“Do I HAVE to practice?”

It’s a commonly-asked question among music students, and I’d like to answer it for you.

Short answer: yep.

Medium length answer: I mean honestly, why are you even taking lessons? It’s to be able to play. Right? So play! The play’s the thing! Practice is a specific type of playing, designed to help you improve your abilities over time. That’s why I call it “practice” and recommend that my students do it. But I also recommend that my students PLAY regularly. After all, what would be the point of knowing how to play an instrument but never actually doing it? If you don’t play on a daily or almost-daily basis, you’re missing the opportunity to enjoy whatever skills you’ve developed.

Long answer: The question you should really be asking is,

“HOW should I practice to maximize my learning and enjoyment?”

That’s the question I really want to examine in depth here. I’m using piano practice as my example here, but really, this applies to learning any instrument, and even to learning non-music skills.

Occasionally, I get a student whose parents ask for twice weekly lessons. Doesn’t that sound great? Intensive study! They should make double the progress, right? Some twice-weekly students are seriously committed to music and achieve amazing things. But often, twice-weekly students are the ones who plod along most slowly and eventually quit without achieving very much in their studies. Why? Because frequent lessons cannot make up for lack of daily practice.

I think I know exactly what parents are thinking when they sign up their child for piano two or three days a week, and it totally makes sense. They are thinking, “There’s no way my child is going to practice on their own.” It could be because the poor kid is scheduled to the hilt and there’s no room for practice time. Maybe the parent dreads arguments about practicing, or they can’t summon the energy for the nagging and cajoling they expect they will have to employ to make their child practice. It could be lack of confidence in the child’s ability to work on their own successfully. And it may be that the parent doesn’t think daily practice is necessary—after all, extracurricular sports often have only one or two training days a week, and kids are able to improve in those activities. One way or another, the parent concludes that the only way they can get their child in front of a piano often enough for them to learn anything is to hire someone to sit with them and make them learn.

Those reasons are all totally understandable. And yet, my online teaching profile says this:

“Who should NOT sign up for lessons: anyone who does not have the time, ability, and willingness to practice regularly. Sorry, it's the ONLY way to learn!”

Daily practice is key to progress. I can’t say it enough. But this isn’t some old-school, Draconian, smack-your-knuckles-with-a-ruler, nasty old hag piano teacher rule. In fact, it’s the most liberating and empowering part of studying music!

Because here’s the secret to practicing: the more you do it, the more fun it is.

You doubt me! I can feel your eye rolls across time and space. No, I don’t think practicing is fun because I’m some freak music nerd and you’re not like that so of course this wouldn’t apply to you. Actually, I find practicing as tedious and lame as any kid might say it is—AT FIRST. When you start practicing, or start practicing a new piece of music, you usually can’t do it right away. You start out with zero accomplishment. You know nothing. That’s no fun. There’s not a lot of satisfaction in making failed attempts. That’s why you have to invest in your practicing, so you can get past that part and on to the rewarding part of playing music. The only way out is through!

Follow me through an emotional journey: This is a week in the life of a student who doesn’t practice well.

You come away from your lesson with a practice assignment. The teacher probably went over your new piece with you in your lesson, so you’ve tried it before, very slowly, in tiny pieces, with continual feedback and instruction. Your teacher probably also told you how to approach the new piece in your practice sessions—for example, I always tell students to start with only one hand, and to do only a few measures at a time, slowly and steadily, many times in a row. I might also tell the student to practice saying the letter names of the notes or the finger numbers they’re playing. (More about practice methods another time.) You have a general idea of what the piece is supposed to sound like.

But the next day, you don’t practice. Maybe you were supposed to but you somehow weaseled out of it. Maybe you never even planned on it. You don’t even think about your lesson. It doesn’t come to your mind at all.

The next day, you sit down to practice. It’s been 48 hours since you heard how your new piece was supposed to sound. You look at it, but you can’t remember the experience of attempting to play it two days ago. This means you have to start over practically from scratch, but this time, without your teacher’s help. You struggle to figure out what notes to play. You attempt the entire song straight through. You aren’t even actually sure if you did it correctly or not. Or maybe you’re SURE that there’s something wrong with it, and you don’t know what. You try it a bunch of times. It doesn’t seem to be getting any less confusing. There’s too much to remember all at once. Your parent yells to you from the other room that you have to stay at the piano for half an hour. This sucks and you hate it, so you don’t want to practice the next day.

The day before your lesson, you realize you’re going to have to face your teacher tomorrow and she’s going to ask you to play this song. You spend an entire 45  minutes trying to learn it. It’s frustrating. You can’t remember anything from either your lesson or the one time you practiced, and you feel hot prickly shame creeping up on you as you become aware that you haven’t done what you were supposed to do and that your teacher is going to be disappointed. You feel angry, thinking, “This is too much for me to handle!” You have a sinking feeling in your stomach when you think about how embarrassing it will be to have to attempt this song in front of your teacher tomorrow.

All day, the dread of having to go to your lesson is in the back of your mind. Finally, the moment comes: your teacher asks you to show her your progress on your new song. You’re stressed out and embarrassed, and even though you remember a bit of what you practiced last night, it still feels unfamiliar to your hands. You try to read the notes, but it takes you too long to figure out what letter they should be. You have to pause every few notes to think about what to play next. You struggle through your lesson. You don’t feel any satisfaction. You can’t play the song. Your teacher tells you to keep working on the same thing next week.

Good lord, does that sound awful, or WHAT? 

Who would inflict that kind of torture on a kid? And on a weekly basis, no less! No wonder so many people quit piano lessons! That makes music lessons sound like really hard work and no fun at all.

Now let’s experience a week in the life of a good practicer.

You start out the exact same as the poor practicer, leaving your lesson with a new piece to work on. You’ve gone through it with your teacher, heard it, and been told how to tackle it in your practice sessions.

The next day, at your scheduled practice time, you sit down at the piano like always. You open your lesson notebook and your music. You read your teacher’s instructions and try to remember what you did in your lesson. It was only yesterday, so you remember pretty clearly. You follow your teacher’s practice instructions. You try to replicate everything you and your teacher did together yesterday, but you can’t do it quite as well as you did when she was helping you. After working on it for ten minutes, and then playing your favorite songs you already know for ten minutes, you mark off today on your practice chart.

The next day, you sit down to practice at your scheduled time. You review everything you did yesterday. It’s starting to feel familiar to your fingers.

The next day when you practice, you work really hard on only one part of the song. You’re able to play that one part much more smoothly than before, and a little faster, too. You’re doing so much better today than yesterday! This feels good. You mark off another practice day.

The next day when you practice, you are tired and distracted. You do all the same stuff you’ve been doing all week, which is feeling more familiar, but you don’t really get any better today. You throw in the towel after twelve minutes. Still, you mark off another practice day and feel a little satisfaction looking at the row of check marks. This is your fourth day of practice in a row!

The next day, you practice again. You remember everything much more easily this time. You find you don’t have to think all that hard about how to play this song. You know how it’s supposed to sound. In fact, you were humming it earlier in the day. Your fingers almost seem to be doing it by themselves sometimes.

It’s the day before your lesson. You play the whole song with very few mistakes. You keep doing your practice assignment, doing smaller sections of the music instead of the whole thing. You can play your right hand part all the way through without a mistake. You do it four times in a row. You like this song! It really sounds like it’s supposed to sound when you play it now. You keep playing it. It becomes easier every time. It’s satisfying to play this song. You check off yet another day of practice.

All day, you’re looking forward to going to your lesson and showing your teacher what you accomplished. She asks you to try out your new song, and you’re just a little nervous, but you remember how it’s supposed to sound, and your fingers remember how to play it. It comes out allllllmost as good as when you practiced it yesterday. Your teacher is really impressed! She says she can tell you put in a lot of effort this week. She notices that you practiced every single day since your last lesson, and she gives you an extra sticker. You enjoy being praised for your accomplishment. You feel proud of yourself. The next day, when you sit down to practice, you remember how great it was to play well in your lesson yesterday, and you feel confident that you can do the same thing this week.

Now there’s an empowering, positive, satisfying experience. 

Is it still hard work? Yes! But it’s not just hard work, it’s hard work that pays off, both immediately and in the long run, in satisfaction and confidence. Does it take more time? Yes, but only a little - if you assume that the good practicer spent 20 minutes a day except for their one bad mood day, they practiced 112 minutes in one week - 37 more minutes than the poor practicer. That’s not actually all that much, is it?

You may have noticed that the time each student spent at the piano wasn’t the only difference between these two practice scenarios. Let’s take a look at the major divides between the poor practicer and the good practicer. What did they do differently, and how did it affect their end result?

The biggest, most essential difference is the first one—the poor practicer skipped a day. It doesn’t take long for information in short-term memory to dissipate. By reviewing the same information every day, the good practicer was able to hang onto the progress they had already made, whereas the poor practicer lost the progress they had made in their lesson by not reinforcing it before it could fade. The days between the first and second practice sessions for the poor practicer had the same effect of erasing much of the progress they were able to make in their first practice.

Daily reinforcement also builds motor memory. The good practicer was able to develop a physical sense for the correct way to play the piece, whereas the poor practicer was still trying to remember and reason out the song intellectually. Motor memory is not developed over a number of minutes spent practicing. Like learning the sound of a song, this is learning that happens when you’re not playing, when your mind is unconsciously reviewing and incorporating what you’ve done in your practice, and it requires frequency rather than quantity of practice. Sleep between practice sessions is especially helpful for cementing what you’ve learned.

The starkest difference between these two practice experiences is the emotional landscape. It always begins with frustration, but the good practicer, by getting an early start and by employing effective practice techniques, quickly conquers the initial frustration. The good practicer managed to create a bit of satisfaction in the very first practice session, giving them something to build on for the rest of the week. Having a scheduled practice time and tracking their progress toward their goal of daily practice allows this student to have a sense of accomplishment after only one 20-minute practice session. After all, playing well is a difficult goal to accomplish, but following your schedule and putting in effort is a goal anyone can easily achieve. The poor practicer, on the other hand, did not follow the practice methods they were instructed to use, and they waited too long to start practicing, resulting in an unpleasant experience that motivated them to avoid practicing. Both students experienced an emotional feedback loop that motivated their practice habits. This pattern carries over to the next week, so that the good practicer is starting their week with confidence that it can go just as well as the last, whereas the poor practicer begins their week dreading that it will go just as unpleasantly as the last.

Once a student starts down the path of practice avoidance, it can be pretty hard to sell them on the idea that the solution to their problem is actually MORE practice. The experience of the good practicer is one that’s hard to have faith in until you’ve personally experienced it. This is where parents can come to the rescue. Remember the good practicer’s scheduled practice times and their practice chart? Do you think any kid is going to set that up for themselves? You, the parent, have to set your child’s schedule and hold them to it. You can set up expectations that your child will be sure to fulfill. You can give them that initial boost of self-assurance that comes from knowing you have accomplished a goal, because you did what you were supposed to do, no matter what results you achieved.

Do you know what’s NOT a difference between these two students? Inherent abilities. Any student can go down either of these paths, because successful practicing is about behavior choices. In fact, these two examples could be the same student at different times in their studies. I’ve rarely seen a student whose practice habits are 100% consistent over time. In the course of only one week, the good practicer could become a poor practicer, or the poor practicer could become a good one! We—teachers and parents—can’t do the learning for them, but we can support our kids by encouraging effective and consistent practice habits. 

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