How well do you know your own playing?

Being objective about your own playing is incredibly difficult, and it’s harder to do in the moment. Being able to accurately assess your own playing as you are in the middle of playing is one of the hardest skills that musicians have to learn.

But regardless of how hard it is, some amount of self assessment is necessary to improve.

So how do we learn it?

Here are three things that we can do to learn this skill.

Play easy pieces

The first thing is to play pieces that are below your ability and pay attention to how well you are playing.

The pieces should be fairly easy. Pieces that you can play well work. You want to be able to focus on how well you are playing, rather than focusing on how to play the piece. You want to be able to listen to yourself play the piece.

So choose a piece that you learned about a year ago; one that is easy. As you play it pay close attention to how you are playing each note and how you are articulating each and every part of the music. How are you playing the staccato notes? How are you playing the legato sections? Could they be more staccato or more legato? How quietly are you playing the quiet sections and how loudly are you playing the loud sections? Could you be using a larger dynamic range?

Pay close attention to each and every detail as you play.

The reason you want to use an easier piece is because you want to be able to focus in on how you are playing the music, rather than focusing on the act of playing. You want to be able to easily get your fingers around the notes, rather than having to think about where your fingers are going. You want to have some free attention, almost like you can let your fingers go on auto-pilot as you play so you can focus on the articulations.

Record yourself

Another thing you can do is to record yourself.

Record yourself playing and assess the recordings. It’s not exactly the same because you aren’t assessing your playing in the moment, but it will give you an idea of how you sound and will help you better assess your progress. You’ll be able to listen repeatedly through the recording and assess how you are articulating and playing everything.

After you’ve assessed a recording, practice playing it with the articulations differently, and record yourself again. You’ll want to check your playing a few times to make sure you are able to change how you are playing everything.

If this is a technique you’ve never used then this can be eye opening into how you are playing everything. You might notice that some sections sound much better than you thought they sounded and other sections could be improved because you aren’t able to pay close attention to your own playing as you are playing.

I highly recommend everyone try this at some point in their musical development because it can be such an eye opening experience to be able to hear yourself without having to play.

If you do this though, I do recommend taking into account the way in which you are recording yourself. If you don’t have a proper microphone, or recording space, and the recording conditions aren’t ideal, realize that it likely won’t sound like it was recorded in a studio regardless of how well you play. This won’t affect your playing, but it can affect how “well” and how “professional” the recording sounds.

It’s not a huge deal, but it’s worth mentioning because sometimes when recording yourself for practice it won’t sound like a professional recording. That’s okay as long as you the listener and the player realize it.

Compare recordings of yourself to recordings of other people

One last thing that you can do is compare your own recordings, of your own playing, to recordings of the original players.

If you’re a beginner this tip won’t be useful because recordings of professional players will be quite far above your level. But if you’re an intermediate or advanced player this can help a lot. Try to mimic their playing as closely as you can.

Play their articulations exactly as they play them. Try to mimic how they play every single note and every single articulation. The goal is to be able to sound just like them. Almost like you’re preparing a musical impression of someone. You want to be able to pretend to be that player.

When you play things yourself you can forget all of this, but in doing this you’ll work on articulating things in a new and probably less familiar way than you normally articulate things. Whenever I do this I notice how much more other players articulate things. Some players have a specific way of playing every single note that they play basically.

For example, on guitar a lot of blues and fusion players have some type of articulation on every note. Every note is played with either a slide, a bend, a palm mute, a ghost note hammer-on or pull-off, or a reverse slide. Doing all of those things can be difficult if you’re not used to it. It can be a lot of work to add an articulation to every single note, but in trying to mimic some of your favorite players you’ll get much better at doing it.

Give this a try.

In doing this you’ll get to know your own playing style and how you like to play your instrument. You’ll also learn what techniques are difficult for you to play and what techniques are easy to play.

ISJ