Be a gardener.

I don't know how to tell if a practicing session was productive. I don't even know if that's a meaningful question to ask.

Most of the improvements you make in practicing take weeks or months to develop. Then, one day or one week, they show up. A breakthrough! Good, right? Yes, but.

Breakthroughs in playing are often temporary; they can come and go before they become permanent. More to the point, the effort that leads to them occupies many practicing sessions.

Breakthroughs in understanding are more sticky. They can be infrequent, though, and they also take a while. They don't necessarily indicate progress in playing, either.

Breakthroughs are great, of course. They're satisfying and inspiring, and we want them to happen. But they're random. They emerge from effort, but not on any predictable timetable. And they wobble on their feet like baby horses when they first arrive. We're glad when they happen, but they don't indicate productivity.

All right – what about learning songs? Does learning a song mean a practicing session was productive? Again, it's a good thing when you learn a song, but it likely took place over several sessions. Also, a lot depends on what you mean when you say “I learned a song.” Does that mean:

• I can play it perfectly three times in a row on three non-consecutive days?

• I can play it in all twelve keys?

• I can play it perfectly without the music?

• Not only can I play it right, I can not play it wrong?

• I can perform it easily in front of an audience?

Your own definition of “learned” is whatever you want it to be. You can see, though, that any of these definitions would probably take more than one practice session to satisfy.

So?

Rather than “Was I productive?,” ask, “How well did I practice?” You have 100% control of how well you practice, and 0% control of whether you have a breakthrough. What matters most on a day-to-day basis is how well you worked your process. Did you show up on time? Did you keep your head on straight? Did you follow your plan? Was your effort consistently intentional? Did you stay with it when you got tired? Did you get yourself back on track when your attention wandered? Breakthroughs and milestones are great; they're flowers that grow because you tend your garden.

But you're not a flowerer. You're a gardener. Tend your garden and don't worry about flowers. Dig. Water. Nurture. Weed. Get out there every day and get your hands dirty. That's what you can control. That’s where the fun and the satisfaction are. That's what you are actually doing. Be a gardener.

The Practicing Toolkit

Over the past months I have been gathering everything I know (so far) about practicing and connecting it all into a coherent whole. I have created a provisional structure for it, called The Practicing Toolkit. These are the tools in the toolkit:

Tool 1. Your Vision

Tool 2. Your Commitment

Tool 3. Your Process

Tool 4. Your Head and Your Hands

Tool 5. Your Language

Tool 6. Your Notebook

Tool 7. Your Exercises

Tool 8. Your Devices

Tool 9. Your Attention

Tool 10. Your Practicing Technique

Each tool is a container for a lot of related ideas, strategies and tactics, some of which will belong in multiple containers.

The Toolkit.

That's the idea, at least. I don't yet know that these tools are the final ones. (I like them, though.) I don't yet know which ideas will fit best in which container. I don't yet know how to connect the containers. I don't yet know what I don't know. And I don't know which ideas are for everybody and which are mostly for me.

I've been looking at this material by myself for a long time; now I'm in need of more eyes, ears, brains and voices to help me sort, build, adjust, rebuild, readjust, polish and deliver it. I need your help.

Once the Practicing Toolkit exists as a coherent structure, I have several uses for it in mind. First of all, I hope it will be useful to anyone who practices. However, I know that the whole toolkit will not ring everybody's bells equally. For some people, one or two tools will have everything they need. Other people, who like the deep details more than everyone else, will want ways to learn and use and discuss it all.

I also want the Toolkit to work for people just getting started practicing. So there will be a way to teach it as well, in particular for beginners. And that means there will be resources specifically for music teachers.

That's the vision. The details will change as it evolves, but the vision should stay pretty constant.

Here's where you come it. I'm going to post here weekly with drafts, outlines, updates and questions. Think of everything I post here as me saying, “Hey - tell me what you think of this.” And I really do need to know. Is the writing clear? Does the idea make sense? Does it work for you? Did you hear the same thing from your teacher back in fifth grade? Have you tried it, and learned something I don't know? Am I missing something? Did I contradict myself? Have I put the same idea in two different places? Did one thing or another jump about at you, either because it was great or not so great?

All of it will be helpful.

I'll turn the comments on, and pay close attention to them. There will be an RSS feed, once I learn a little more about that, so that you can be updated when I post something. There's a link to email me at the bottom of every page on the site, so you can join the conversation that way, too. As I learn more I'll add more.

I've always been a guy who keeps his cards close to his vest, so this is a new idea – a whole new world – for me. (Thanks to Josh Skaja for suggesting it – check Josh out at GuitarOs.) I think the Practicing Toolkit will turn out immeasurably better with your input, so thank you!

---

Articles about practicing RSS

Peak.

A while back I read Peak, by Anders Ericcson and Robert Pool. Ericcson was a psychologist who spent his career studying expert behavior; his book has a lot of good and interesting things to say about practicing, as you might imagine.

Ericcson and Pool come back repeatedly to the idea of getting out of your comfort zone. It's such a simple idea – if you want to get better at something, you have to try to do things you currently can not do. They go into the science behind it, explaining that brains, muscles, and nerves all respond to the stress of the stretch. But the idea hardly needs the explanation, because it makes such immediate sense. So the question is:

If it's so obvious, why am I not doing it?

When it comes to practicing I think there are really two comfort zones – one for practicing, and one for playing. If you have a practice routine that doesn't change very often, that's your practicing comfort zone. If you're generally content with the way you play and you only practice to keep from getting rusty, that's your playing comfort zone. And, being comfort zones, they both can be pretty comfortable.

You can be doing a lot of practicing and still be in your zone because it's easy to confuse getting things done with making progress. Let's say your practicing routine is 10 minutes of scales to warm up, 10 minutes on technical exercises, 20 minutes of concentrating on a song you're learning and 20 minutes of trying something new. That's organized, and varied, and reasonable, and you can easily imagine it leading to better playing. But has it led to better playing, or does it just seem like it should? You're clearly doing something, but are you getting anywhere? Are you running in place, or actually running?

The progress I'm talking about there is progress in your playing, and I'll get back to that, but there is also the idea of progress in your practicing. Are you becoming a better practicer? Is your concentration getting better? Are you using your time more efficiently? Are you more conscientious about avoiding distractions? Are you gaining facility with new material more easily? Taking better notes? Being more consistent with your scheduling? These things may be harder to notice and harder to measure, but there's clearly such a thing as getting better at practicing. Think about how you did it when you first started. You're surely better at it now than you were then, so what has changed? And has it stopped changing? And if so, why?

Progress in your playing has to do with more than just practicing. It also has to do with goals. You may be comfortable enough with how you play, so your goal is just to maintain that level. You may be comfortable with your technique, but want to expand your repertoire. Or, the reverse may be true – you're comfortable with your repertoire, but want to improve your technique. Or you may want to both expand your repertoire and improve your technique. In each case you have (or should have) a goal, and, if you try, you can tell whether you're making progress towards that goal.

Having goals is a useful way to get out of your comfort zone, but there are a few more things to keep in mind. One is that goals need to be measurable; you have to be able to tell if you've reached them, or how close you are if you haven't. “I want to learn more songs” is not a goal. “I want to learn these five new songs by my birthday” is a goal. “Five new songs by my birthday” is specific about how much you're going to to and when you're going to have done it. Six new songs, and you've exceeded your goal; four new songs, you haven't met it. Five new songs by the day before your birthday, you've exceeded your goal; five new songs by the day after, you haven't. So you need measurable goals – and then, you need to actually measure them.

Goals should also be enough of a stretch to be challenging but also achievable. You can become comfortable with slow progress as easily as you can with no progress.

And then there's the problem of the last 10%. The last 10% of anything is the hardest part – going from 90% done to 100% done. You can end up working on that last 10% for a long time, with little progress – and that becomes your comfort zone. After all, those last rough spots are hard, or you'd be able to play them by now; in a way, it makes sense that you can't play them. And you're working on them, right? So you're comfortable with where you are and, if you're not careful, you'll never leave.

Besides having measurable goals and measuring your performance against them, how else can you deal with comfort zones? Ericcson and Pool stress the importance of having a good teacher who gives you personalized instruction in what to practice and how to practice, given the current state of your playing. All I can say about that excellent advice is that such teachers are easier to describe than to find.

One more thing to suggest: If you think you may be stuck in your comfort zone (and, if you have to wonder, then you are), change something. Change your goals, change your routine, change your schedule. Make it a thoughtful change, not a random one, of course. But change. Then measure. Make yourself a little uncomfortable, and see what happens.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, by Anders Ericcson and Robert Pool, Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Relentlessly positive

I have a guitar that was built by Matt Eich, of Mule Resophonic Guitars. It's a great guitar. Matt was being interviewed about learning to make guitars, and he said, “Failure is not part of the process. Failure IS the process.”

I thought, “That sounds like practicing.”

You spend so much time when you're practicing working on things you can't do yet. Progress is slow. It can feel like you're doing nothing but failing. It can be discouraging if you let it. Don't let it. That would be like letting water discourage you from swimming. What you need is a relentlessly positive attitude.

Start by getting these three obstacles out of the way right up front.

TALENT
My father said, “You need three things for success: talent, luck and hard work. The only one you can control is how hard you work, so forget about the other two and focus on that one.”

Talent is irrelevant to practicing. You don't need talent to practice, and you have to practice whether you have talent or not. If you have talent, you have to practice. If you don't have talent, you still have to practice. Don't worry about whether you have it or not. Don't even think about it. It's irrelevant. Take the word out of your vocabulary.

When you hear someone else use the word, substitute the idea of “hard work” for the idea of “talent.” Not, “That guy is talented” - it's “that guy worked hard.” Not “I wish I had her talent” - “I wish I worked that hard.” Because you can work that hard. It is completely within your control.

HARD
Here's something we've all done. We hear a piece of music, or we look at some sheet music, and we say, “This piece is HARD.” To me, that just means you're afraid of it.

Don't say it's hard. Say why you believe it's hard, instead. If you can do that, you'll know how to practice it.

Think of something that you learned a year ago. Back then it looked hard, and now it doesn't. You can play it now. But it's the same piece; it hasn't changed. It's not hard now, and it wasn't hard then. It's the same piece; you've gotten better. That's what practicing does – it makes you better.

So take 'hard' out of your vocabulary, too.

GETTING BACK ON TRACK
Everyone gets off track when they practice, every time they practice. It's a normal part of practicing. Don't beat yourself up over it. You just have to learn how to get yourself back on track.

It's easy to get off track when you're working on something that's not going well. As you get more and more frustrated, your body gets tense, and you can't play. Your mind gets tense, and you can't think. Sooner or later you snap. You stop playing and say, “I'm terrible, I can't play, I can't practice, I hate this, this will never work.” Things like that.

You can usually feel this coming. Catch yourself before it gets this far. When you realize you're off track, stop everything for a few seconds. Take a few deep breaths, shake out your arms, relax your shoulders, clear your mind. Go back to what was giving you a problem and find one little thing that you can work on.

There's more, but that's it for today. Practice better, play better.

PS: There's never a reason to beat yourself up over practicing – never.

Cosmic Truth

Here are some aphorisms from the earlier draft of First, Learn to Practice that didn't make the final cut. Like most aphorisms, they're not so much Cosmic Truths as signs that say, "For Cosmic Truth, dig here."

Lessons don't make you a musician. Practicing makes you a musician.

You can't accomplish the extraordinary by doing the ordinary.

Every day when you practice, expect it to be enjoyable.

We think about things when we practice so we won't have to think about them when we play.

If you have to think about what you're playing, you don't know it yet.

Forget about talent. Focus on hard work, and talent will show up.

Things improve when you pay attention to them.

One small thing, perfect, over and over, every day.

You are always practicing one of two things: doing it right, or doing it wrong. There's no third option.

Decide today how you're going to play for the rest of your life.

And here's one, from Russ Barenberg, that I would have borrowed if I had heard it when I was writing the book.

An amateur practices until he can play it right. A professional practices until he can't play it wrong.

Do it anyway.

Lots of people have an inspiring slogan taped up where they work. I have one right by where I practice. It says: DO IT ANYWAY.

Here's how I use it:

“I don't want to practice now.” DO IT ANYWAY.
“I'm tired.” DO IT ANYWAY.
“It's my birthday.” DO IT ANYWAY.
“I'm just not feeling it.” DO IT ANYWAY.
“The sun is out.” DO IT ANYWAY.
“[Anything at all.]” DO IT ANYWAY.

Practicing depends on consistency. It works best if you do it every day. Why? Because what we practice is movement, and that means muscle work. Muscles learn through consistent repetition. This is not a moral judgement, or a musical judgement. It's just how muscles work. And not just repetition, but consistent repetition. Every day works best.

Practicing is also about building habits. There are habits to our playing – for example, always holding (or sitting at) the instrument a certain way. There are habits to our practicing, too, like always starting at the same time every day. Habits are built and reinforced through consistent repetition. Every day works best.​

Finally: even when you enjoy practicing, it can be hard to get started each day. When you don't want to start something, any little excuse can derail you. So it's good to develop the habit of starting regardless of any excuses. The more often you say, “Do it anyway,” the more quickly it will become habitual. And the more habitual it becomes, the easier it will be.

So: DO IT ANYWAY.
​
PS: I understand that there are things in life more important than practicing, and that these things come up often. Practicing every day is a target that we can't always hit. But the value in a target is not in hitting it. The value of a target is in aiming at it. Yes, it's good to know whether you hit the target, but only because that information prepares you for the next time you aim at it.

DO IT ANYWAY.

Exercises

I was struggling with an exercise designed to help me develop consistent speed with a violin bow (and thinking about how useful a bow speedometer would be) when this occurred to me: An exercise is not a series of notes. An exercise is a series of movements. The idea sounded good, but I couldn't tell at first how useful it was.

An exercise, as opposed to a piece of music, is usually written as a way to help a student learn or practice something – how to control bow speed, for example. The musical content is secondary at best, and in my view that's fine. I don't want to be distracted by the music when I'm working on my bowing. The bowing, not the music, is the point of the exercise. The music will eventually emerge from the bowing, but it will never emerge without the bowing. And if I knew the bowing so well that I could play the music, I wouldn't need the exercise in the first place.

A good exercise is one that gets you to execute a specific set of movements over and over, with some musical window dressing to keep you from getting tired of working on it. My bowing exercise, for example, has a measure of slow movement, with four notes per bow stroke, then a measure of faster movement, with two notes per bow stroke. That bowing pattern repeats for the whole exercise, another 15 measures. There are variations in the notes played and the strings on which they are played; that's the window dressing. But the core of the exercise – fast bow, slow bow – is the first two measures. You could play those two measures alone over and over again and get 80% of the benefit of the exercise, without playing past measure 3.

Back to this: An exercise is not a series of notes. It is a series of movements. Is this useful? I think so. This is why.

It's good to know what you're doing: Playing a song is different from practicing a technique, as different as eating a pie and cooking a pie. If you want to do something right you have to know what you're doing. If it's an exercise, your project is not notes. It's movements. That's what you have to figure out and master.

Finding and then sticking to the point: My bowing exercise is 17 measures long. The core is in the first 2 measures. Usually when I tackle an exercise I first find the core (always a good idea and usually not hard) and work on it for a while before going on to the rest of the exercise. That way I know what I'm working on and don't get lost in the window dressing. In this case, the core involved only the right arm, so I ignored the left hand, notes and all, and worked with my bowing arm using just the open strings. Eventually I added back the notes in the first two measures; then I moved on to playing the rest of the exercise, But the core came first.

Savoring: Maybe it's just me, but I often find the physical aspects of playing enjoyable on their own. I like the contact of my fingers with the strings; I like the glide of the bow. I like the sound of the notes on their own, regardless of how they connect with other notes to form harmonies or melodies. These things can get lost if you don't look for them. An exercise as a series of motions provides an opportunity to look for them, savor them and, most importantly, use them to improve your playing.

Showing the proper respect: If I'm playing a song, as opposed to an exercise, I want to honor the composer's intent as well as I can. However much I work on it, the end I have in mind is to be able to play the song all the way through. Even if I break it into pieces while I work on it, my goal is to put the pieces back together in performance. On the other hand, If I'm playing an exercise, I honor the composer's intent by learning what he/she designed the exercise to teach me. If I master the technique without ever finishing the piece, that's OK. I'm showing the proper type of respect.


Much of what I have learned and written about practicing comes in the form of aphorisms like this one. They're easily understood and easily evaluated. If one of them rings a bell for you, you can put it to work, and if it doesn't, you can set it aside. Often they are no more than slightly different points of view - “Hey, stand next to me for a minute and see how things look from over here.” This one is like that. An exercise is not a series of notes. It is a series of movements.