Practice Tips

Practice Session Strategy: This practice advice comes from Butch Baldassari.  Structure your practice session by dividing it into four sections, devoting an equal amount of time to each section.  If you have an hour, break it into 15-minute sections.  If you only have 20 minutes, break it into 5-minute sections.  You can even use a kitchen timer to keep yourself on track. 

Here’s what to focus on in each section.

1.      Exercises – Play scales, arpeggios and scale patterns.  Work on finger exercises, reading exercises and even incorporate some theory (e.g., playing a pattern around the circle of 5ths).

2.      Repertoire Maintenance – Play through several tunes that you know well.  The purpose of this section is to keep your repertoire fresh under your fingers, so you don’t forget songs.  It is important that you rotate the songs you play, moving through your repertoire over time.

3.      Tunes In Process – Play tunes that are in development.  Work through difficult passages, playing slowly.  Break the tune down into phrases to practice.  Commit the tunes to memory and work on bringing them up to performance tempo.

4.      New Tunes – This is the time to start working on tunes that are on your wish list.  Listen closely to some of your favorite recordings of the tune.  Try to pick up a few licks and get the tune into your head. 

It is also helpful to make lists of the songs you are working on, a wish list for new tunes, a list of those in process and a list of those in your repertoire.  The lists are helpful when deciding what to play during each section of your practice, and contribute to a sense of accomplishment as tunes move from your wish list to tunes in process and finally to your repertoire list.

Speed and Accuracy: When learning to play an instrument, speed and accuracy tend not to go hand in hand, but rather form an inverse relationship – as speed increases, accuracy decreases.  To work on increasing both, it is helpful to practice at three different tempos:

1. Play slowly and work on hitting every note accurately.  If you have trouble playing a piece with complete accuracy, slow it down until you can play it three times in a row without a mistake.   [This is a goal rather than a strict formula.  There are practical limits to how slow you can play, as the slower you play, the harder it is to maintain a sense of the songs rhythm and musicality.  One trick that can help when playing slowly is to use a hornpipe rhythm (think “If I only had a Brain”).]
2. Play at a medium tempo, one that is comfortable, and work on gradually increasing both speed and accuracy until you can play the piece up to tempo (for some styles of music, up to tempo can be 260 beats per minute or more, so this can take years).
3. Play as fast as you can. Don’t worry about accuracy, just push the speed, even to the point of only hitting 25-50% of the notes.  Over time, this will help increase your ability to play fast.

Focus: The sound you produce is a result of many convergent factors; right hand technique, left hand technique, rhythmic sensibility, even your mood.  However, you cannot attend to all of these factors at once.  Indeed, you’ve probably heard that playing well transcends thought – thinking about what your left hand is doing can get in the way of a great performance.  But playing well without thinking is a skill that can take quite a while to develop.  So, how does one get there from here.  One useful practice technique is to pick a tune that you know well, play it at a comfortable tempo and focus on a specific aspect of playing.  One time, focus on the left hand, another the right.  You can also focus on how you hold the pick, pick angle, your wrist, the tone you produce – anything that you can identify as having an impact on the end result.