Practicing is more often than not the difference between good and great, but a lot of musicians have never developed good practice habits and as such are not getting as much benefit from practicing as they should. I don’t claim to be an expert on practicing but I have picked up some tips and tricks over the years and I’d like to share them with you here. The most helpful practicing technique I ever learned was taught to me by my college guitar instructor and I’m going to outline his method here. Since I learned this method on guitar I’m going to use the instrument for my example but the same techniques can be applied to any instrument.
Let’s say that we have written a guitar part that sounds great in concept but we are having trouble playing it. Sometimes notes in the chords are choked out and we often fall out of time because the movements between chords and notes are not easy. The first thing that we’re going to do is get out our metronome and figure out the slowest tempo that we can play the part cleanly. This may be significantly lower than the tempo that we want to ultimately play the part at and that’s fine. The point of this is to start building muscle memory with correct technique so we will go as low as we need to. For this example let’s say that we want to play the figure at 130 but the fastest we can play it perfectly clean is 60 bpm.
Now that we’ve found our beginning tempo we’re going to get out a timer and set it for two minutes. We’ll then play through the specific part with the metronome at 60 BPM for the entirety of the two minutes. After that we’ll raise the metronome 2 BPMs to 62 and then do 2 minutes of practice at that tempo. We’ll continue to raise the tempo by 2 BPMs and practice for 2 minutes until we’ve done that 5 times and have gone up 10 BPM to 70. We’ll then create a log in a notebook or an app showing how far we went that day and then we are done for the day with this part. You could do the same practice with another part or another song but you don’t need to do this part again that day.
The next day or whenever you return (hopefully on a regular schedule of some sort) you will start the metronome 2 BPMs higher at 162 and go up to 172 in 2 BPM intervals for 2 minutes each. You’ll then repeat this every practice. It will seem like it takes a while to move up but in 30 days of this type of practice you’ll find that you are starting your practice at 122 now and you’ll be able to play the part cleanly because you’ve developed muscle memory from the ‘bottom up’ so to speak. This is a more time intensive process but it will yield great results for you. You’ll also find that over time you won’t need to start the metronome as low when using familiar techniques because the muscle memory is already there.
Here are a couple more tips and tricks that relate to this technique:
- Don’t be Afraid to Go Backwards If you are moving up in BPM and you find that you are having trouble executing things cleanly don’t be afraid to go backwards and start at lower BPMs. The point is to be able to play the part cleanly at the desired tempo and if you keep moving up in tempo but are not playing it cleanly we’ll never get the desired results. Only move up in tempo if you are able to play it cleanly and easily at the tempo you’re currently playing at.
- Isolate as Much as Necessary If you are struggling with transitioning between two hard to grab chords with your fret hand then isolate the two chords and go back and forth with only your fret hand. Once it becomes easy to do that then you can add back in your picking hand. If the problem is in the picking hand then isolate that and only focus on that hand until it’s better. Another example for a different instrument would be if you’re struggling to play fast 16 note hi hats on a kit while playing the kick and snare at the same time then I would ditch the kick and snare and focus on the hats until they are good.
Think Outside the Box If you’re struggling with a particular part see if there are alternate techniques, fingerings, positions, etc that make the part easier.
