Make something great
As my students can confirm, I’m not a fan of “tips” and “tricks”. For one, learning is lasting change to thoughts and/or behavior, and lasting change rarely results from tips and tricks. Learning is beautiful and thrilling. We should all be encouraged to embrace its complexity. With that in mind, here is the closest thing to a tip I can responsibly suggest: when faced with the question of what to practice, make something great.
This seems obvious.
But the obviousness of that suggestion belies a rather important problem: making something great is not easy for many music learners. Many practicers know that they are supposed to make something great. The best way to do that may be far less clear.
Practice strategies, or the techniques of how to improve passages of music are the thrust of many music lessons, classes, conferences, and research studies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is not currently a single practice strategy (or prescribed practice method) that has emerged as the most effective for all music learners.
The differences in how musicians are taught to make passages great could lead one to see more mystery and mythology (or less charitably, rumor and gossip) in the process than science.
Thankfully, research in motor learning suggests some common ground for all great practice. Because after all, every music practicer is working with the same exquisite piece of equipment, a human brain. Data suggest a surprisingly simple and actionable optimization: if you’re unsure how to make something great, try adding a preceding step.
Step 1: identify a proximal goal that must be achieved to succeed at your eventual goal that you can make great in one practice session.
Step 2: make that thing great
Many of us get lost in the weeds trying to solve step two. But the most reliable path through step two is by starting with step one. And it’s there that many music practicers have room to improve. Making something great is really about knowing what to make great now.
Proximal goals are those that present some, but not too much, difficulty. They afford your brain its most fully engaged perceptual-motor learning, and are likely to elicit the sorts of behavioral adaptations that afford expertise. As smaller, more doable goals are reached, dopamine releases in the brain increase the likelihood that the adaptations used to achieve those goals will stick. As an added benefit, this can lead to practice that feels more rewarding!
Our brains aren’t terribly interested in ill-defined goals. When was the last time you got goosebumps over the idea of getting slightly better at some technique? “Slightly better” is an ill-defined goal, and not likely to recruit the full capabilities of the human brain. “Better” isn’t an effective construct for the brain. I can hear the voice of Dr. Bob Duke saying: “better means ‘I’m not done yet”.
Instead of practicing to get better, practice identifying a thing, usually a little thing, and make it great now.
