By Raj Jayavant · Updated
This is the single biggest change available to most intermediate players. The default practice session is: start the song, play until the difficult part, make a mess of it, go back to the beginning.
Count the repetitions in that. You play the easy opening twenty times and the hard bar twice, badly. Your practice time is being spent almost entirely on material you already know.
Instead, find the two bars that fail and work on those alone. Ten minutes on the hard bar is worth an hour of running the song. The method is in how to practice a difficult passage.
Everyone knows they should practice slowly. Almost nobody practices slowly enough, because a genuinely slow tempo feels like it cannot be productive.
The test is not how the tempo feels, it is whether you play accurately. If you are making mistakes, it is too fast, and this remains true no matter how slow that turns out to be. Speed comes from accumulated correct repetitions, and there is no route to it through inaccurate fast ones.
Twenty minutes a day will take you further than three hours on Sunday. The consolidation that turns conscious effort into automatic movement happens between sessions, so more sessions means more consolidation.
It is also the difference between a habit and an event. Twenty minutes is short enough to do on a bad day, which is what makes it survive contact with an actual week.
Sessions without a target become playing rather than practicing. Playing is worth doing and it is not the same activity, and confusing the two is why some people practice for years without improving much.
A target should be specific enough to fail: “get bars 17 to 20 clean at 80 percent” rather than “work on the solo”.
Playing and listening critically are hard to do simultaneously. A recording separates them, and it is reliably uncomfortable: timing problems and inconsistent tone are far more audible on playback than they are from behind the instrument.
Once a month is enough. It is a diagnostic tool, not a practice activity.
Tab is efficient and it outsources the listening. Working something out by ear, even something simple, builds the connection between hearing and finding that eventually lets you play what you imagine.
Start small: a bass line, a vocal melody, a two bar riff. The method is in how to learn a song by ear.
When you are learning from a video or a track, being able to slow it down and repeat one part changes what is possible to learn from it. A run that is a blur at full speed is a series of individual notes at half.
PhraseLoop exists for this: mark the passage, set the speed, and it repeats while you work on it. The pitch stays where it was, so what you hear at half speed is still in the original key.
Improvement is not linear. Long stretches of no apparent progress followed by sudden jumps is the normal shape, and the stretches are where the consolidation is happening.
The players who get good are not the ones who improved steadily. They are the ones who kept practicing through the flat parts.