How to practice music and memorize music
There's a single key ingredient in elevating your musicianship: the amount of time you spend playing well. Sounds utterly simplistic, but it's true. And to play really well—to find your best mastery over a piece—some memorization is usually required.
So it follows, to play your best, you'll need to explore music memorization, directly experience its many benefits, and regularly use memorization to foster deep accomplishments and technical achievements.
I encourage you to give memorization a solid try under good guidance. If you like the results you may find yourself motivated to use those memory/memorization techniques on a regular basis ... and continue looking for "practice tools" that help you honestly and quickly improve.
The opposing view
Many teachers view memorization and the use of music notation as polar opposites, and those who teach primarily through notation often discourage memorization, as if there's some fundamental conflict, believing that the student's reading skills won't develop in an atmosphere that also encourages memorization. But there's no argument, the world's great classical soloists are excellent readers and outstanding in their ability to play by heart. Both skills are important, and one strength needn't diminish the other. Ideally they work in tandem, and the student uses the better tool for the task at hand. As artist Marc Chagall might say, work in whatever medium likes you at the moment.
Now it stands to reason, if a teacher is not proficient in memorization, in learning by ear, or at improvisation (skills often eschewed by classical musicians) there's a good chance the teacher may be unable to teach those skills and thus might avoid the topics entirely, or perhaps declare them unimportant or harmful.
So let's get started in understanding the price and rewards of memorization, in detail. They can make an astonishing difference in how fast you learn, in refining your musical expression, sustaining your interest, bolstering your confidence, stengthening your overall connection with music, and deepening the joy you get from it.
Music study skills
Various study skills will accelerate your progress with music memorization. This article discusses a number of methods that generally work, and for contrast, it illustrates approaches that will likely prove of little value.
In adopting study skills that allow you to memorize easily you'll probably need to pinpoint the common pitfalls so you can avoid them, while trying proven methods, and focusing on approaches that you know work for yourself.
Here's a synopsis of points made below:
- Speed is an essential ingredient in establishing deep reliable memorization—it's of particular importance when attempting to embed kinesthetic memory, the type of body memory often called "muscle memory."
- Speed can be destabilize us; as we all know, a certain amount of speed will cause us to tighten up and lose control—a likely occurrence when trying to go fast on a large section of new music.
- You'll need to select and work on small sections, bits that you can easily speed up.
- Once you've memorized sections you have the opportunity of successfully linking them together, and enjoying effortless command over them.
- Add an effective review cycle to the mix and you've got a winning formula, which I'll describe in detail as we continue in this article.
What's the mystery?
Doesn't everyone know how to memorize? Well, yes and no. We learn and memorize our native tongue practically without effort. We remember faces and the scads of pertinent information that help us navigate and participate in our daily lives. This is undeniable.
But many of us have trouble with memorization when it doesn't occur effortlessly or instantly. We managed the required trial and error in learning to walk—so there was certainly a time in our history that we were sufficiently endowed and resilient in the ways of learning and memory.
Most people are still quite capable of memorizing and enormous amount of knowledge and physical skill. but most of us have forgotten what it takes to learn and master new physical skills. ut often people have sorta forgotten how.
Intellectual learning vs. Physical learning
It stands to reason that the average student would have sufficient prior successes with memorization, enough intuition or adequate understanding too incline them to an efficient and effective approach to music memorization. But my decades of experience as a music instructor have shown me quite the opposite, and in fact, students tend to dislike and avoid the very skills and habits that will quickly afford them the musical experience they seek.
We might not always enjoy all the steps required in reaching our musical goals, but deep rewards may cause us to gladly embrace the necessary chores, and to excitedly acknowledge and use them as the most direct path to our goal ... even if that means delaying gratification and deferring attention to the required steps.
Here's an apt quote from painter Marc Chagall whose "acheivement couleur" is perhaps unrivaled, "The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation ..." And Chagal's gemane admonition to those of us practicing the art of music, "...but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep."
To practice well and memorize easily, you'll need to remain mindfully of domains nearly simulataneously, so you can: 1) refine the sounds and movements that make your music beautiful 2) use study skills to help you quickly and securely achieve those refinements.
Memorization is a natural linguistic skill
Music memorization is an essential skill, and an important one for musicians because most people can play music far better than they're able to read music. Also because memorization and learning by ear are indeed the natural language of music.
Western/European music notation is only a few hundred years old, whereas people have been singing and playing music for many thousands of years, and have successfully done so without need of notation. I'm not being dismissive about music reading—it's an incredible tool. And I can scarcely imagine my music career without music literacy, but for many people it's music reading is limiting. Suffice it to say, if you can't read well, you can't play well. And if you can read effortlessly, you reading won't allow you to play effortlessly, or near your best. So don't let reading hold you back.
Of course, you can work to improve your reading, which is a worthy goal, and you may get considerably better, but reading tends to interfere with memorization, and memorization will help you play your best. And that will motivate you to go deeper into music. Read to memorize and find your potential. And let that motivate you to work harder and improve your reading.
Surmounting your blocks and doubts
Many people struggle with memorization because they're using an ineffective approach. As a result they think they're just not good at memorization, when it's far more likely that they simply haven't found a good path.
Others struggle because they doubt that they'll be able to memorize music, so they never try out effective study skills, or they've tried approaches that don't work well, and for that reason they erroneously concluded that the problem lies in their level of ability or talent. But in reality memorization is natural part of our everyday lives. However, many of us have simply lost touch with how to learn and memorize large bodies of information, and how to attain mastery over new and challenging physical skills.
When pursuing memorization people are swayed by emotional blocks, like frustration and doubt. And they easily feel confined by the amount of repetition required. Or they judge themselves erroneously, thinking they wouldn't need so much repetition if only they were better a better musician or student.
In other words, sometimes a difficult emotion will derail practice habits and study skills that will benefit you most. So you'll need to learn to keep yourself calm and adhere to the recommended path, even when the going gets tough. And to manage studious focus while simultaneously having enough fun to keep yourself motivated Proceeding with respect to the adage, "All things in moderation, including moderation!" Yes, you can goof around, and binge a little or fun playing that doesn't really amount to much, as long as you get back to work.
And even when students resign themselves to a restrictive diet of repetition, they often fail to repeat in a way that makes a nutritious difference, so they can easily conclude that ineffective approaches are adequate, if not better, because they feel more fun. And this is an extremely common issue I've seen with students over decades of teaching private lessons.
Repetition and memorization
We can't memorize without repeating. We can't repeat without memorizing. If you honestly contemplate these two sentences, I needn't say much more about practice and memorization.
If your repeat things poorly you'll memorize unwanted habit; you'll fail to relax and get locked into tight or awkward hand positions, and you'll make mistakes in timing and notes. It's hard to undo these matters, especially incorrect timing. Careless practice inevitable leads to needless work untangling the results of reckless playing. If you work hard at first, you can avoid lots of needless effort.
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." — Abraham Lincoln
To make incisive progress you'll need to pick the proper tool and sharpen it. To learn to play effortlessly, you must learn to repeat accurately. To repeat accurately you'll often need to work on small bits so you can refine and relax. Then to make a lasting impression on your memory you'll need to adequately increase the speed of the repetitions.
Your progress will hinge on a combination of refinement, accuracy, adequate persistence, and speed.
Speed itself is an essential catalyst to memorization. Speed is most easily acquired when you practice on small sections. Small sections played fast etch a sustainable recollection into your short-term memory (also known as working memory.) And if you're reading the music, generally you'll need to look away from the page to etch this small sections into long-term memory. This is because the brain sees no reason to memorize what it can see and read. If you keep reading or peeking you will usually only retain a partial and wobbly recollection.
Naturally, your accomplishments won't be perfect at first. So you must get yourself on track quickly, before ingraining bad habits or misconceptions. You won't improve much by stumbling and efforting your way through pieces, just chipping away, believing that time and effort are the key ingredients, and if applied in quantity a good result will eventually appear.
Be clear on your goals, each small step of the way. Get a clear image of the step you're trying to accomplish, make sure you're working on an accomplishable piece, and watch to make sure you're rudder points you in the right direction.
Don't bite off more than you can chew. Attempt, evaluate and repeat. Repeat carefully, in measured doses, so you accomplish your goal and ensure you don't get overwhelmed or frustration. Be sure to finish what you start. Be satisfied with a small solid accomplishment each day. Be kind to yourself, and have fun. It's your responsibility to keep it fun. Even given the suggestions and tips for success, you need figure out and assure that it's mostly fun.
Have a specific goal in mind every minute of your practice. Become aware of when you have a goal in mind, learn shift your attention from goal to goal: playing with steady time, with good tone, with proper hand positions. Learn to spread your attention wide enough that you can observe your actions and sounds, and compare them to your understanding of the goal, and steer yourself toward that goal, in a way that will be retained enough that you can quickly rediscover it the follow day and build upon it. (All the while checking casually and occasionally to see if previously honed skills are working as intended. If they are already well learned it won't take but a second of attention to notice and correct. And that's how it all comes together.)
Memorization secrets in a nutshell
Most people can easily learn and memorize music, they can learn the intricate and subtle physical skills of musicianship, and they can best accomplish these tasks when they adhere to a couple of essential approaches:
1) practice with methods that produce rapid improvement for you
2) review in a manner that ensures a persistent, long-lasting, long-term memory
Sounds rather simplistic, I know. In upcoming sections I'll explain these points in detail, but first let's take a overview of the challenge facing musicians and music students.
The musical challenge
Musicians are 'small muscle' athletes. Learning a new instrument or a new song involves physical training, just like learning the skills of a sport like skiing, boarding or swimming.
Imagine the practice routine of Olympic divers. There are hundreds of repetitions of every aspect of the dive: learning flips and twists, first independently, then learning to combine them. And finally, once the dive is perfected, to ensure consistency and reliability, they practice the perfected dive again and again, hundreds, even thousands of times. The same thing happens in the ballet studio or martial arts dojo.
You only get to some of what you learn!
This is the part that hardest for most people to accept. You only get to keep a portion of what you learn in a practice session. Doesn't seem fair, I know. After all your hard work! If your expectations are more aligned with reality, you're more likely to feel happy. You can better manage your expectations when you realize that you will naturally forget some of what you've accomplished in yesterday's practice session, or that you won'timmediately remember what you've learned in prior sessions. Along with this understanding you'll need to know the steps of establishing the deepest possible memories, and the steps for recalling them and further strengthening them.
Short-term memory (working memory) dissipates quickly, and if you fail to take steps to transfer it into long-term memory, it will feel like you're starting over from scratch the next day. Part of the secret is managing your expectations, and using approaches that produce quick and solid results ... and even then, know that it may take some warm up and review to find the knowledge acquired the previous day. When people struggle to recall they may bail out, and ignore or avoid repracticing without reconnecting with and reviving the memory they've already kindled. And this can quickly cause a downward spiral with your accomplishments with the specific piece or technique at hand, or it can cause your overall enthusiasm to stall. And if you love music, you don't want that, nor is there any reason for it if you're equipped with the right tools and understanding.
Rapid improvement
The opening section of this article states two basic premises. The first premise is that students need to make 'rapidimprovements' when practicing. Without rapid improvement students become frustrated, which leads to discouragement or disinterest, even the erroneous conclusion that the task at hand or music itself is beyond the student's grasp. Even if you possess a strong passion for an instrument, if you find yourself unable to quickly acquire skills, if you're unable to assimilate new repertoire, if you're unhappy with the sound you make, eventually your verve may fade.
You have a limited period of time to master various skill before frustration or disinterest set it ... or before you consciously or unconsciously resign yourself to being a perpetual beginner. So it's in your best interest to discover the steps that help you learn quickly, and use them regularly.
I am earnestly advocating timely accomplishment, indeed... so I need to clarify. The 'rapid improvement' I'm espousing is unrelated to impatient rushing. Impatience, recklessness and aimless efforts have no logical or practical connection with improvement, and they won't lead you to rapid improvement. Quite the contrary, they lead to disarray and unfulfilled goals.
Total prioritization
You can accomplish 'rapid improvement' by a technique I call 'total prioritization.' It requires and affords heightened attention for detail and self-observation ... and it actually makes practice more interesting and more fun. Yet ironically, it's the path of the tortoise, not the hare.
I've known students who have studied skills for weeks, months, even years, without achieving their intended goal: straightening their bow stroke, developing flexibility in the bow hold, learning one or more styles of vibrato. They remain stuck because they just give a daily flick toward their goal, never really moving if substantially forward, or finding a foothold they can leverage the following day. Dutifully they devote a small amount of practice to bowing, but they establish only a small amount of momentum, an amount insufficient for carrying their accomplishment throughout the entire practice session. This means they practice on track for a few moments, but in their remaining efforts they fall back on familiar old habits, because the wheels always turn toward the ruts in the road, and this quickly undermines whatever bowing accomplishment they had achieved.
This is typically what happens when we fail to use 'total prioritization.' Later I'll illustrate how 'total prioritization' leads toward rapid assimilation of skills like violin bowing.
We've taken a brief look at rapid improvement, the essential first point of this article. Now let's look at our second point: reviewing in a manner that ensures a lasting, long-term memory.
Making memorable steps
Even if you practice in a manner that fosters improvement, if your practice and review style fails to create a strong, lasting memory, you'll reap little gain. Each day it will feel like you're starting over. It's true in philosophy and political science, and equally true in musical practice: 'Those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' Sound harsh, but it's true!
The mastery of physical skills requires a real "physical education." An eloquently expressed description can be found in Mastery, an insightful book by George Leonard. I highly recommend that you read it.
Quality over quantity
If time devoted to practice fails to help you improve, all the time in the world won't amount to much. As a music student, your job is to improve, master, and remember what you've accomplished. And, as much as possible, enjoy the process while making good use of your time.
To learn a musical instrument you must learn to master many physical skills. Most musical skills are actually a compound skill—a physical skill built upon the foundation of other previously memorized skills.
Every step of the way you need to master skills so that they operate automatically. You can't turn a skill into a compound skill until the foundation skill is entirely memorized. Once memorized a skill operates automatically" in an efferent flow. Concentrated mental attention is not required to drive it. At least not our normal executive process, where we dictate a string of rapid instructions.
This precisely what allows us to begin combining the skill with other memorized skills to make compound skills. With our normal mental attention free we can track and refine existing skills and adopt new skills. We build one skill upon the next, so we must perfect each foundation skill before adding on, or the whole system becomes unstable. This requires careful observation and much review.
In summary: Attention is required in reviewing and evaluating each skill to determine if more refinement is required. A memorized skill operates with without our conscious oversight. You can't study or shape a new skill while trying to master another. But you can connect skills to existing ones.
Listen to the music that you plan to learn
More than any other single activity, listening helps you learn music easily and quickly. So schedule some listening into your day. Just listen to music a couple of times a day—a piece that you want to learn, or a piece you've already begun working on. You needn't drop everything, set aside a special time, or apply any special concentration. In other words, don't make a big deal out of it. Play a recording while attending to some task. Listen when you're in the car. The music will sink in effortlessly as you attend to other activities. You just need to hear it.
Listen to each new piece for a few days before you start to practice it. You're ready to start working on it when you can hum or whistle the piece or you can hear it in your head.
If you are good at reading music, especially if you're good at reading rhythms, you may not need to listen. Still it will be quite helpful.
The biggest advantage in listening is that it keeps you from making rhythmic mistakes. And rhythmic mistakes are the hardest to fix. So, simply by listening you'll avoid some of the worst pitfalls.
What if you already know how it goes?
It's best to listen anyway. There are lots of different versions of a single piece of music. Listen to a recording of the version that plan to learn. Even after you've learned a song, play with favorite recordings. Listen and compare your sound to that of the recording.
Practice daily
Daily practice is a cornerstone of steady progress. You'll get much more out of your practice if you practice every day. An occasional day won't hurt, but be careful about skipping days.
Many people under estimate the value of daily commitment, so they skip days without too much concern. They usually do so with the good intention of doubling-up the following day. But one skip often leads to another. If a student skip a few days, this can lead to pledges of catching up with one or more marathon sessions on the weekend. But most 'make up' promises are destined to be broken, especially when a backlog of deferred practice comes due.
Unfortunately, these make-up sessions seldom materialize. And when they do, often they're counterproductive. Practice should contain some hard work and diligent repetition, but it should should also be fun.
Long marathon sessions usually cause mental and physical fatigue which can initiate a downward spiral, leaving you tired, frustrated — and probably with little to show for your efforts. Often there's little fun and little accomplishment. A regular reliance on marathon sessions may easily take the fun out of music, and lead to a bad attitude toward practice, practice which might well be enjoyed when spread out appropriately.
There are many other benefits to daily practice.
Daily practice helps to keep you toned and strengthened, limber and relaxed. Music practice places many demands on your body, so it's important to warm up and stretch. If you warm up and prepare yourself before you practice rigorously, your body will benefit from the exercise. If not, you run the risk of developing bad habits and physical tension.
If you have trouble practicing every day, try alternating days of light and heavy practice. That's what tri-athletes do.
Shorten your practice rather than skipping it
There will come days when you really don't have time for a full practice session — there's only so many hours in the day! There will be times when something else comes up that you'll choose to do instead. And some days you're honestly too tired to practice — or you just don't feel like doing it.
On days like these go easy on yourself, but don't skip your practice entirely. Simply shorten it! Put in five or ten minutes, give yourself a pat on the back, and then call it a day. This may leave you feeling disappointed that you didn't put in a significant effort. Surprisingly, it really makes a significant contribution toward your progress.
A few minutes of practice may not measure up to your idea of a rigorous practice session, but it actually goes a long way toward keeping you on track. It maintains and strengthens your "daily commitment," and that counts for a lot.
Remember that the "daily" aspect is more important than the amount of time; especially at first. Slow and steady wins the race — we need to remind ourselves of the tortoise the hare.
Pick up your instrument daily, even if you practice for just a few minutes. It's much better to shorten your practice than to skip days.
The occasional skipped days
Hey, nobody's perfect. Just tell yourself, "tomorrow will be a better day." Take a brief moment to imagine yourself practice, improving, and enjoying it. Choose a time for tomorrow's practice.
Warm-up First
Practically everybody wants to skip the warm-up. This is true for beginners, advanced students, young students and adults. The complaint is that the warm-up "keeps you from getting to the fun part." This is a short-sighted view. A good warm-up will heighten your skills, and will make it easier for you to play well during the rest of your practice.
Always start your practice with something easy, preferably something familiar.
Play some open string exercises or easy scales. Then play an easy piece or two. In doing so, you'll establish a baseline for the day - a preflight check, a list of what's working and what's not. Then continue your warm-up and try to improve on these points before working on new or challenging material.
If you skip the warm up and fail to establish a baseline at the start of your practice, you may proceed with unrealistic goals for the day, launching in unaware that certain skills are working, while others are temporarily dormant.
If you practice more than once a day, you may shorten or skip your warm-up in the later sessions.
Strive to improve from today's baseline. Have that single goal in mind!
It's rare that you pick up right where you left off the day before. This is especially true for beginners. It may take five to twenty minutes to get yourself warmed up and back in touch with yesterday's best.
With other types of tasks, such as building a stone path, you continue building on Wednesday right where you finished on Tuesday. But not with music.
There will come days when your most diligent efforts will fail to elevate you to the level of yesterday's accomplishments. Or perhaps you'll reach yesterday's level, but not until your practice is nearly over.
And it's OK. Don't let it get to you. Your achievements won't always follow a straight line, and your improvements won't always come at a steady rate.
So simply strive to improve from your starting point — from your baseline.
Warm Up On Technique
As you practice a piece of music, you must spread your attention spread over several tasks: reading notes, interpreting the timing, trying to play at a steady pace, maintaining posture and relaxation, creating good tone, playing in tune, accenting ... the list goes on.
With so many musical details vying for your attention, you're likely to lose track of your technique (the details of how you control your instrument, including posture, hand positions, relaxation ....)
So, it's essential that you practice technique during your warm-up period, otherwise you may fail to improve or maintain technique at all.
But if you practice technique first, there's a good chance some of the accomplishments will carry through to the rest of your practice. When this occurs, your practice yields dividends on an exponential level.
Divide and Accomplish
Divide and conquer an old idea. I put a positive spin on it, calling it Divide and Accomplish. Break tasks and obstacles into small, manageable pieces. This is ideal for learning music and physical skills.
There's plenty of brain research that shows that most people can only remember about seven items of new information at a time — plus or minus two. To learn large groups of information efficiently, you must study the material in small sections.For most people, that means just four to eight notes. Though this may seem like a ridiculously small amount, even four to eight notes can be too much. You have to see for yourself. If you can't accomplish your goal, try reducing the size of the section.
Work on any size piece you want, any amount that allows you to make decided progress, and that you do so quickly. If you fail to quickly learn the section you've chosen, divide the section in two parts, and practice those parts in loops.
Continue dividing until you reach a size where you can progress quickly. Indeed you may need to work on just two, three or four notes. And this can be the most intelligent and effective way to proceed.
When adopting this style of practice, you're face to face with delayed gratification. Playing from the start to the end feels like a lot more fun, but you may accomplish little by doing so. The big fun comes from learning a piece well, and reaping the many rewards that accompany that level of success.
From understanding to accurate repetition ... to physical knowledge.
The study and mastery of a musical instrument is largely about observation, repetition, and a careful four-step process where we develop and transfer skills from one level of knowledge to another.
Once we've thoroughly learned a physical movement, we no longer rely on understanding or deliberate actions to produce the desired result. This is critical. People are unable quickly and reliably perform actions while they are still under conscious control, so we need to transfer the skill out of conscious attention, not to improve our ability, but because we need our conscious attention for other tasks—primarily for observation. To practice effectively we need to shift our observation from point to point, without interrupting our skill execution.
Step 1: Understanding
Understanding is essential when attempting to learn physical skills. Nothing can be accomplished without it. It's our map to our destination. However all the understanding in the world won't produce a physical skill -- it's merely to tool with which we set our sights and evaluate our progress. Then the trial and error begins.
Step 2: Refinement
Through trial and error we influence and forge memories, but we can only forge good memories when we understand and can discern between a desirable and undesirable outcome. It takes lots of trial and error before your body can do what your mind clearly understands. You can't sail freely when constantly referring to your map. Sometimes even a misunderstanding needs refinement, but this may be impossible to know until we begin trial and error.
Once a movement is correctly refined, sufficient repetition is required in order to establish the movement deeply in your memory. It takes still more repetition and review before you'll have a reliable type of reflex-level, long-term memory.
This result is often called kinesthetic memory, motor memory, or muscle memory, which is a cascade of ordered reflexes, rather than a string of bodily instructions and mental intentions. You must reach this level of control in order to play by heart in recitals, performances or rehearsals.
Step 3: Working memory (short term memory) and relinquishing executive process
When we've thoroughly learned a physical movement, we no longer rely on the slow deliberate sequence of conscious instructions delivered through executive process. We bypass executive process completely and replace it with a cascade of ordered reflexes that trigger effortlessly and reliably in succession. The mere imagination of the melody carries the song effortlessly through the fingers. It looks magic, and feels magical, and it's a testament to the amazing mind/body ability to memorize physical movement.
Step 4: Muscle memory and long term memory
Once you can play something by heart, when you've got it in short term memory, make sure to transfer that knowledge into long term memory. It's the moments you spend playing by heart—without reading at all—that create durable long term memory.
Reading music will surely interfere with memorization, and it easily undermines memorization by preventing or stalling the transfer of knowledge to long term memory. I have no quarrel with written music, nor it's use in memorization ... if people use it wisely. Use it to launch yourself into motion by reading small sections of music, usually just four to eight notes. Then add speed to the section as you continue practicing it in a loop.
Whether reading or learning by ear, you need to practice fast enough to out run executive process. Executive process is a slow, deliberate type of mental effort where intention and observation are roughly intertwined. When you exceed the speed executive process allows, you make the leap to playing by heart.
To free yourself from executive process, systematically increase your speed. Then look away from the music. Go back and forth as much as you need: switch from reading, to memory, from reading to memory. When fully comfortable increase your speed even slightly more and continue repeating—uneffortful speed naturally deepens memory.
Give it a minute — Don't obsess
Once you've chosen a practice section, practice it briefly in a loop, just for a minute or two. If there's no progress after about 20 seconds, work on half as much. Then go to the next section or even to another piece of music. There are advantages to working on a sections pieces at once:
-- it keeps practice interesting
-- it allows your memory to absorb the experience subconsciously. This way you'll get the most out your of practice time — much like studying and sleeping on it.
Review frequently
Review is your best practice tool. If you've tackled a few new sections, and you can play them by heart, review each section occasionally during your practice.
Alternate between learning and reviewing.
Start your practice with something familiar. Then try something new. Continue alternating between familiar and new. In other words, rest one part of your brain while a different part works.
Get it right
You'll learn whatever you practice. There's the old saying, "Practice makes perfect." Actually practice makes permanent. So practice carefully. Don't practice music casually. Anything repeated becomes partially memorized. Don't memorized just anything! Be specific. In Jane Wagner's play, the Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Trudy the bag lady takes a looks at her station in life, haven fallen from a high powered New York city career, now living on the street and having conversations with extraterrestrials. She states, "I always knew I wanted to be somebody. Now I realize I should have been more specific!" (Sounds like something Henny Youngman would say!)
Keep it right
Your memory thrives on patterns. It especially notices recurring perceptions and repeated actions. If you repeat actions casually, without precision in time and motion, your memory will probably discard you good efforts, or it may link them with a number of errant and imperfect bad habits.
Exact repetition allows you to memorize quickly and efficiently. Your brain literally stores new repeated memories by creating new physical structures in you brain. once your memory is hard-wired in this manner, it is lightly quick at serving up perfected or unperfected movements, depending on what you've practiced.
As you repeat make the movements the same every time you play a passage. Once you've established a relaxed and well formed hand position, work on a small passage. Refine your movements with attention to relaxation and economy of motion. Don't just aim for right notes. Extra motion will slow you down and tire you out.
Complete your practice with review
Before you end your practice session, briefly review all the material you've practiced once again. In just a few tries see if you can revive each accomplishment to the best level that you achieved during this practice. Then just spend another minute with it. I know I've already said this, but I just wanted to review!
Summary
This article outlined and explained a number of practice ideals, but of course we never practice in a perfectly ideal manner. Nevertheless, you'll benefit when you include any of these methods into your daily practice.As you adopt good practice habits, you'll get more out of your practice. Occasionally try out one of the tips that you forgot or avoided.
There are many other practice techniques as well. Some are rather detailed and best explained by example in lessons.
Watch your own progress. Remember the value of various learning techniques. Try them out. Soon enough you'll discover your own practice secrets. Make a list so you don't forget them.
Recommended Reading: Books on music practice and learning music
 Private Music Lessons Workshops • Performances
Tips for Learning Irish Traditional Music
A simple collection of useful and definitely opinionated material for those who are learning and teaching Irish traditional music.
If you're not interested in my personal opinions, you are welcome to skip directly to the Other Opinions section.
"The beginner, and strangers coming to this music, should not, initially, bother with the forms of ornamentation. It will be time enough to begin decorating the music when one has impressed the rhythm on the ear and by practice acquired a certain agility with the fingers. It is his rhythmwhich distinguishes the performer who plays as to the manner born. When beginning to learn this music one should aim to play in that manner. There is no difficulty in doing this, in becoming a native, provided one listens only to genuine players and one has chosen an instrument on which no other form of training had been received."
– from Breandán Breathnach's "Introduction," CRE 2, xiv. Bold emphasis added by me.
That valuable and carefully phrased thought reminds us all at once of the four most important tips:
Tip 1: Use Your Ear, Not Your Eye
Amazingly enough – as I know from my own youth, when I was totally dependent on printed music – school and mainstream music pedagogy emphasizes visual reading skills, even though the art form we are trying to master is aural and physical, not visual or intellectual. Many of you are in the same boat as I was. That's why most newcomers to Irish (or any other culture's) traditional music must first overcome this fundamental misunderstanding about how to learn to play music well. I urge you strongly to never learn a tune from notation, whether from sheet music or abc code. But see the tip below about Transcribing!
So, of What Use Are Tune Books for Musicians?
Here's another beautifully succinct quotation, from Breathnach's preface to Pat Mitchell's valuable book of transcriptions, The Dance Music of Willie Clancy:
"By aiding ear and memory it will help the already proficient piper to add with ease to his repertoire."
Think about that. First you spend time hearing and absorbing music, played by a musician, before you engage your mind with symbols on paper which are supposed to offer some technique-related information about that piece of music. Otherwise your result will be quite unmusical.
Never learn a tune from notation alone, especially if you are not already an excellent Irish musician. You may not learn tunes fast enough to satisfy your otherwise healthy eagerness, but you will learn them right. And learning tunes by ear is the direct path towards becoming an excellent Irish musician. This is the only way to learn the "nyah," the "draoicht," "lift," "swing," or whatever you want to call beauty. Many Irish music teachers can hear a student (even when the student is a "professional" musician) and instantly pick out every single tune that the student learned from paper or in some other short-cut manner. How do they do it and what was the student missing? – See the next tips.
The next three tips are like the first laws of real estate: "location, location, location."
Tip 2: Rhythm
. . . is so complex and detailed in Irish music that even its most important, absolutely essential aspects cannot be notated using traditional classical notation. Instead it can only be learned and recognized after intensive and lovingly careful listening. For every tune, even if it's your five-hundredth tune.
Tip 3: Rhythm
. . . is the primary distinguishing characteristic between music that sounds Irish and music that does not sound Irish.
Tip 4: Rhythm
. . . is vastly more important than notes, pitches, and ornaments in Irish traditional music. Don't forget that reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas, slides, mazurkas, etc. are dance music.
Tip 5: Articulation
All that talk about rhythm and no practical advice? Well, to get the rhythm right, after you've done lots of careful listening, you need to figure out the particular physical tricks on your instrument that give you all the same kinds of articulation that you're hearing. For the following instruments, this means your first priority is going to be to learn the following skills (it helps to think about what other instruments do, too):
| Instrument | Techniques for Articulation |
|---|
| Uilleann Pipes |
Closed vs. open fingering, or a mix between the two, and the exact timing of releasing or placing the fingers over the holes. Your articulative art comes in how you measure those milliseconds between the notes. This includes the techniques of popping, cranning, cuts, and rolls.
Pipers, by the way, seem to have to concentrate the least on other aspects of rhythm, since their instrument, as the dominant defining instrument of Irish traditional music, can hardly be played other than in an Irish manner. Or is it just that pipers, as generally well-mannered people, have the most respect for their musical elders, and thus have listened with the most open and receptive mind to the "genuine players?" I think it may also be proof of Breathnach's contention that you will progress much more easily if you learn Irish music on an instrument upon which you have never played any other kind of music. Who learns the uilleann pipes for anything but Irish music, after all? |
| Whistle / Flute |
Tonguing. This means above all not tonguing. Too much tonguing is the single most common and fundamental error made by players coming to Irish music from other kinds of music. But you must also learn how to dose and pulse your breath within notes and within a phrase. Too much tonguing totally destroys that multi-note breath, so getting rid of the tonguing is your first task.
Then you can proceed to listen to your role models and gradually learn to use a pulsing breath to give rhythmic life to your individual notes and note-groups. Meanwhile, you can also be working on the secondary task of learning how to use your fingers to get much more subtle and artful breaks and bubbles between and during notes than the gross method of tonguing could ever allow you to get. |
Fiddle (and other
bowed instruments) |
Bowing. It's all in the bow. Forget all the left-hand distractions from the real thing. Ignore what so many commercial tutorials and teachers get away with as substitutes for teaching rhythm. You need to listen closely to your role models and figure out two very subtle skills: 1) how to get a pulsing "breath" (see whistle/flute above) within your notes and note-groups, and 2) bow direction-change ("slur") patterns.
Tip for 1): concentrate on your millisecond-level control of bow pressure, not bow speed. Tip for 2): practice all the various slur patterns you hear, especially the ones slurring across the beat. Tip for combining both skills: you need to keep the pulsing breath going regardless of your slurs and direction changes. Your bowing may quite often be "off-beat" but your pulse must still deliver the solid, on-the-beat lift that makes Irish music Irish. Finally, a tip for the left hand: your various cuts and rolls are there to give you much more subtle ways of articulating rhythm than bow changes offer you – see whistle/flute "breaks and bubbles" above. They are not there as pretty little melodic diversions à la Walt Disney. |
Tip 6: Select Your Own "Genuine Players" to Study
"Genuine players," as Breathnach calls them in the quotation at the top of this page, are those who are defining figures of the tradition. They have studied the past of the tradition with great respect and care, they participate in the current tradition to general praise from other traditional musicians, and they are helping to shape the future of the tradition.
There is, of course, – and fortunately – much room for personal variation within the Irish tradition. Every player, as they learn how to play, gradually develops a taste for particular role models or styles. Besides your personal fancy for the styles of certain players, such decisions usually also revolve around your particular musical community (also known as "regional style" or "local style"):
- Musicians with whom you are related.
- Musicians with whom you play regularly, such as friends, neighbors, and bandmates.
- Musicians who are (or were) the role models of the musicians with whom you play regularly.
- Musicians with whom you have played on some occasion, such as while traveling, or otherwise irregularly.
- Musicians who have strongly influenced how Irish traditional music is played on your particular instrument.
- Musicians who have strongly influenced how Irish traditional music is played generally. Examples include historical figures such as Michael Coleman (fiddle) or John J. Kimmel (accordion).
Practice
Caveat (regarding Breathnach's phrase "by practice"): All of the above tips presume that you have already achieved a basic physical and mental facility with your instrument. To gain a basic facility, you will first need either a face-to-face teacher or to devote considerable time and concentration to fundamental skills. For example, teaching yourself to play scales cleanly, in tune, in even tempo, and from memory will take you a very long way.
In my own experience teaching fiddle to adults, I find that the most common stumbling block for students is not their dexterity or their ear or their instrument, but simply how often — and well — they practice. Another site offers some general tips I agree with about how to practice music.
Transcribing
If you face the necessity of learning by ear with fear and/or self-doubt, as many people do (and as I did, too, when I dove into playing Irish traditional music), here's a handy tip to overcome that fear: Make your own transcriptions! First, use all of the above tips to select and study a recording of the tune you want to learn, but add one extra step for yourself: Write down what you hear in that recording, using either standard music notation or abc code, as you prefer.
Why does learning from your own transcription work, but not when you learn from someone else's transcription? The process of understanding what you're hearing enough to be able to write it down is the key. The hands-on task of making your transcription ends up being a much less daunting and even an enjoyable and fascinating task, too, compared to going directly from ear to fingers, for anyone still new to the latter skill.
Darrin Koltow wrote an excellent article titled " Transcription: The Hows and Whys" which I encourage everyone to read, even though it's about music in general, not Irish music.
Listen
"Listen" is another word from the Breathnach quotation at the top of this page, worth considering in its full weight, and as a counterweight to the mechanical aspect of the "practice" message. To listen is not merely a necessity in order to learn a particular tune. It is also a necessity in order to enter at all into the Irish musical culture, into its essence, nature, beauty, and language. If you do not naturally listen to this music out of the pure joy of listening to it, then you have no chance of ever being able to play it.
Dig down a little further into this truth: If your goal is to play this music on your instrument, on your own, in a way you enjoy, how can you get there if you do not enjoy listening to great masters of this music play it on their own — without any accompaniment and without anyone else covering the details of their sound? And how can one possibly make progress in the direction of such masters without first having spent hours and hours of your life listening to them regularly — just because you like to?
Other Opinions
Larry Sanger teaches Irish fiddle in Ohio, and I agree in general with his Guide to Learning Irish Fiddle, but not with some of the fiddle-specific technical advice he gives there. Note especially his practical tips about modern technology to use for learning tunes from recordings. Given my own lack of local Irish master teachers, I also depend on high-technology tools to learn the fine details from recordings.
University of Vermont music professor Michael Hopkins explains: "Composition is about sound, not dots on paper. Many students are confused about this concept." Read more of his very readable thoughts in his String Pedagogy Notebook.
I was pleased to discover that there is an entire body of solid research on how humans learn music and how to teach music which supports my opinions, presented very nicely by the Gordon Institute for Music Learning.
Finally, have a look at the lengthy debate a large number of whistle players and learners got into back into 2001 when someone gave them an excerpt from "Tip 1" of this page. I'm happy to report that those who objected to that excerpt clearly haven't read this page in its entirety.
This page © Copyright 2001–2015 Alan Ng. Please contact me at alan@alan-ng.nospam (substitute "net" for "nospam") for usage permissions. The last time I changed something on this page was April 24, 2015.
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frame of mind really helps! It is much better than silent memorization.
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