Back to school for On Learning Percussion!

Over August and September I’m going to be sharing some of my favorite tips for practicing, time management, and organization. I’ll start with practical tips that I hope are germane to percussionists. Along the way, I’m going to share larger ideas about honing and refining the skills of learning which underpin our musical practices. To me, all of the stages of our musical lives are connected, from pre-practice research, motor learning, performance, advocacy, and professional development. The thread: being great at learning new things.

I’ll share ideas about researching a new piece of music, preparing music to practice, planning and managing practice sessions, using feedback effectively, and more: all sections of my forthcoming book and online class

This week: Mapping Your Practice

We’re all so busy, right? Wouldn’t it be nice to just have one piece to practice, one skill to learn, one dish to cook?

I don’t think so. It is physically exhausting and mentally grueling to have a singular goal for your practice time. I recommend developing multiple pieces at different speeds, occupying multiple spaces simultaneously: note learning, incubation, and refinement. That way you can swap between pieces depending on your level of focus and your time constraints.

In fact, the science is increasingly clear that interleaved practicing—where a practice session includes a number of different kinds of material at the same time—is far more effective for long-term learning than massed practice, where only one kind of music or topic is explored. In fact, the most effective kind of practice for long-term learning is high in contextual interference, forcing the brain to continually reinforce what it knows. (The exception is when one is learning a new skill, and needs to focus on isolating each of its components.

That said, a central worry performers face is managing both our time and our expectations for ourselves in that time. Sometimes this anxiety about getting enough done is well-founded, but many times our stress is compounded by lack of information. We create unrealistic expectations for our learning because we don’t actually know what we’re learning!

So:

That’s where my learning chart comes in.

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The file includes 2 pages: one chart for tracking multiple projects, and a second for drilling down in to a single piece.

I know I shared this a while back, but it’s so important to creative music-making that I’m sharing it again.

How I Use My Charts

I use these to keep track of the music I have to learn, articulate each piece’s relative priority organized around learning challenge and timeline, and track my progress to ensure my desired learning style is embodied.

In the rows I put all the music I have to learn, and in the columns I articulate each piece’s relative priority vis a vis learning challenge and time line:

• Do I have the music?
• When’s the deadline?
• How stressed out am I about this? Stress level and deadline together are good indicators of priority
• Do I need to play the piece by memory?
• I use the remaining columns to track my readiness, putting x’s in each column to show roughly how comfortable I feel in each section of each piece. Everyone has their own standard for ready. Mine goes between “notes learned,” “incubating,” “refining,” and “call be at 2am and I can play it exactly the way I want to.”

That way, I can tell what stage each of my projects are in at a glance, allowing me to plan effective practice sessions where my only job is to focus on focusing: I have a strong sense of what I want to accomplish and how the practice session will get me closer to my goals. This clarity has made my time in the practice room more productive, creative, and interesting.

For me, making a learning chart for all my musical learning is like Dumbledore’s Pensieve

It removes my to-do list from my active mind, freeing my brain to focus on the quality of my playing. I feel relief writing what I need to do into the chart,

Paradoxically, planning practice is an essential part of allowing time in the practice room to be as creative as possible. It’s not helpful to scheduling practice time down to the minute, but it is helpful to know what should be accomplished by when, and to keep track of those goals outside executive functioning of the brain.

Finally, these charts have side benefit: they require a kind of passive musical analysis. Because each piece needs to be broken into sections, the performer has to articulate a work’s structure and relationships between sections. Analysis is a vital part of how I learn music, and being able to look at your repertoire from a birds-eye view is extremely helpful.

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Happy Practicing!

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