11 ms·

The Science and Art of Practicing

153 points by yonibot 12y ago

noname123 12y ago
Awesome article. But tbh still very vague, I'd love to hear about some of your guys' specific practice schedule. Below is mine, Guitar Practice: I do repertoire, technique and improvisation. For repertoire, I usually focus on the hardest passage and run it three times to the best ability and then connect the whole song together for 3 goes before I finish. For technique, I usually rotate on scales patterns/licks/ear training; review the last pattern I learned and learn a new pattern. For improvisation, I just doodle with jam track and listen and try to iterate on how I can improve (e.g., better timing on stressing notes on chord changes, building tension). Dota Practice: I sometimes watch youtube casts on warding and laning. Also what different heroes are good to counter different heroes. But mostly I just play ranked games and try different heroes.
- kevan 12y ago
  I play trumpet, my routine usually starts with long tones and slow articulation exercises. As I get warmed up I extend into lip slurs, faster articulation, and flexibility. After I'm completely warmed up then I go into a mix of technique work, etudes for fun, and whatever other repertoire I need to work on for performance. Repertoire that I'm just maintaining is a mix of full runthroughs and reinforcing small segments. For new repertoire I usually work through it measure by measure, mixing air+valves reps with playing reps to save my lips.
gtani 12y ago
Good article, i discovered it right after i bought my violin (could have been after i got a viola, can't remember). I think you can apply these tips to learning, say, rust programming, or convex optimization. I also think a random beat generator is sort of similar to backing tracks i record in Garage band or ableton, and you should leave pieces/charts you're learning out on the stand next to your computers, and look at them often, 5x/hour. Another tip, always remember the first time you tried to play a clarinet, cello or violin (if you can). Those for me were special moments. Here's some other (comprehensive) books about practicing, which go from mechanical prescriptions about washing hands and brushing teeth beforehand, to the zen, in the vein of the motorcycle and archery books, like long tones/long bows/drone notes/son filé (the last is Galamian's term, his violin technique book highly recommended). Kenny Werner, http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-Master-Musician/dp/156224003X http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-Master-M... (recommends pianists practice long tones ?!) Sterner: http://www.amazon.com/The-Practicing-Mind-Developing-Discipline/dp/1608680908 http://www.amazon.com/The-Practicing-Mind-Developing-Discipl... Bruser: http://artofpracticing.com/book/ http://artofpracticing.com/book/ (Gerald Klickstein' book is also good, i remember) Julie Lieberman has soem good violin-specific eg http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.do?itemid=695420 http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.do?itemid=6954...
- graycat 12y ago
  Galamian's book -- loved it! > convex optimization I assume you are minimizing -- maximizing is easily NP-hard. So, get some supporting hyperplanes of the convex epigraph and use linear programming to minimize subject to those hyperplanes as constraints. Then add a constraint and try again. There is also a cute way to do central cutting planes that can be better numerically. So, for many non-linear problems, if are maximizing, then the dual is a convex minimization, and that can help. This can be called Lagrangian relaxation. I never thought that how to do violin practice was so tricky -- just work to get the fingers on the notes, in time and in tune, and then do it a lot until get a lot of facility (hear the note(s) just before playing them), sometimes return and play very slowly and deliberately, and then work on expression -- the fun part. But then I never made much progress. The best I did was the D major section of the Bach "Chaconne", and that was fantastic fun -- I played the repeated notes that made them sound insistent! I regard the end of the D major section as the climax of the piece and find it fantastic.
  - TTPrograms 12y ago
    I find it interesting that you're response to studying a field that has entire conferences dedicated to it is "So, just do this!"
    - graycat 12y ago
      > interesting It worked for me, in violin, As we know, things should be as simple as possible but not simpler. My approach to learning mathematics is quite different from learning to play violin but also is based mostly in independent study. In violin, I got started when I was a math grad student at Indiana University. Of course there is a terrific music school there, and at the time my dorm was next door with a lot of music students. One day one of the violin students, darned good, a Stern protege, put his violin under my left chin, and I was off and running, took a violin course in the music school. After some years of work from Galamian's book and just self-teaching, I went for some lessons. Sure, I started with the "Preludio" of the Bach E major partita. Of course early on there is a fast shift from 1st position to 5th; I happened to get the note after the shift right; and the teacher exclaimed "You could play in an orchestra!". Gee, that shift is the main issue for playing in an orchestra? I doubt that! Maybe he thought I was sight reading that music! Not a chance! I'd worked hours on each note, note by note, checking intonation over and over, etc. That shift I'd likely done 1000 times. I hadn't really been learning just the piece but had been using the piece as an exercise to learn to play violin, starting from very little! So, that shift to 5th position, at two places in that music, was the first I'd learned. Sure, I could have used that skill with that shift elsewhere. I learned the whole piece; the learning was a lot of fun. But, I learned it, self-teaching. I had a good ugrad math major but didn't like what the IU math department had me doing: Of the three courses they started me with, two of them had just what I'd already learned in ugrad school, and the third started with what I'd learned in an NSF summer program the previous summer. But there was other material I wanted to learn. So, IU and I didn't get along, and I went, got a job, and studied on evenings and weekends, independently. That study worked out well and was, really, except two graduate courses all I needed for my Ph.D. I did the research for that independently in my first summer after the two courses. So, my approach to learning has worked. Computer science and programming? I've taught college and grad courses in it, but I never really took one. What I'm saying did work for me. Of course if you want then you can try more complicated ways. For the OP, she was concerned that her playing sounded mechanical. Well, once she has the notes on time and in tune and practices until they are "in her fingers" well enough that she can concentrate on the expression, then she should, just think about how she wants it to sound. For convex minimization, once a guy had a 0-1 integer linear program with 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables. He'd tried simulated annealing without much luck. I looked at his constraints, and 16 of them were special, and I put them in the objective function with Lagrange multipliers. Then the dual problem was to maximize a concave function, and I did the linear programming and supporting hyperplane approach I outlined. After about 500 primal-dual iterations in 900 seconds on a 90 MHz PC, linear programming via the IBM OSL, I found a feasible solution, guaranteed from the duality, to be within 0.025% of optimality. It was fun! But I do recommend the central cutting plane idea.
ytturbed 12y ago
>When she does this with students, she asks them afterwards, “Was anything fuzzy?” It’s usually the part that they were messing up that’s fuzzy. This is genius. Reminds me of the rule that if something feels fuzzy at the instrument it's always a conceptual error about the piece rather than poor coordination or poor finger strength. >Why is it better to practice every day for an hour, instead of seven hours on one day of the week? For the same reason that it's better to practice for 10 minutes several times per day instead of one hour straight.
- vshan 12y ago
  Not the same reason, as it is better to practice one hour every day of the week instead of seven hours on one day because of the sleep you have.
  - ytturbed 12y ago
    Sleep is a given. The brain is learning continuously, not just during sleep. Go back to a section of a piece after 15 minutes doing something else and notice it has become easier.
    - cheepin 12y ago
      Sometimes it's even easier after just 1 minute away. I code and play music, and I've made a habit of occasionally walking around the house, petting the dog, then back to where I'm working/practicing. It doesn't take long, but it works strangely well.
      - ytturbed 12y ago
        Yes. There's something about walking isn't there? Returning attention back to the body and the senses amounts to relaxing after hard concentration. Perhaps petting the dog enhances that, the body being where emotions are felt. Scientists seem to suspect that walking or just standing occasionally is important for health. To complete the argument about learning: you play the tough section, correcting a few errors. Then you go away for a bit, and during that period the brain updates its hardware to include those corrections. The mistake is to hammer/saw away repeatedly and interfere with what you have already achieved, wasting time and effort. I think the OP kinda acknowledged this by recommending switching at whim between different tasks within a practice session.
tokenadult 12y ago
Good advice. My wife (a pianist and piano teacher) just read the article kindly submitted here and said that that is how she practices. I've heard over the years about how she advises her students, and, sure enough, one of the key ideas is to distribute practice across multiple days each week rather than piling into one lump of time just before the lesson. After my reading of the article, I have to say that getting a good night's sleep each night is definitely crucial for learning anything challenging. Sleep makes connections and consolidates learning. The one thing I don't see mentioned in this article that my wife tells most of her students, after learning about it from one of her university music teachers, is how important it can be to analyze a new piece of music through multiple modalities. My wife's university teacher has a book about "music mapping,"[1] an approach to reading musical scores and adding visual notations to them, which is highly individualizable and works wonderfully for helping musicians learn where the music is in a new piece of music. Playing with musicality rather than just memorizing notes is always the key idea. [1] https://www.areditions.com/books/rs001.html https://www.areditions.com/books/rs001.html
- MrDom 12y ago
  > getting a good night's sleep each night is definitely crucial for learning anything challenging. That makes me wonder why sleep deprivation is such a large part of the college experience.
  - toddkaufmann 12y ago
    so we learn how important sleep is?
  - wallflower 12y ago
    I think pulling 'all nighters' (seriously, being in the computer lab when the sun comes up in totally not cool - especially with the gradual lightening of the sky and realization that you are bone tired and still have 2 hours left of work...) is part of the culture that college students expect at some but not all schools. Similar to binge drinking, there is a lot of peer pressure to 'pull an all nighter' or 'do a funnel (of beer)'. Peer pressure doesn't stop after high school. In fact, it might not "stop". As some of us grow older, your peers change until they reflect what you really want in life (for most, in my experience, that means having peers who are settling down and having two kids and a family). I'm sure there is definitely peer pressure at senior citizen/assisted living homes to be 'cool' (whatever the norm is). Startup culture is similar in the bubble of San Francisco. The norm is so skewed from the median/average of what most people in a business environment do. As David Foster Wallace said, the fish doesn't know it is in water. [1] [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607
read 12y ago
In one study, where they tried learning both ways, people felt like blocked practice was better, even though their ultimate performance was measurably better after the random practice! Though you might improve at a task during practice, you’re less able to carry forth that improvement to the next day. Studies have shown that consistently getting a full night’s sleep (eight hours) plays a huge role in learning motor and auditory skills The surprising parts are usually the places that they did not account for in their mental practice. Forget about the nasty passages for now. Instead, spend two weeks getting in touch with the musical aspect of the piece and practice it through, just for musicality. The linked essay in the article also gives a timeline on how long in takes for neurons to connect: it takes about a week to happen. http://mollygebrian.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/what-musicians-can-learn-about-practicing-from-current-brain-research.pdf http://mollygebrian.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/what-musicia... Also: You will be much better off practicing your orchestra music for 15 minutes a day until the concert, rather than “wood-shedding” the day before the concert. Why? Because you’ll have all those nights of sleep for your brain to process the new music.
chipgap98 12y ago
I found this article very interesting, but I'm not a musician. I know they mention sports briefly, but I'd love to see a more detailed account of this advice applied to other topics.
ianamartin 12y ago
I don't find this to very useful, and I think the approach of this study is probably not so great. My background on this is that I'm a professional violinist. I started playing when I was 4 and was performing professionally when I was 8. I'm 35 now, and I still play as a soloist, in chamber music, and with an orchestra. I happen to make most of my money by writing code, but the violin is still a big part of my life. I teach kids, and they win big important violin competitions. My specific issue with this article is that it seems to think of practicing as one monolithic event--as though you are really just doing one big thing when you practice: getting better at what you are practicing. I think the concept of randomizing tasks is sort of getting at a good point, but it's really not all the way there. And also, you have to understand that you are, in fact, getting something extremely valuable out of the block practicing: the ability to focus on a singular task for a long period of time. That's a skill itself. You will never do well in a 3-5 hour rehearsal with a string quartet or an orchestra if this is not something you are accustomed to doing on a regular basis. Here are some more details. The big thing to do when I was a kid was to send your children to a practice camp like Meadowmount, where all the Juilliard School teachers spent their summers teaching kids like me. That was all block practice. 5-8 hours a day, and a lesson every day or so. That kind of block practicing went exactly as described in the article. An hour of scales, and hour of etudes, an hour on a piece of music, etc. In my opinion, that's a mixed bag. You need to be able to pull a scale out and just lay it down. Any scale. Any time. It's a kind of a musical Fizz-Buzz problem. You just need to be able to do it even if it's not really interesting. Although, it's not like Fizz Buzz because scales are actually really hard. Etudes are a sort of micro-problem to solve. You isolate a particular bow or finger technique, and you spend some time every day working out that physical skill--the logistics of getting x fingers from point a to point b in the requisite amount of time. Putting in a block of time on your musical piece is also important in itself because you have to commit that music to memory. Not just the notes and the finger motions involved, but all the little things like the bowings and phrasings and dynamics and stuff. The parts that take notes and turn them into "music." The reason I think the study is flawed is that I think it's studying a strawman of an idea. No great players actually practice in the way that this article describes. There's this idea of a mindless slaving away that we do for hour after endless hour. That's not real. I mean, it's probably real for some people. But great players don't do that to begin with. And good teachers don't recommend this approach. There are some popular methods of learning difficult things. There's a thing that people do to tackle a difficult bit of notes where you just practice slowly with a metronome and you gradually increase the tempo. Start with a tempo slow enough for you to get the notes out, no matter how slow. Then you just gradually make it faster and faster. This should work, right? No. It should not work. And it doesn't work. --a brief interlude before I explain why that doesn't work-- What you're doing when you play a musical instrument is that you're solving physical problems--usually without the necessary tools. You are working a variety of physical challnges. The logistics of moving fingers from one place to another, you're solving acoustical problems by managing the friction between your bow and your string(s). Or if you're a wind player, you're dealing with the physical properties of your breath interacting with a vibrating reed or you're vibrating your lips when you play a horn of some kind. There are two parts of every musical problem. 1. There's the conceptual problem: "How should I be trying to execute this solution?" 2. The physical part: "How do I train my fingers, arms, hands, lips, whatever to perform this solution?" Tempo matters when you are planning out these solutions. A slow tempo uses different physical motions, and it takes a different mindset. Slow tempos (yes, tempi, I know, but I don't feel like the word is so foreign that I need to pluralize it in Italian, so tempos) allow for larger motions and gestures. Slow tempos do not need to have efficient motions the way fast ones do. --back to my point-- Practicing slowly will never get you to perform things quickly. You are practicing the wrong thing. If you want to learn to play things quickly, you have to practice them quickly. But in small chunk. Take 2 or 3 or 5 notes. Play them even faster than you ever intend to perform them, and do it with a metronome, so your rhythm is good. Chain them together, and gradually slow down and enlarge your motions. I don't know the details of this study: who were the participants, where they came from, or what their experience is. But to me, this seems like a situation where the block practicers are basically dumb practicers. Because no good musicians practice that way. I think you would have positive results doing absolutely anything to break up this kind of a thoughtless, put-in-some-time-and-hope-I-get-better kind of a routine. Random exercises are probably better than that. I can see how these results make sense. Randomization is probably a good thing for a certain type of musician. But I would argue that it's definitely not better than a thoughtful, focused, problem-solving approach applied for long periods of time. Anyway, just thought I would throw some things out there. Cheers.
larrym 12y ago
"Mental Practice" Now there lies the key to the door...
deadfece 12y ago
I found a lot of improvement in my guitar practicing by reading "Fundamentals of Piano Practice." The author made it available for free at http://pianopractice.org/ http://pianopractice.org/ As I play fingerstyle I study hands separated by separating the bass and melody as thumb and fingers, then move to hands together. I also analyze the piece to find the hardest as well as the most repetitive measures, work those out and pick up the rest of the piece. You also work these measures with transitions, by playing the preceding measure or half measure leading in and out of the measure you're practicing. I typically don't get a lot of time to practice so I will pick up my guitar at random and play measures that I'm working on.

153 points by yonibot 12y ago

Awesome article. But tbh still very vague, I'd love to hear about some of your guys' specific practice schedule. Below is mine, Guitar Practice: I do repertoire, technique and improvisation. For repertoire, I usually focus on the hardest passage and run it three times to the best ability and then connect the whole song together for 3 goes before I finish. For technique, I usually rotate on scales patterns/licks/ear training; review the last pattern I learned and learn a new pattern. For improvisation, I just doodle with jam track and listen and try to iterate on how I can improve (e.g., better timing on stressing notes on chord changes, building tension). Dota Practice: I sometimes watch youtube casts on warding and laning. Also what different heroes are good to counter different heroes. But mostly I just play ranked games and try different heroes.

kevan 12y ago
I play trumpet, my routine usually starts with long tones and slow articulation exercises. As I get warmed up I extend into lip slurs, faster articulation, and flexibility. After I'm completely warmed up then I go into a mix of technique work, etudes for fun, and whatever other repertoire I need to work on for performance. Repertoire that I'm just maintaining is a mix of full runthroughs and reinforcing small segments. For new repertoire I usually work through it measure by measure, mixing air+valves reps with playing reps to save my lips.

gtani 12y ago

Good article, i discovered it right after i bought my violin (could have been after i got a viola, can't remember). I think you can apply these tips to learning, say, rust programming, or convex optimization. I also think a random beat generator is sort of similar to backing tracks i record in Garage band or ableton, and you should leave pieces/charts you're learning out on the stand next to your computers, and look at them often, 5x/hour. Another tip, always remember the first time you tried to play a clarinet, cello or violin (if you can). Those for me were special moments. Here's some other (comprehensive) books about practicing, which go from mechanical prescriptions about washing hands and brushing teeth beforehand, to the zen, in the vein of the motorcycle and archery books, like long tones/long bows/drone notes/son filé (the last is Galamian's term, his violin technique book highly recommended). Kenny Werner, http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-Master-Musician/dp/156224003X http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-Master-M... (recommends pianists practice long tones ?!) Sterner: http://www.amazon.com/The-Practicing-Mind-Developing-Discipline/dp/1608680908 http://www.amazon.com/The-Practicing-Mind-Developing-Discipl... Bruser: http://artofpracticing.com/book/ http://artofpracticing.com/book/ (Gerald Klickstein' book is also good, i remember) Julie Lieberman has soem good violin-specific eg http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.do?itemid=695420 http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.do?itemid=6954...

graycat 12y ago
Galamian's book -- loved it! > convex optimization I assume you are minimizing -- maximizing is easily NP-hard. So, get some supporting hyperplanes of the convex epigraph and use linear programming to minimize subject to those hyperplanes as constraints. Then add a constraint and try again. There is also a cute way to do central cutting planes that can be better numerically. So, for many non-linear problems, if are maximizing, then the dual is a convex minimization, and that can help. This can be called Lagrangian relaxation. I never thought that how to do violin practice was so tricky -- just work to get the fingers on the notes, in time and in tune, and then do it a lot until get a lot of facility (hear the note(s) just before playing them), sometimes return and play very slowly and deliberately, and then work on expression -- the fun part. But then I never made much progress. The best I did was the D major section of the Bach "Chaconne", and that was fantastic fun -- I played the repeated notes that made them sound insistent! I regard the end of the D major section as the climax of the piece and find it fantastic.
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  I find it interesting that you're response to studying a field that has entire conferences dedicated to it is "So, just do this!"
  - graycat 12y ago
    > interesting It worked for me, in violin, As we know, things should be as simple as possible but not simpler. My approach to learning mathematics is quite different from learning to play violin but also is based mostly in independent study. In violin, I got started when I was a math grad student at Indiana University. Of course there is a terrific music school there, and at the time my dorm was next door with a lot of music students. One day one of the violin students, darned good, a Stern protege, put his violin under my left chin, and I was off and running, took a violin course in the music school. After some years of work from Galamian's book and just self-teaching, I went for some lessons. Sure, I started with the "Preludio" of the Bach E major partita. Of course early on there is a fast shift from 1st position to 5th; I happened to get the note after the shift right; and the teacher exclaimed "You could play in an orchestra!". Gee, that shift is the main issue for playing in an orchestra? I doubt that! Maybe he thought I was sight reading that music! Not a chance! I'd worked hours on each note, note by note, checking intonation over and over, etc. That shift I'd likely done 1000 times. I hadn't really been learning just the piece but had been using the piece as an exercise to learn to play violin, starting from very little! So, that shift to 5th position, at two places in that music, was the first I'd learned. Sure, I could have used that skill with that shift elsewhere. I learned the whole piece; the learning was a lot of fun. But, I learned it, self-teaching. I had a good ugrad math major but didn't like what the IU math department had me doing: Of the three courses they started me with, two of them had just what I'd already learned in ugrad school, and the third started with what I'd learned in an NSF summer program the previous summer. But there was other material I wanted to learn. So, IU and I didn't get along, and I went, got a job, and studied on evenings and weekends, independently. That study worked out well and was, really, except two graduate courses all I needed for my Ph.D. I did the research for that independently in my first summer after the two courses. So, my approach to learning has worked. Computer science and programming? I've taught college and grad courses in it, but I never really took one. What I'm saying did work for me. Of course if you want then you can try more complicated ways. For the OP, she was concerned that her playing sounded mechanical. Well, once she has the notes on time and in tune and practices until they are "in her fingers" well enough that she can concentrate on the expression, then she should, just think about how she wants it to sound. For convex minimization, once a guy had a 0-1 integer linear program with 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables. He'd tried simulated annealing without much luck. I looked at his constraints, and 16 of them were special, and I put them in the objective function with Lagrange multipliers. Then the dual problem was to maximize a concave function, and I did the linear programming and supporting hyperplane approach I outlined. After about 500 primal-dual iterations in 900 seconds on a 90 MHz PC, linear programming via the IBM OSL, I found a feasible solution, guaranteed from the duality, to be within 0.025% of optimality. It was fun! But I do recommend the central cutting plane idea.

ytturbed 12y ago

>When she does this with students, she asks them afterwards, “Was anything fuzzy?” It’s usually the part that they were messing up that’s fuzzy. This is genius. Reminds me of the rule that if something feels fuzzy at the instrument it's always a conceptual error about the piece rather than poor coordination or poor finger strength. >Why is it better to practice every day for an hour, instead of seven hours on one day of the week? For the same reason that it's better to practice for 10 minutes several times per day instead of one hour straight.

vshan 12y ago
Not the same reason, as it is better to practice one hour every day of the week instead of seven hours on one day because of the sleep you have.
- ytturbed 12y ago
  Sleep is a given. The brain is learning continuously, not just during sleep. Go back to a section of a piece after 15 minutes doing something else and notice it has become easier.
  - cheepin 12y ago
    Sometimes it's even easier after just 1 minute away. I code and play music, and I've made a habit of occasionally walking around the house, petting the dog, then back to where I'm working/practicing. It doesn't take long, but it works strangely well.
    - ytturbed 12y ago
      Yes. There's something about walking isn't there? Returning attention back to the body and the senses amounts to relaxing after hard concentration. Perhaps petting the dog enhances that, the body being where emotions are felt. Scientists seem to suspect that walking or just standing occasionally is important for health. To complete the argument about learning: you play the tough section, correcting a few errors. Then you go away for a bit, and during that period the brain updates its hardware to include those corrections. The mistake is to hammer/saw away repeatedly and interfere with what you have already achieved, wasting time and effort. I think the OP kinda acknowledged this by recommending switching at whim between different tasks within a practice session.

tokenadult 12y ago

Good advice. My wife (a pianist and piano teacher) just read the article kindly submitted here and said that that is how she practices. I've heard over the years about how she advises her students, and, sure enough, one of the key ideas is to distribute practice across multiple days each week rather than piling into one lump of time just before the lesson. After my reading of the article, I have to say that getting a good night's sleep each night is definitely crucial for learning anything challenging. Sleep makes connections and consolidates learning. The one thing I don't see mentioned in this article that my wife tells most of her students, after learning about it from one of her university music teachers, is how important it can be to analyze a new piece of music through multiple modalities. My wife's university teacher has a book about "music mapping,"[1] an approach to reading musical scores and adding visual notations to them, which is highly individualizable and works wonderfully for helping musicians learn where the music is in a new piece of music. Playing with musicality rather than just memorizing notes is always the key idea. [1] https://www.areditions.com/books/rs001.html https://www.areditions.com/books/rs001.html

MrDom 12y ago
> getting a good night's sleep each night is definitely crucial for learning anything challenging. That makes me wonder why sleep deprivation is such a large part of the college experience.
- toddkaufmann 12y ago
  so we learn how important sleep is?
- wallflower 12y ago
  I think pulling 'all nighters' (seriously, being in the computer lab when the sun comes up in totally not cool - especially with the gradual lightening of the sky and realization that you are bone tired and still have 2 hours left of work...) is part of the culture that college students expect at some but not all schools. Similar to binge drinking, there is a lot of peer pressure to 'pull an all nighter' or 'do a funnel (of beer)'. Peer pressure doesn't stop after high school. In fact, it might not "stop". As some of us grow older, your peers change until they reflect what you really want in life (for most, in my experience, that means having peers who are settling down and having two kids and a family). I'm sure there is definitely peer pressure at senior citizen/assisted living homes to be 'cool' (whatever the norm is). Startup culture is similar in the bubble of San Francisco. The norm is so skewed from the median/average of what most people in a business environment do. As David Foster Wallace said, the fish doesn't know it is in water. [1] [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607

read 12y ago

In one study, where they tried learning both ways, people felt like blocked practice was better, even though their ultimate performance was measurably better after the random practice! Though you might improve at a task during practice, you’re less able to carry forth that improvement to the next day. Studies have shown that consistently getting a full night’s sleep (eight hours) plays a huge role in learning motor and auditory skills The surprising parts are usually the places that they did not account for in their mental practice. Forget about the nasty passages for now. Instead, spend two weeks getting in touch with the musical aspect of the piece and practice it through, just for musicality. The linked essay in the article also gives a timeline on how long in takes for neurons to connect: it takes about a week to happen. http://mollygebrian.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/what-musicians-can-learn-about-practicing-from-current-brain-research.pdf http://mollygebrian.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/what-musicia... Also: You will be much better off practicing your orchestra music for 15 minutes a day until the concert, rather than “wood-shedding” the day before the concert. Why? Because you’ll have all those nights of sleep for your brain to process the new music.

chipgap98 12y ago

I found this article very interesting, but I'm not a musician. I know they mention sports briefly, but I'd love to see a more detailed account of this advice applied to other topics.

ianamartin 12y ago

I don't find this to very useful, and I think the approach of this study is probably not so great. My background on this is that I'm a professional violinist. I started playing when I was 4 and was performing professionally when I was 8. I'm 35 now, and I still play as a soloist, in chamber music, and with an orchestra. I happen to make most of my money by writing code, but the violin is still a big part of my life. I teach kids, and they win big important violin competitions. My specific issue with this article is that it seems to think of practicing as one monolithic event--as though you are really just doing one big thing when you practice: getting better at what you are practicing. I think the concept of randomizing tasks is sort of getting at a good point, but it's really not all the way there. And also, you have to understand that you are, in fact, getting something extremely valuable out of the block practicing: the ability to focus on a singular task for a long period of time. That's a skill itself. You will never do well in a 3-5 hour rehearsal with a string quartet or an orchestra if this is not something you are accustomed to doing on a regular basis. Here are some more details. The big thing to do when I was a kid was to send your children to a practice camp like Meadowmount, where all the Juilliard School teachers spent their summers teaching kids like me. That was all block practice. 5-8 hours a day, and a lesson every day or so. That kind of block practicing went exactly as described in the article. An hour of scales, and hour of etudes, an hour on a piece of music, etc. In my opinion, that's a mixed bag. You need to be able to pull a scale out and just lay it down. Any scale. Any time. It's a kind of a musical Fizz-Buzz problem. You just need to be able to do it even if it's not really interesting. Although, it's not like Fizz Buzz because scales are actually really hard. Etudes are a sort of micro-problem to solve. You isolate a particular bow or finger technique, and you spend some time every day working out that physical skill--the logistics of getting x fingers from point a to point b in the requisite amount of time. Putting in a block of time on your musical piece is also important in itself because you have to commit that music to memory. Not just the notes and the finger motions involved, but all the little things like the bowings and phrasings and dynamics and stuff. The parts that take notes and turn them into "music." The reason I think the study is flawed is that I think it's studying a strawman of an idea. No great players actually practice in the way that this article describes. There's this idea of a mindless slaving away that we do for hour after endless hour. That's not real. I mean, it's probably real for some people. But great players don't do that to begin with. And good teachers don't recommend this approach. There are some popular methods of learning difficult things. There's a thing that people do to tackle a difficult bit of notes where you just practice slowly with a metronome and you gradually increase the tempo. Start with a tempo slow enough for you to get the notes out, no matter how slow. Then you just gradually make it faster and faster. This should work, right? No. It should not work. And it doesn't work. --a brief interlude before I explain why that doesn't work-- What you're doing when you play a musical instrument is that you're solving physical problems--usually without the necessary tools. You are working a variety of physical challnges. The logistics of moving fingers from one place to another, you're solving acoustical problems by managing the friction between your bow and your string(s). Or if you're a wind player, you're dealing with the physical properties of your breath interacting with a vibrating reed or you're vibrating your lips when you play a horn of some kind. There are two parts of every musical problem. 1. There's the conceptual problem: "How should I be trying to execute this solution?" 2. The physical part: "How do I train my fingers, arms, hands, lips, whatever to perform this solution?" Tempo matters when you are planning out these solutions. A slow tempo uses different physical motions, and it takes a different mindset. Slow tempos (yes, tempi, I know, but I don't feel like the word is so foreign that I need to pluralize it in Italian, so tempos) allow for larger motions and gestures. Slow tempos do not need to have efficient motions the way fast ones do. --back to my point-- Practicing slowly will never get you to perform things quickly. You are practicing the wrong thing. If you want to learn to play things quickly, you have to practice them quickly. But in small chunk. Take 2 or 3 or 5 notes. Play them even faster than you ever intend to perform them, and do it with a metronome, so your rhythm is good. Chain them together, and gradually slow down and enlarge your motions. I don't know the details of this study: who were the participants, where they came from, or what their experience is. But to me, this seems like a situation where the block practicers are basically dumb practicers. Because no good musicians practice that way. I think you would have positive results doing absolutely anything to break up this kind of a thoughtless, put-in-some-time-and-hope-I-get-better kind of a routine. Random exercises are probably better than that. I can see how these results make sense. Randomization is probably a good thing for a certain type of musician. But I would argue that it's definitely not better than a thoughtful, focused, problem-solving approach applied for long periods of time. Anyway, just thought I would throw some things out there. Cheers.

larrym 12y ago

"Mental Practice" Now there lies the key to the door...

deadfece 12y ago

I found a lot of improvement in my guitar practicing by reading "Fundamentals of Piano Practice." The author made it available for free at http://pianopractice.org/ http://pianopractice.org/ As I play fingerstyle I study hands separated by separating the bass and melody as thumb and fingers, then move to hands together. I also analyze the piece to find the hardest as well as the most repetitive measures, work those out and pick up the rest of the piece. You also work these measures with transitions, by playing the preceding measure or half measure leading in and out of the measure you're practicing. I typically don't get a lot of time to practice so I will pick up my guitar at random and play measures that I'm working on.