notes below:
Firstly, we should focus only on the notes. How many different notes do we have here and where to play them?
We see that we have 5 different notes: E, F, F# A, B.
Now, instead of playing the song, try to play all these notes in order. Going back and forth. This will result in a weird scale. Play this a few times until you memorized it and can play without looking.
Achieving mastery
"Ok, can I now play the song?" No, not yet! To achieve mastery, we will now randomly play the notes! We can ask a friend to point to a random note or oscillate randomly between them. Like this:
I know, it does not sound that good, but we don't care about that. We want to achieve mastery learning the notes and switching fast between them. Anyone can do this, regardless of musical talent. After you do this series of steps, I am sure you already mastered learning the individual notes. These notes are useful not just to "Come as you are", but for all other songs! That's why teachers suggest students to learn scales. By learning scales, which are abstract concepts, you can then easily master any song with minimal effort, because you already know the individual tones and switching fast between them, instead of having to learn everything from scratch, like every song is a completely new thing. Now let's go to the Rhythm.
Deconstructing Rhythm
The first step is to play the rhythm using only one note. I will not explain in this article how to read rhythm. This step you can do it by listening to the original song (1) and trying to copy the rhythm using only one note. If that is too fast for you to keep up with the video, don't worry, you can use YouTube's feature of slowing down the videos. It will not sound good but we are not worried (yet) about that.
Combining notes and rhythm
Good job! Now, you can finally try to play the song as it is. At this point you don't need to spend time to search the notes (because you already know them). Also, you are fully aware what the right rhythm is. However, usually this is the hardest point. You have to combine the two elements we addressed before. That's why we need to practice slowly! At fast speed, our brains still don't have the skill to magically combine the two things together. That's why we HAVE to practice in a slower speed! This is a common cliché to say, but it's 100% solid and helpful advice. In this video, experienced pianist and teacher Cory Hall explains us how he practices slowly (2).
More important than the method, I think it's crucial to develop the ability to "enjoy" practicing slowly. We all dream of playing fast and impressive, but many times that impatience stops us from evolving. It hinders our progress. We need to enjoy playing it at a slower pace, finding a speed we are comfortable. In that speed we shouldn't be doing mistakes. If you are doing mistakes, then you are practicing it too fast. Usually people recommend 50% of the speed, but I find that way too fast and is prone to errors. It should be something around 25% to be absolutely sure we can listen to everything and that we let our brains have enough time to absorb the information.
After repeating enough times, our brain starts to go into "Automatic mode". In that scenario, we can play without pausing to think or check the notes.
An action that, at first, might require a lot of brain power and focus, like a child learning to tie their shoelaces, after many repetitions becomes automatic and intuitive. That is the power of "deliberate practice" (3).
Usually people interpret that automatic behavior as "practicing". I know a lot of people who play the instrument for hours and hours like that, but that behavior only "reinforces" what you already know. If your technique is bad, it will reinforce the bad technique. If your technique is good, it will reinforce the good technique.
That's why deliberate practice like the one described in this article requires a lot of brain power and makes you tired. But it makes you evolve way faster compared to repeating the same thing mindlessly 200 times without any progress.
This formula and series of steps can be used by anyone, doesn't matter your current level at the instrument.
In the second part of this article I will address all the other common questions about practicing.
Useful sources / links:
1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vabnZ9-ex7o
