In our book What You Learn Learning Music, to be released on November 3, my podcast partner and co-author Kevin Bales reminds us of an experience that taught him a valuable lesson about practicing. One day early in his piano studies when he came for a lesson, the teacher asked him what he had accomplished since their last lesson, and he answered, “I hope I got better.” She replied, “Oh, Kevin, hope is not a practice strategy.”
That was enlightening, the beginning of his journey to figuring out how to get the most from your practicing. In that chapter, appropriately titled, “Hope Is Not a Practice Strategy,” Kevin shares some of what he talks about when he talks with his students about practicing.
“We hear about people practicing eight hours a day,” Kevin says. “But it’s not the amount of hours that matters, it’s the quality. You can’t just do the same thing over and over and expect to get better. I had to struggle for everything I learned in music. But a lot of that struggle was because I was practicing the hardest way, repeating the same thing over and over and over and then becoming dispirited because I wasn’t making progress. “Oh poor me, I’m just not talented enough,” that kind of junk.
“So I try to give students, whether at the college or my one-on-one clients, something they can practice for one period, one week, one day, to solve a problem they’re having right then. That’s a win, and I think when you practice that way it creates momentum; you can’t wait to solve the next thing.”
So that’s the strategy. As Kevin summarizes: “Take something you’re doing, a stumbling block, and practice enough to solve that problem.”