Smart it up

I recently gave a presentation on expert practice at a great university with some very sharp students. At one point, I asked them to name strategies they’ve used in the practice room when confronted with passages of music they can’t play as they’d like. The responses were great: take things down an octave, slur everything, change the tempo, etc. All great tools for a practicing brass player.

One student said that sometimes when he’s working on a tricky spot, it helps to “dumb it down”. I bristled at the word “dumb”, but he was referring to what is, perhaps, the foundational strategy of all effective practice. Very astute. In fact, modifying tasks to afford yourself immediate success is anything but dumb. Making a passage doable doesn’t dumb it down, it smarts it up!

What do you do in the practice room when the sounds or movements you make aren’t the ones you intend to make? You may try the passage again, but simply playing a difficult passage many times won’t necessarily lead to better performance in the absence of change. Repetition alone is insufficient for improvement. What, then, do experts change to optimize improvement?

In our research at the Center for Music Learning at the University of Texas at Austin, we’ve had the great pleasure to observe artist-level musicians practicing undoable tasks. We’ve found that expert practicers consistently use a robust, elegant, and efficient strategy: they modify undoable passages, making them playable immediately. Experts waste little practice time making errors that cannot be addressed in the short term, by quickly making things do-able.  Smart*.

Confronting a difficult passage in individual practice is common. The practice room is where many musicians feel relative comfort in discovering error and exploring solutions. This helps to explain the many class and studio hours dedicated to helping students learn how to improve through practice strategies that make passages more doable. (here’s a great article suggesting how large ensemble teachers can teach practice) The most common methods of do-able-ization are likely familiar to many musicians:

·           Modifying tempo

·           Modifying intervals

·           Modifying rhythms

·           Segmenting smaller musical units

·           Reducing effectors (e.g., one-handed piano practice, singing, or audiating)

·           Modifying articulation (or bowing) complexity

Knowing how and when to use these effectively is an important challenge for players and teachers. Research suggests that many students don’t use all the strategies that teachers teach. Some students are even taught reductive mantras like: “if you can play it slow, you can play it fast”, or “if you can sing it, you can play it”. Although these both can be useful strategies, there is good reason to suspect that expert strategy use is more complex.

Strategies are only as useful as the musician wielding them. Each method solves different problems and experts deploy them precisely to achieve moment-to-moment change. The choice of method to modify is highly dependent on what is intended, the characteristics of the perceived error, the context in which it’s situated, and the practicer’s current ability to fix things. In other words, experts use different methods to make a passage playable. 20 different experts will tell a different story about how they do-able-ize, but they likely share a sense of how much to do-able-ize.

Leaping back to reliable actions is smart. Doing so affords experts a perceptual-motor advantage. If they modify the task into something they can already do well, the coordination required for execution is sufficiently automatized. This suggests the modified task doesn’t require much conscious attention to accomplish, setting up a reliable place to start a practice sequence.  

For example, walking, an automatized activity for typical adults, requires little thought to execute successfully. This affords walking individuals some attention to spend thinking about the destination, what may happen after arrival, or anything else, really. Similarly, experts optimally position themselves to aim attention at important sources of error by leaping back to automatized actions (then adding complexity over trials).

The smart feature here is the crafting of the modified version. Reliable practice trials are an outcome of effective do-able-ization. Perhaps the most important activity in a practice session isn't simply motor execution…it’s planning. Experts plan tasks they can mostly execute as intended.

When faced with difficult music learning tasks, experts adapt quickly and excel. If they weren’t exceptionally good at learning music, they wouldn’t be exceptionally good performers. Performing music beautifully and reliably requires the ability to make the undoable, doable. The next time you find yourself performing a passage of music that is undoable for you in that moment, smart it up and play a doable version of that passage keeping as many elements of the original as possible, and build your learning on solid ground.

*As an added incentive, spending some practice time playing things you sound great on will likely increase your self-efficacy. This can make you happier, more motivated, and more effective.