The Musician and Teacher Resource

Consider the following 3 factors to determine how much YOU should practice:

1) Lessons don’t make the musician.  This isn’t like baseball, where athletes get better when they’re with the coach.  Music students get better between the lessons, not at them.

2) Practice consistency is much more important than the amount of time.  Creating music has more to do with repetition and muscle memory than just getting concepts into one’s head.  This isn’t like riding a bike.  It’s like memorizing the Declaration of Independence.  You can’t cram for a big performance, and you have to keep practicing to maintain your ability.

3) Goals guide the practice.  Students should attempt meet the week’s goals, not just log a certain amount of time at their instrument.  Just like preparing for any test in school, preparing to perform well will take more time some weeks than others.

All students who want to efficiently become experts need deliberate practice.  This is different than just practicing hard.  Deliberate practice:

*Is designed specifically to improve performance.  A mentor, teacher, or other professional should create assignments for the student that is focused toward a goal, not just fun or nice to listen to.  Because a student’s needs change as they develop, teachers must be engaged and in tune to what that particular student needs instead of just assuming the next song in the lesson book is the best assignment for the student.

*Is repetitive.  Professional musicians have trained their bodies to play their instruments more than they have learned the workings of music.  Like typing skills or a great golf swing or shooting a free-throw, mastering an instrument is more a matter of muscle memory than gaining knowledge.

*Requires feedback.  It has been said that we judge others words by their meaning, but we judge our words by our intentions.  The same is true in performing music.  As we play, our brains makes adjustments in notes and timing so that we actually hear more what we meant to play than what we actually played.  Even when listening to a recording, knowing who performed the piece greatly affects the evaluation of the piece!  Aspiring musicians need a brutally honest, outside, feedback loop to draw out the details that need to be perfected.

*Is intellectually demanding.  There is always something else out there to think about once you perfect the detail you’re working on now.  The whole of becoming a musician has been summarized this way: “You’re constantly trying to make a habit out of what you’re thinking about now, so you have the brain power to think about the next thing.”  For more on this concept, read here.

*Isn’t much fun.  Everyone loves to perform well.  But practicing isn’t performing; it’s the opposite of performing.  In a performance, you try to minimize mistakes and draw out strengths.  In practice, you focus on the mistakes and minimize the parts that are easy.  The fun in practice is the challenge and the promise of success in future performance, not the sound coming from the instrument!

For more details about deliberate practice from a researcher’s perspective, please see the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell.

Students who can learn to hear the nuances of their music before and during their practice are much more successful musicians than those who merely try to get the technical details.  It is not enough to spend time practicing; studies show that students need to be fully-engaged during practice time.  That means:

1) Practice time should take a great deal of effort.  The brain should be working at full capacity during the entire practice session.  While mentally draining, a successful practice session should also be rejuvenating, since the student is completely disengaged from the rest of the world, focused solely on the music.

2) During later stages of perfecting a piece, students must actively detach themselves from the mechanics of the music to participate as a critic and listener to their own production.  If  it is too difficult to simultaneously perform and critique, it will be VERY helpful to record the performance, then listen back with the expectation that the recording is done by a professional.  Evaluation should be done with the mindset of “The performer should have…” rather than “I should have…”

3) Students should stop practicing sooner or learn to refocus during practice time.  A practice session completed halfheartedly can be worse than no practice at all.  At least the student who hasn’t practiced doesn’t expect to be any better.  Students who practice without engaging often find themselves frustrated with how little they improve, since they feel like they’re spending plenty of time on their instrument.

Most teachers cannot teach students under 9 or 10 very well, but a specialized, experienced teacher can teach students down to 2 or 3.  Just remember that the goals for a student that young will be drastically different from older students.  However, immersing them in a positive musical environment can help greatly when they are developmentally ready to play the actual instrument.

Unfortunately, when you ask a music teacher “How young of a student do you take?”, the answer is usually based on what age they think they can manage, not what age they can actually help.  Turning away a student means turning away money.  Most people won’t do that unless they are forced to.  So whatever age a teacher says they take, you should sit in on a few lessons to see how well they connect with your child.  You child will progress through practice, but they will be inspired through relationship!  In other words, if you force your child to practice, they will get better, no matter the quality of the teacher.  However, if they learn to respect or love their teacher, they will also enjoy learning.  The best situation is a student who practices under a teacher they admire.

That’s why at Milestones Music, unlike other studios, we always encourage students who don’t connect with their teacher to leave and find another, better fit as soon as possible.  Also unique to Milestones, we don’t kick out students who don’t practice.  If they and their parents are comfortable with the rate of the progress, and if they connect well with their teacher, we enjoy experiencing their musical journey with them, whatever the pace.

So how young can a student be?  It depends on the teacher and it depends on your goals.

For some students, having a parent in the lesson and taking notes is very helpful, for others, it causes them to be nervous, distracted, or to act out for attention.  For other students, having a support person in the lesson may make them more confident and have a greater support at home.  Still for other students, having a parent sit in once every month or two helps them feel accountable.  You may want to attend the first couple lessons, but then try hanging out in the waiting area for a couple lessons and get some feedback from the teacher and/or the student about which was more profitable.

TOO MUCH:

Over-involved parents are often referred to as “helicopter parents”, as they seem to always hover around their student, micro-managing their progress.  The drawbacks of being helicopter parent are:

1. Since the parent is learning the same things (usually at a faster pace), the student can feel like they’re learning slower than they should.

2. The teacher may feel awkward, since they often take it as an evaluation of their teaching style, and they may change their style to fit what they think the parent wants.  You don’t want the teacher out of their element.  Your child is going to get the best instruction when the teacher feels confident and free to make the comments and changes they feel necessary.

3. The student may

HOWEVER, “helicopter parents” usually get results.

TOO LITTLE:

Under-involved parents don’t ever check on a student’s progress.  Not at home, and not in the lesson.  They often consider music the child’s domain, and never enter it.  The problems with this style are:

1. The parents won’t know when you’re wasting money (if the child isn’t getting better)

2. The student may feel like practicing doesn’t need to be a priority, since it isn’t one to the parent

3. The teacher may be disengaged, disrespectful or worse to the student once they learn that the family isn’t concerned about getting any results or making progress.

MODERATION MEANS:

1. Checking in with the teacher and the student individually to see how the lessons are going

2. Diligently monitoring practice time and quality at home

3. Giving genuine, relevant, specific praise for progress.

THE PROBLEM:

Many students get frustrated with how slowly they feel they learn music.  Especially adults.  They think that it’s because they’re too old to learn.  Sadly, there is no way you can consciously process all that is required to play your instrument.  It’s impossible.

THE GOAL:

Think about music progress as an endless list of “tricks” or “tools” for your instrument.  There are millions and you can’t think about them all.  That’s why it is the goal of every musician to take whatever concept is directly in front of her and move it back to the subconscious by practicing over and over.  We’re just trying to stop needing to think about what we’re thinking about so we can start thinking about what we’re not yet thinking about.

SO WHAT?

Don’t attempt things way out of your league.  Even if you conquer that piece, it won’t do you any good in the long run.  You won’t actually have the cumulative skills required to play pieces like it, you’ll just have memorized that one song.

In fact, it may be helpful to make an actual physical list of the things you’ve learned.  The fact that there is always an ocean of tools out beyond our grasp is humbling, and sometimes de-motivating.  Keeping track of what you’re working on gives you an important list to see how far you’ve come.  All Milestones Music students get this updated list each week, so students can track their progress for encouragement and motivation.

You can now check out our music lessons services on thumbtack. Check us out here: Music Lessons

If you’ve taken lessons from Milestones for very long, and have expressed how you’ll never be as good as _________, you’ve probably heard your teacher say something like, “You’re just as good as them, they just have an extra 10,000 hours of practice under their belt.  When you’ve practiced 10,000 hours, you’ll be 10,000 hours good too.”

The following is an fascinating excerpt from a fascinating book.  This is abridged, but the rest of the book is just as intriguing:

“Is there such a thing as innate talent?  The obvious answer is yes: achievement = talent + preparation.  The problem with this view, though, is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play, and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.

Exhibit A in this talent argument is a study done in the early 1990s by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two colleagues at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. With the help of the Academy’s professors, they divided the school’s violinists into three groups. In the first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world class soloists. In the second were those judged to be merely “good.” In the third were students who were unlikely to ever play professionally and who intended to be music teachers in the public school system. All of the violinists were then asked the same question: over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced?

Everyone from all three groups started playing at roughly the same time, around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practiced roughly the same amount, about two or three hours a week. But when the students were around the age of eight, real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up, until by the age of twenty they were practicing — that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better — well over thirty hours a week. In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had totaled ten thousand hours of practice over the course of their lives. By contrast, the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours.

Ericsson and his colleagues then compared amateur pianists with professional pianists. The same pattern emerged. The amateurs never practiced more than about three hours a week over the course of their childhood, and by the age of twenty they had totaled two thousand hours of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily increased their practice time every year, until by the age of twenty they had reached ten thousand hours.

The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any “grinds,” people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks.

Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. What’s more, the people at the very top don’t just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

The emerging picture from such studies is that 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything.

Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others, but no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time.  This is true even of the people we think of as prodigies.  10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.”

Gladwell then goes on to give example after example of world-famous “prodigies” who hit their stride at almost exactly 10,000 hours.  How did Mozart fare?  Well over 10,000 hours.  Apparently not a prodigy.  You could likely do better.

So you love your lessons!  Even though you’ve been playing with your band for years, you’re learning things about music that never occurred to you.  It feels like it’s all coming together.  Life is making more sense than you ever thought possible!  You feel excited about going to lessons and always leave feeling like you’ve taken in more than you know what to do with.

Usually what happens with a motivated, interested student like you is that there is an initial, strong emphasis on theory, and the student will feel like he’s making great progress each week because he’s learning a lot… [big foreshadow] even though he’s not practicing much.  He feels like a good musician because he can analyze it, but he’s more of an educated critic than a musician.  By the time his head gets filled up with as much theory as he can take in without actually playing any of it, he’s in a bad habit of not practicing.  Unfortunately, by that time there’s not much more to say in the lessons, but he still wants the same feeling of results without practicing.  At that point, he will either quit, find a new teacher, or (very rarely) buckle down and change his habits.

You differ from that if you actually practice the concepts a lot.  At the beginning what you learn really applies to all instruments in all genres.  As you dive more specifically into your instrument, you’ll eventually know more than what is required to play certain pop/rock genres.  At that point you hit the steps that most average players are not willing to take: setting yourself apart as a serious pianist/guitarist/drummer by practicing the details and exercises that turn your knowledge into experience.  You’ll also learn the repertoire that make you a versatile musician, able to play in nearly any setting.

The moral of the story: You can’t fit more theory in your head until you work out what you already know.  So if you’re filling your brain with music, you might feel cool, but you’ve got to work it out in your fingers.

“The people who become excellent at a given thing aren’t necessarily the same ones who seem to be ‘gifted’ at a certain age.”  That’s what the authors of Superfreakonomics feel they’ve proven.  And the studies are pretty convincing.  For their examples, check out their book or podcasts, but here’s the basic outline:

“Prodigies” don’t happen naturally, they’re always a result of hard work.  (Also see the books “Talent is Never Enough” by Maxwell and “Talent is Overrated” by Colvin.) HOWEVER, the great “prodigies” do have the following things in common in the way they train:

Setting specific goals

In music, this would mean determining ahead of time…

*how much time was going to be dedicated to practice,

*how quickly a particular piece was going to be learned, etc.

Getting immediate feedback

Lessons should be as frequent as possible, and teachers should spend a good portion of the lesson hearing the student practice.  It looks like a waste of time to most observers, but a teacher who guides a student to practice more effectively does infinitely more than a teacher who focuses on “more important” things or who likes to hear themselves speak.

Most music studios will have their more serious students come in less frequently for more time, like once every two weeks for an hour.  At Milestones, our most serious students come in 2-3 times per week for 15-20 minute lessons, so they’re constantly getting feedback and they’re not wasting any time practicing things the wrong way for a week or two before they find out the right way at their next lesson.

Focusing as much on technique as on outcomes

For the top basketball player, they don’t care that they can sink a high percentage of free-throws if their technique is off.  Tiger Woods was known for repeatedly deconstructing his game and re-creating his style for better technique.  Superstar Kobe Bryant did the same.  They didn’t care that they were undeniably the best in their sport – they cared just as much about technique as outcomes.

For musicians, that means it’s not just the sound of the song, it’s the way it’s played.  Fingering is important, timing is important, scales and exercises are important.  If you’re wanting to become the best in your field, your teacher/mentor will have to be vigilant about such things.

ON A PRACTICAL NOTE:

Most students don’t want to become the best in the world.  They just want to have fun playing music.  So a teacher who forces the above concepts on all their students is probably frustrating a lot of people needlessly.

Here’s the take-away for most people: that other person isn’t better than you because you just “weren’t born for it.”  They don’t have something you don’t have.  Mozart practiced for hours each day since before he was school-aged.  He could have easily had over 13,000 hours of practice under his belt before his 15th birthday.  If you practiced that much, you’d likely be as good, if not better than Mozart when he was 15.  See?  You’re just as good as the rest.  Keep practicing and have some fun.  You’re probably just as talented as the next.