How to Practice

A very common pitfall among musicians, even experienced ones, is when their practice sessions consist of playing through entire pieces without stopping to change anything. This can result in mistakes and bad habits becoming solidified as muscle memory.

To be clear, when nearing a performance date, it is necessary to run the entire piece as part of your preparation. But when learning a new piece, you should be starting out with smaller, more manageable chunks and be making conscious, deliberate choices with your technique.

Here are several tips for making your practice sessions more efficient and ensuring that “Practice Makes Permanent” doesn’t apply to your mistakes!

General Practice Tips for Any Musician:

1. Break it into bite sized pieces.

Learning an entire song can feel overwhelming, so instead, tackle it a measure or two at a time. Is there a section of a song that you consistently mess up? Is there a transition where you always hesitate and pause before playing? Take away everything else and focus on just that single moment, starting just a few notes before. This reduces the iteration time between successive attempts at the difficult spot and makes it easier to remember what you need to adjust.

2. Don’t always start from the beginning.

Often the difficult parts of a song are in the middle or at the end. Especially for singers, only ever practicing from the beginning means that you are carrying all the baggage and fatigue from the entire first part of the song when you arrive at that high note at the end. Try beginning a practice session with the middle or end of the song, that way you can start from a clean slate and be more on top of your technique while you are building muscle memory in a difficult section.

3.  Slow it down.

This is one of the most important pieces of advice for learning music and doesn’t only apply to fast songs. Slow. It. Down… Way down. Play it slower than you can stand. Play or sing each note deliberately, and if you make a mistake, slow it down further. Sixteenth notes should feel like quarter notes. See if you can really master a section of the song at 40 BPM, then try 42. No need to rush. Keep slowly ratcheting up the tempo until you make a mistake, then spend some time near that tempo. Deliberate, conscious effort will help to eliminate unnecessary movements and you will eventually be able to play super efficiently and therefore, faster!

Don’t always play to a metronome, especially when working on something new. Personally, I find it frustrating to get back in sync with the click after messing up, and sometimes a gnarly set of notes requires more attention with an even slower tempo. If you’re spending more time catching up with the metronome than playing, turn it off. The metronome is just a tool, nothing more.

4.  Focus on one skill at a time.

A piece of music requires coordinating many different musical skills, from dynamics to articulations, breathing technique, lyric diction, genre-specific styling, you name it. As with tip #1, take away everything except the specific skill you are working on, then add back in the layers as you become more comfortable with the basics.

5. Work backwards from difficult areas.

So what’s with that high note you can never quite nail? Or that run where your fingers cramp up and tie themselves in knots? It might not be the note or the run itself – often the section leading up to it is putting you in a tight spot by the time you get there.

In the spirit of tip #1, isolate the high note or run and work out any issues specific to that, then add in a note or two before it, repeat several times, add in some more notes, etc. Work backwards until you find the culprit note(s) or word(s) that might be throwing you off or causing your technique to fall out of alignment. Adjust as necessary and keep going.

6.  Shorter, more frequent practice sessions are better.

Especially when starting out as a beginner, don’t make it your goal to practice for an hour. It’s great if you find yourself playing for that long, but a whole hour in your schedule can feel intimidating sometimes, making it more likely that you put it off until tomorrow – or never.

Practicing for 10 minutes every weekday is better than practicing for an hour on the weekend, even though it is less time in total. You learn faster, build muscle memory, and memorize lyrics better with consistent, daily practice versus cramming it all in at once. You might also find that 10 minutes goes by very quickly, and after getting over the initial hurdle of starting a practice session, you might play for a lot longer than 10 minutes without realizing it.

Scheduling a regular practice time in your calendar can help for some people, as can making a habit of practicing after dinner, after you get home from work, after walking the dog, etc. Piggyback off of other set routines in your life so that practice can turn into part of your routine as well.

7.  Reduce the set-up time, eliminate barriers to practice.

Take your instrument out of its case and put it on a stand or place it safely in a spot that is within arm’s reach of wherever you spend most of your free time. Set up a music stand with your music folder ready to go. Get comfortable with the fact that you don’t always have to warm-up for an extended period of time before you can begin practicing – just do it.

The point is to make it so that whenever you feel even the slightest bit of motivation to practice, you can get started within 30 seconds. And not every practice session has to be a marathon, as mentioned in tip #6. Make singing or playing your instrument something that you can enjoy on a whim.

Practice Tips Specific to Singing:

1.  Sing with a piano.

Very often as singers we believe we are singing the correct melody when in reality there may be an incorrect pitch on a short note somewhere in the middle. Not to make you paranoid or anything, but this happens more often than we’d like to admit. By plunking along in unison on the piano, it will become obvious when there is a wrong note in your singing. If you don’t already have the piano chops, start slowly (and slow is good, remember?) or even play only the notes on the strong beats, working in the rest of the notes later.

Not only is singing with the piano good for error correcting, it will also improve your intonation, which is very often affected by a swallowed vowel or over-supporting with your breath. After all, when singing a cappella, how would you be able to tell if you are sharp or flat with nothing to compare your pitch to?

Eventually you will need to practice the song a cappella or with the original accompaniment which may or may not be doubling your part. But during the initial song-learning phase of your practice, singing with the piano is essential for making sure you learn the notes correctly the first time.

2.  Try without the lyrics.

The voice is a unique instrument in that it is inextricably tied to language. That adds yet another layer of complexity to an already complicated instrument. Especially when singing in a language that is unfamiliar to you, it is important to take away that complexity when first learning the song.

Replace the lyrics with “ah” or whatever your favorite vowel is. Once that feels comfortable, sing only the vowels of the original lyrics (this will sound ridiculous, of course), then finally add in the consonants. Pay special attention to how the feeling of singing the notes changes as you add in the vowels and the consonants. Was it easier to sing a particular note back when you first sang on “ah”? Did any of the consonants break your legato line and/or add any tension?

3.  Memorize your lyrics “between the lines”

Almost every time I have “forgotten” the lyrics to a song, it was because I couldn’t think of the very first word in the line. Once I remembered that first word, the rest of the line came to me almost immediately. If you notice yourself having the same issue, try putting the first few words of the next line up against the end of the current line. This way you don’t have to “search” for the beginning of each line.

Example:

Dashing through the snow On a one

On a one horse open sleigh O’er the fields

O’er the fields we go Laughing all

Laughing all the way Bells on bob

Bells on bob tail ring Making spirits

Making spirits bright What fun

What fun it is to laugh and sing A sleighing

A sleighing song tonight Oh, jingle bells... etc

You might also write the next words into your sheet music so that they show up in the rests between phrases. This way you are anticipating the upcoming words during the entire piano interlude, for example, rather than panicking when you can’t recall them right before you have to sing. Basically, don’t space out when you aren’t singing, be thinking of your next entrance!

To practice patter sections with a lot of rapid-fire words, start slow, of course! Try speaking the entire line so you don’t have to worry about the pitches. Then, over time, ratchet up the tempo until you are able to spit out the words even faster than the song requires. Now add back in the pitches at the normal tempo and you might find yourself anticipating the upcoming words without even having to think.

~Alexander