Have you experienced this? You have been practicing for weeks but the piece doesn’t get better. Your intonation is not good, you play wrong notes, perhaps you’ll have to perform a concert two weeks from now and you are getting a little concerned.
In this series we’ll try to shed some light upon this phenomenon to improve your practicing skills and we’ll try to avoid common mistakes made when we practice.
What does “practicing” mean?
The human brain works differently from a hard disk on our computer.
Depending on our operating system saving a file means something like
“file – save as – (name) – (Enter)”
an operation which is completed after that, unless you suffer a software failure or a hard disk crash.
In opposition to this procedure our brain saves it’s information mainly by repetition.
Remember your time in school. When you had to learn poems, dates or vocabulary you probably repated them many times to minimize mistakes. Only few people are capable of remembering 50 or 100 new words by reading them once.
Nothing else happens when we practice. Practicing means learning of more or less complicated operations.
We learn by repetition of the same operations and movements.
In other words: We learn the things we repeat frequently, no matter if they are right or wrong. If we play a passage or even an entire piece very often we save it to our disk exactly as we played it. Together with all our mistakes and inaccuracies we made.
This is the major problem when we practice. Many violinists (and other soloists as well) play an entire piece up to twenty times being convinced that they practiced well.
OK, they practiced. But they practiced the wrong things. Even if they succeeded two or three times their brain had enough opportunity to save 17 or 18 wrong or inaccurate versions of this piece.
Good practicing means four or five flawless repetitions.
Repeating further doesn’t improve things significantly because our brain switches to “auto-pilot” sooner or later. After the tenth run-through we cannot distinguish precisely if we play right or wrong. Chances are good that we play unprecisely again and we would waste time by erasing tediously what we just saved to our “brain-disk”.
How do we achieve five flawless repetitions?
This is the most interesting point in our series.
Let’s assume we have a passage of 32 fast notes which we cannot play without mistakes. But to learn this passage we need those five repetitions without mistakes. Obviously we are stuck.
A provoking question: Who on earth is pushing you to play the entire passage in one piece?
We reduce the number of notes until we can play them. We play 16 or 17 notes. Still not enough? No problem, we reduce further.
In an extreme case we practice two notes, if we look at a shift, or even one note if we want to improve the sound, the vibrato etc.
If we can play those notes well we append some notes of our passage. After that we increase the number of notes again until we can play the entire passage.
Flawlessly!
