Practice chunks

While practicing we often want to start from the beginning of the piece of music. Almost always. This might feel great, but it’s not all that efficient in terms of practice time.

If we always start from the beginning and re-start every time we make a mistake we end up practicing the beginning section a lot, while not practicing the other music as much.

Let’s look at an example. We’re learning a new piece of music and start from the beginning and play until the 4th measure. In that measure we make a mistake so we re-start the piece of music over from the beginning and play until the 5th measure. We make a mistake in the 5th measure so we start it over again. Then we play until the middle of the 5th measure and we make a mistake so we start over again. We play until the 6th measure and make a mistake and start over again. We do this a few more times making the same mistakes in the 5th and 6th measures.

This is illustrated in the picture below where each run through the piece of music is notated by the number at the beginning. The line goes until the place we made a mistake.

Notice how we’ve played through the first four measure the most, but we’ve hardly played through the second half of the melody at all.

This is a short example, but if we imagine this as an expanded, larger, practice session it can easily become a problem. This happens especially when we encounter one difficult section or measure or few beats of music that’s always difficult. We practice up until that section, make the same mistake, start over, practice until that difficult passage, and make the same mistake over and over.

We practice the beginning a lot and get really good at playing the first sections of music. And we hardly practice the sections after the difficult passage.

What’s the solution?

The solution I’ve found to be the most useful is to separate the music into sections and start playing at multiple different places. Basically, don’t always start from the beginning. This is difficult to do at first because we’ve likely played through the piece starting from the beginning the most and we only know how to play the middle if we’ve played the music before it. It can also be difficult because we can play the beginning the best and that’s what makes us feel good and that’s what’s the most fun to play.

But if we start from different points we end up with a different result in terms of practicing.

In this example we made the same number of mistakes within the first four measures, but because we stopped at the fifth measure and started playing from the beginning again we didn’t make the same mistakes over and over in the 5th measure.

If we continue this throughout the whole piece of music we’ll likely cut our practice time down drastically and learn the piece in much less time than if we used the previous practice method.

Considerations

When using this practice method you might need to practice transitions between sections in order to play everything in order from start to finish.

Luckily you can use this same mentality for them.

Play just the transition.

Play the measure before and the measure after, but not much more than that. This gives yourself time to get the transition between the sections under your fingers without having to practice a lot of extra music to do so.

If you can play a transition just fine then there’s no need to practice it.

Another consideration is to practice only what you need to. If you can play something well, even if it’s a whole section, then you already know it and don’t need to practice it.

Play-throughs

I also recommend adding play-throughs to your practice time. Take breaks periodically to play the whole piece from the beginning. This is the fun part to me because I’m actually playing the music and I get to be expressive, but I think of them as a separate thing from practicing because I’m not trying to get better at any specific material. I’m just playing through it as best I can at the moment.

It’s also a great way to give yourself a break from playing the same few measures over and over and over again. You’ll play different music, give your hands and head a rest for a little so that you can enjoy the piece you just learned.

Give this a try if you struggle with learning music quickly and struggle with the same mistakes.

ISJ