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It’s another week in our back to school month!

As I wrote last week, during August I’m going to be sharing ideas about researching a new piece of music, preparing music to practice, planning and managing practice sessions, using feedback effectively, and more: all sections of my forthcoming book and online class.

In September, I’m going deep into drum land, sharing nuts and bolts ideas about refinement of sound, touch, and interpretation that i hope help as the semester gets underway.

But first, practicing.

Practicing is essential to everything we do as musicians. But often, our practice sessions are repetitive and dull, with too much focus on our muscles and too little attention paid to our ears and minds. Here are 7 ideas to enliven your practice with an eye towards creativity, proactivity, and active engagement with your musical development. And, they’re backed by scientific research about how we learn.

This week I’ll elaborate on 4 of them, and next week on 3 more.

7 Tips for Creative Practicing

1. Take on Big Problems
2. Keep Track of Your Time
3. Turn Your Music into Exercises
4. Turn Your Exercises into Music
5. Practice Multi-Modally
6. Record Yourself for Instant Feedback.
7. Be Curious

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1. Take on Big Problems

Articulate larger issues in your playing that you’d like to address. Then, develop a practice routine that addresses those issues incrementally. While most of us are great at setting short term goals, taking on a Big Problem helps give each practice session a purpose as part of a larger goal, and allows you to see your progress more effectively. It also provides a neat shorthand for practice goals within each session.

Your theme could be tone production, timing, maintaining expressivity in high pressure situations, or keeping your hammers low. As you work to hear your sound in a more nuanced manner, you’ll get better at hearing your sound, which will improve over time the quality of your mental representation—your sense of how something should sound, look, or feel.

Deciding to focus your work around a larger issue helps jumpstart a feedback loop of deliberate practice by giving you a feeling of both authority (enhanced expectations) and autonomy (a sense of ownership) over your learning, qualities that Gabriele Wulf and Rebecca Lewthwaite articulate as being central to motor learning in their “Optimizing Performance Through Intrinsic Motivation and Attention for Learning” (Wulf & Lewthwaite, 2016).

Over time, your themes will shift from fundamentals of tone production and timing to phrasing ideas and inflection and character and (fingers crossed) style.

Right now, my themes are "discipline" and "efficiency."

2. Keep Track of Your Time

While my favorite musical memories are those moments where creativity took over and I lost track of time, it’s important to be diligent in your practice to allow for creativity to take hold. I do this by journaling and using a timer.

Dear Diary

Journaling your practice helps you both keep track of what you’re doing and analyze what you have done to see what you should do in the future. It allows for reflection on your work, providing essential feedback on your process. And, the process of writing down what you’ve done provides important multimodal learning, which reinforces retention.

What should your journal look like? It depends on the person. Some will track every minute of their practice, while others will paint in broad strokes. Some will write a paragraph about their struggles with a technical issue, and others will be as terse as Magic 8 Ball. Both work: the important thing is not the journaling, but the reflection it leads to. Reflection is a key part of “recombination,” an essential part of making sure what we learn stays learned.

As Lynn Helding puts it in The Musician’s Mind, "Learning is the process whereby we hold about seven bits, or four chunks, of information in mind, manipulate those bits or chunks, and recombine them with facts or experiences we already know.” Journaling and reflection are key elements in that process.

For more about this, take a look at my “How to Learn Anything Online.”​

Timers

I use a modified version of Pomodoro Technique in my practice. Developed by Francesco Cirillo, the Pomodoro Technique is designed to facilitate planning, tracking, recording, processing and visualizing. Sounds pretty close to effective practice to me! I use the Pomodoro Technique at every level of my musical work, from planning to execution to journaling and reflection. Even though the Pomodoro Technique has been rebuffed by motor learning experts, I still use its tenets as a way of making sure I stay on track.

Here’s how it works:

• Make a to-do list for your practice session. This could be as broad as “warm up, work on Psappha (highly recommended), do recital run-through” or as specific as “work on double strokes for use within snare drum etude, work on snapping fingers, try and memorize a section of text, work fluidity of line in F-L in Piece Y, review notes in Piece Z.”
• Set an intention for a single chunk of time. Not sure how long a task will take? Worried your task is too big or small? Start with a single Pomodoro and adjust.
• Set a timer for 25 minutes, and work on your task without deviating, trying your best to avoid distractions and being sucked into another task or any Slow TV. Remember, the timer is running!
• After 25 minutes, take a short break (5-10 minutes), during which you can review the work you completed, think on upcoming tasks, or reflect more broadly.
• Repeat!
• After 4 blocks of 25 minutes, take a longer break, maybe eat an actual tomato.

I structure my practice routine around a few Pomodori of warming up, a few learning new material, and some focused on review and reflection. After a few sessions, I learn how long a task will take, allowing me to more effectively plot out my future practice sessions. It’s Design Thinking!

Here’s an example of how I structure my practice sessions. Each section could be 1-4 25-minute sessions of time.

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​I speak more about my flow chart here…

Think of each Pomodoro as a mini-experiment—a deliberate practice loop—where you explore a specific problem and track your effort and results. The frequent breaks give you some time to journal your results, and provide a mental break between sessions of challenging work. Changing what you work on each 25 minutes also creates some “contextual interference,” the motor learning phenomenon where frequently changing the context of a motor skill rather than maximizing repetition can facilitate learning.

By minimizing distraction and foregrounding a single task, the technique has allowed me to increase the amount of time I spent in flow, that wondrous state eliding ease and accomplishment. (Be sure to have a notepad nearby, as many of us have great inspirations while in flow). At the same time, this technique has increased my focus, as each Pomodoro is in essence an exercise in concentration.

3. Turn Your Music into Exercises

Instead of repeating challenging passages over and over, I like to make a “most wanted list” in the repertoire I’m practicing: a collection of challenging passages which I dissect and turn into warm-ups and exercises in technical and musical development.

Actively creating material weakens performance anxiety by helping you find many ways of executing a passage, lessening the chances you might be surprised on stage.

Here’s my three-step process to turn challenging passages into exercises:

1. Make the passage much easier

Here, I take away some element of difficulty: if the passage is challenging to coordinate between the hands, play one hand at a time. If the passage is difficult because of a rhythmic issue, make the rhythm much easier but still recognizable. If you struggle to hear the correct pitches, flatten other parameters to make pitch the primary focus. If the passage includes a lot of rolls, practice block chords and then metered rolls. Over time, you’ll develop a toolkit of transformational techniques that you can deploy depending on your diagnosis.

2. Make the passage much more difficult

Here, I extend the difficulty of the passage with regard to some parameter. Might I play faster than is required of me? Might I work to play more softly than I need to in concert? Could I play this passage in a more challenging key, or with an additional coordination challenge? In each case, focusing on varying your playing is helpful, both strengthening your ability to quickly change your playing and adding to the feeling that you are actively creating rather than trying to hit a narrow target. By exploring many ways the piece could be, you are strengthening your ideas about how you think the piece should sound and look.

3. Return to the passage

Go back to the passage as written. At this point, your mental representation should be fairly specific and strong, as you will have heard many versions of the passage. Now, work to narrow the parameters of your target, focusing on precision and accuracy.

I like to do this process in my head, as I find it develops my ears and memory more effectively than with written notation.

In case you like to see things written down, here’s a sample set of exercises I generated around the third movement of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade.

Here's a video

Using this process, you are able to conflate warming up (remember that?) with note refinement, saving tremendous time. Finally, this stepping stone process makes it easier to hit each benchmark.

4. Turn Your Exercises into Music

Take an active hand in your technical studies to make them more musical, mentally engaging, and flexible. Focus on active change informed by critical listening rather than repetition. Dynamically altering your exercises reduces the risk of injury and develops a broader interpretive palette. It also is key to developing myelin, the neural sheathing essential to learning new skills. Most importantly, this tinkering is essential to developing mental representations on your instrument: it sets the bounds of how your instrument can sound, what it looks and feels like when it does, and helps you link physical motion and sonic change.

Challenge yourself to try your exercises with a different musical character, or in the style of your favorite performer. Try a new approach you haven’t explored yet. Taking on a proactive mindset—“let me try this” or “I want my audience to hear this character”—rather than a reactive, defensive attitude (“yikes, I missed that note” or “I hope I don’t overshoot that octave”) can reduce performance anxiety and minimize distraction by subsuming your technique within a larger, altruistic musical goal.

You might also be creative in grouping your exercises by MOTION and not NOTATION.

What do the Flam Accent and Single Paradiddle have in common?

They’re the same motion! A little bit of practicing going between the two can help you develop fine control of your grace notes and rebounds, reducing physical tension as you focus on larger muscle groups.

Another Video

Ditto the Ratamacue and Double Paraddidle…

That’s all for now. Next time, I’ll take on 5, 6, and 7 on my list.

Happy Practicing!

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