The Magic Question: “How Do You Practise?”

The Magic Question: “How Do You Practise?”

 

the-magic-question-how-do-you-practise

Practising a musical instrument is a process that needs to be learned. It’s just like learning how to study any subject in school. In fact, good instrumental teachers should consider themselves teachers of “practice” just as much as teachers of “piano” or “trumpet”.

How often do you teach students how to practise? And have you ever thought to ask them “How do you practise this?”

I hope you enjoy this article by Andrew Ingkavet on the importance of helping students know how to practise as much as what to practise.

You can find out more about Andrew at the Musicolor Method.

PS. For those of you in the USA, I’ve tended to use the UK/Australian English verb “Practise” and noun “Practice” in this article, just in case you were wondering about the spelling! I personally think we should just jump on board the US method and stick to “practice” for both – much simpler!

An Epiphany

Back in my college day, a bunch of music majors were hanging outside the practice rooms, when a particularly gifted guitar student came bursting out of his room.  He was flustered and excited.   

“You know what I just realised?”

We sat staring blankly.

 “You don’t practise what you KNOW, you practise what you DON’T KNOW.”

A bunch of us laughed, but when he left, there was a kind of stunned silence.  

Somehow, we had all made our way to a high level music program at a prestigious University and yet most of had never learned this basic essential skill.  

No one had ever taught us HOW TO PRACTISE.

Practice for Life

It’s the same in life.  If you continuously just do what you know, you will never know what you don’t know.  It takes an intentional choice to look outside your field of experience to seek new ideas, knowledge, concepts, and beliefs.  

As teachers, we can play a huge role in giving our students (and their parents) a mindset of growth.  We can instil the beliefs that change is possible and exciting. Learning never stops and we are always getting better, but only if you take action.  

The basic core action is practising your instrument.  It becomes a metaphor for life.   It’s the reason they call it a medical practice or a teaching practice, etc.

The Magic Question

So, after the first few lessons, here’s a magic question that you can ask your students tomorrow:

“How do you practise?”

Then be quiet and listen for the answer.

Music lessons should not just be about learning notes, pieces and scales just the same as school should not just be facts, rules and theorems.  

Both need to teach the skills of learning and the most basic of skills is how to ask the right question.   

The Power Of Questions

Recently, I posed this question to my family:

“If you had an hour to solve a life or death situation, how would you spend that hour?”

Now, before I tell you what we came up with, take a moment and think about what you would do.  In our family discussion, the consensus was around 20 minutes on the planning and formulating of questions and 40 minutes on execution.

Now here’s what Albert Einstein said:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

– Albert Einstein

Thinking is essentially the art of questioning and the quality of your questions is what will give the quality of your answers.  

Related: What I’ve learnt from asking more questions in music lessons

So back to the practice question

Did you hear the student’s answer?  

Here’s a common answer:

“I practise the piece by playing it from the beginning and when I make a mistake, I go back to the beginning and try to make it better.”

You can hear the results in their performance where the first half of the song is flawless, then comes a particularly slow and difficult part, then the rest of the song is half-baked.

You can then ask them,

“What do you do when there’s a hard part?”

If they say, “Well I play it over and over”,you can tell them:  

“I’ve got an idea that can make you 10 times better with by practising less.

This usually gets their ear! Who wouldn’t want to 10x themselves and by doing less?

“What if you just played the hard parts 3 times until it sounded better?  Then you can go back and play the piece just for the fun of it!”

Making It A Game

In a recent lesson, I made copy of the sheet music we were working on and then cut it into strips, where each strip had just a few measures of music.

We folded the strips and placed them in a hat.  The student then pulled one at random and played the piece while reading it.  If it was not one of the trouble spots, we then turned it over and had her play it again from memory.

If it was difficult, then we worked through it over and over, fixing whatever the issue and then had her play it from memory 3 times in a row.  By the end of the lesson, she was beaming with joy and a sense of accomplishment as well as having a new fun game to practice this piece at home.

The Place Where Learning Happens

Another question I like to ask my students.

Where does the learning happen?

“What?”

“Well, do you learn music and piano here at my lesson or at home?”

Ahh.  Sometimes you see a look that confirms a light bulb went off in their head.  

Then I will tell them how the lesson is where I will give them new ideas, concepts, techniques and music but they actually do most of the learning at home when they are practising it everyday.  And then when I see them again, I can answer new questions that have come up because of the practising.  

Because I teach a lot of preschool aged children (4 to 6) I do have to first show them a proper practice routine, but it’s still something I begin to check in on every few weeks by asking them, “How do you practise?”

Leave your thoughts

What do you do to teach the skills of practice?  I’d love to hear your comments below.

 

Andrew Ingkavet

Andrew Ingkavet is creator/founder of The Musicolor Method™, a proven system for teaching music in a fast, fun and simple way. His diverse career path has allowed him to cross-pollinate ideas from theater, film, marketing, advertising, journalism & design. He was one of the first 3 VJ's for MTV-Asia and holds a Bachelors of Music from New York University. Get more teaching ideas at http://themusicolormethod.com/

 feeling inspired? 

how do you practice?
Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  1. I had a similar epiphany in college. I am always trying to teach my students how to practice smarter not harder. Thanks for some tips!

  2. Centuries ago I studied Charles Cooke’s Playing the Piano for Pleasure in which he advocated selecting the hardest section in a piece, marking it off as a “fracture” and then concentrating 100 pc on mastering it. This never fails to work.

    In fact eventually it transforms that fracture into the easiest section in the whole piece. And into the bargain you discovered you had memorised it.

more Deliberate Practice posts

from our blog

contact us

Reach out to learn more about our multi-teacher memberships