Good reps

You can look at practicing as a attempt to perform as many high quality repetitions of ideal music-producing motions (“good reps”) in your allotted time as possible. There's obvious value in training your muscles and nerves to move reliably in ideal patterns. Along the way to good reps there's another benefit: learning from the many small diagnoses and adjustments you have to make in order for those reps to be good ones.

If a rep isn't as good as you want it to be, there's a reason – at least one. You gain information and build discipline by figuring out what the reason is and correcting what you're doing to improve your reps.

For me, good reps are about playing something well, not learning what the notes are. So whatever is wrong usually has to do with motion. Being aware of how my body feels - fingertips, wrists, shoulders, back, hips, feet and breath – is essential for diagnosing and correcting the problem. It's often hard to put the lessons learned here into words, which makes them hard to remember. So making the same correction over and over again – good reps of the adjustment – are as much a part of the process as good reps of the underlying motion.