Play vs. Practice

Recently during a meeting of teachers at one of the places I teach we talked about this distinction. We were a group of music teachers that all taught various things. I direct some of the ensembles, but some of the other teachers taught violin, music theory, piano, guitar, ukulele, composition, choirs, or other ensembles.

Play is different than practice.

Play is the fun part. It’s enjoyable. Whatever that means for you. Whatever you find fun about playing your instrument or making music is the what I mean by play here. It’s where you get to mess around. You get to improvise and express yourself. For me that often means playing through a song from start to finish or improvising solos or jamming with friends. Play is the fun part.

Practice is different. It’s focused, often on improvement. Practice is a little more serious of an endeavor than play. It’s when you sit down and focus on getting better at doing something specific. That could be ear training, technique, scales, arpeggios, or a specific passage from a specific song. But practice is different than play. Now this isn’t to say that practice isn’t fun, but I think of practice as being more focused than play.

Having this distinction in your head can change a lot about your relationship to your instrument. Not everything needs to be practice. And not everything needs to be play. Sometimes you want to focus on improving your technique or your ear training skills. Sometimes you just want to sit at your instrument and have a good time and enjoy knowing how to make music on that instrument.

The way I use this is by choosing which one I’m doing.

Sometimes I just want to play. Other times I want to focus and practice. But I don’t always want to do both.

The main way I use this is to get myself to pick up my instrument more. Ideally I’d practice for an hour every single day and really focus on improving my technique and abilities on that instrument, but I can’t always do that. Sometimes it might be better to play because I’m reminding myself what I started learning about music in the first place.

I started learning guitar, piano, melodica, ukulele, flute, trumpet, and violin to play. I didn’t start learning them to practice. Practice is still useful and I still do it, but that’s not my goal. My goal is to play and to eventually play at a higher level than I did before.

You don’t always need to practice, but I think you do always need to play.

ISJ