In the first few times you go through the whole piece, play or sing slowly with attention to what the notes are and how you go from note to note. After that, start looking at the rhythm.

Beginner pieces usually have very little differences in rhythm. That helps get you started.

2. Do short sections three times. I’ve already written about this in The Gold Standard of Music Practice. When a beginner student can identify and recognize a hard part of the music piece, that’s an important milestone.

Next comes the ability to play that tough part by itself. Then, playing it three times in a row, cleanly, means the student will soon progress to intermediate.

3. The Slow Down Technique. This follows naturally from the three times repetition. You play through the piece at a comfortable, moving pace and slow down for the hard parts to play them accurately.

This might seem like a bad idea to the music teacher advocating a steady beat. Sometimes you hear the advice, Play through the whole piece at a pace that works for the hardest part. But that is mind numbingly frustrating. I can’t do that myself and I don’t ask students to do it.

The slow down technique is intuitive, if a little tricky to do well at first. It avoids the horror of fixing a flub. every music teacher has heard this. The student plays a piece, makes a flub, a wrong note, stops and goes back a little to play the part right. Many times the part is still wrong the second time. Anyway, it’s a useless practice technique.

If you hit a flub, stop. Use the three times repetition carefully. Then just go on. You integrate the hard part into the piece with the slow down technique.

4. The Easy Memory Method. This is a way to get a different part of your brain involved with your practice. You play one or two bars of music. Stop and turn 90 degrees. Play the part again without looking at the chart.

You are involving short term memory, a different part of the brain than either the visual or auditory. If you feel you played it right, move on to the next one or two bars. If you are not sure, do the first section again. Continue until you complete the piece of music.

5. Learn the last part first. It’s common to realize that we can play the first part of a piece much better than the second part.

This may be because we have spent more time on the first part and played it more. It also may be an example of the primacy effect.

Whatever we see first or hear first sticks better than what we see later. First impressions rule.

We can use this principle to our advantage. Spend a number of sessions starting with the second part. In fiddle tunes, I’ll often begin with the B part of the tune. It helps the learning process.

6. Identify the sequences and play them back to back. In etudes, pieces, tunes and songs you will find sequences. These are groups of notes in a relationship that appears in other keys in the piece.

Sometimes the sequences are separated by many notes. That’s when you have to look for them to identify them and group them together.

Once you find them, play them one after the other, without the intervening notes. Get the feel of how the relationship of the notes is the same.

When you do this process just a few times, you will be surprised at how much the whole piece improves.

7. Transpose the target part to other keys. This is a more advanced technique. In this one you take a difficult, but short passage and work through it starting from a different note. On stringed instruments it’s almost easy to start the passage on another string and play it in a parallel way.

For very high parts, transposing down an octave helps. You can hear the intonation more easily.

8. Play it easy. For string players who must play a part up the neck on a lower string, play it in the lower position first.

Just this past week I saw a student make a huge improvement just by playing the up-the-neck passage two times in first position.

9. Long tones for micro-intonation. When I was studying with Pauline Oliveros she told me how she, and Terry Riley and Morton Subotnick had a program of playing very long tones. It was a discipline. You begin to hear very subtle changes in pitch. She said it paradoxically enhanced her speed.

I confess, I’ve only done this a little bit. It definitely helped my pitch perception, which needed help. (My fans are too polite to say it still does.)

10. Use a metronome. You didn’t think I would miss this one, did you? The metronome is the primary practice tool of the pros.

By the time they go to the metronome they have already used one or more of the other techniques. This is the one that puts the polish on the piece.

It also tells you where you stand. You end up with a number that represents the fastest pace you can use and still be accurate. (You can also find the flubs when you push yourself a little past that number.)

For this kind of practice you need a metronome loud enough that you hear it over the sound you are making. The flashing lights help, but sound is essential.

One last thought. Learning a piece of music is a little stressful. There’s the stress of getting acquainted with it, the stress of ignorance. Then, there’s the stress of the harder parts that don’t sound as good and compromise your performance. Any stress affects your performance adversely.

Every technique you use to master even part of a piece reduces the whole level of stress. Thus, it helps the whole performance. Practice time gets you through the gateway to excellence. Practice technique is the helpful companion that makes that time less of a burden.

The purpose of this short essay is to highlight the significance of that frequency in relation to natural pitch. I would like to set forth why I question this pitch as having been anything other than A flat in the time of Johann Sebastian Bach.

It was during the time of Bach that the vibrational rate per second of middle C was discovered to be 256 times per second. We call it 256 Hz now. Apparently this was the pitch for middle C commonly used in the time of Bach. It has been accepted by scientists as the pitch of middle C since that time.

Is there anything about that number that catches your attention? It is a power of  two. That means that if you reduce it by halves you get 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and finally 1.

Those numbers are all lower octaves of C. The one at 16 vibrations per second is the lowest that can be heard as a distinct pitch by the human ear. The lower numbers are still octaves of C.

This means that there is an immediate physical connection between one second of time and the standard of middle C at 256 Hz. If the interval of one second is a natural division of the diurnal rotation of the earth, then middle C of 256 is the natural middle C. This may explain why the pitch was standard before it was ever measured.

Using one cycle per second, we can derive other natural pitches by employing the simple rules of deriving overtones, or partials, from a fundamental pitch.

Two cycles per second is the octave C from one cycle. Three cycles per second is the fifth. It is G. Four cycles yields another C. Five per second gives us the third, E. Six cycles per second is an octave of the fifth. Seven cycles produces the lowered seventh, B flat.

Taking that pitch and multiplying by 7 we get the seventh of B flat, A flat.
That’s 49 vibrations per second. Double that for the octave and you have a tone that is 98 Hz. Double that and it’s 196 Hz. A final doubling gives you 392 Hz.

In short, if middle C in the time of Bach was 256 Hz, then the tone produced by 392 Hz would be perceived as an A flat.

It’s possible that violins might tune down their A and E strings a half step to sound brighter when accompanying the brass instruments. They might leave the G and D strings in standard tuning, playing in closed position on the lower strings, and open position on the higher strings. I’m just speculating here.

What is not conjecture is this assertion: if middle C is 256 Hz, then 392 Hz will sound like an A flat.

If you allow yourself to make the same flub when going through a piece, time after time, you are practicing the flub. It doesn’t pay to practice a flub. It pays to eliminate the flub.

Even if you mentally reject the flub and fix it by replaying the passage the way you want it, you are wasting time. It’s faster and more efficient to just eliminate it as soon as you identify it.

Suppose you have identified a place in the music where you make an error. It might be a hard part, an awkward part, something you are not used to doing. By looking closely at the spot, you know exactly where you hit the wrong note, the off pitch, sing the wrong word. use the wrong rhythm. The possibilities for error are extensive, aren’t they?

You can play the passage the way you want, the correct way, and integrate it into the whole. It’s a two step process.

First go through just enough notes to complete the tough spot. That would include at least one note before the passage that is not hard and one note beyond the passage that is not hard.

That is your primary segment of practice. There is already a speed at which you can execute the passage with no error. Find that speed and get well acquainted with it.

You may even spend a minute going over the spot to increase the speed a little bit. Be patient, and do not attempt to get it up to speed at this point. Just get it 100% reliable at a slow speed.

Second, play through, or sing through, the entire piece at your normal pace until you get to the hard part. Just as you get to it, slow down to your reliable practice speed, avoiding any flub. Go as slow as you need to go to avoid the flub.

This technique connects all the dots. (Pardon the pun.) This creates a pathway in your brain that is good and reliable. Now the only thing is to build speed. The main thing is to keep the passage clean and accurate as you work your way through the whole piece.

I use this technique for learning fiddle tunes and folk songs. In the music teaching studio I go over it with students. In classical music, as you advance you get to longer pieces, concertos, sonatas, etc. You need to chunk these down to a manageable section that only has a few really tough spots. Then you can apply the process and enjoy playing the section with no errors.

Even etudes will sometimes have too many places of danger to do the whole thing right away. They are often made that way to challenge the student. Any piece of music that has seven or eight flub-worthy spots is too much. Too much to listen too and too much to work with. Chunk it down.

The big principle is this: you are training your brain to work through data and produce a definite desired result. It isn’t the hands that are being trained, or the mouth, larynx and lungs. It’s the brain.

When you get the result you want, you are allowing all the neuron connections nd relays to work in just the right order. Even if it’s very slow, the right order is the right thing to do. Speed can be increased. But, flubs cannot be fixed. They must be eliminated.

There are some traditions in which a flub is not necessarily a mistake. Improv playing can allow you to choose a fortunate error and repeat it. Now you have a new way of playing a passage. You have a new way of singing a song.

Even in an improv tradition you can choose to do a piece note for note a certain way. just as you received it. This can teach you a valuable new way to produce music, taking you beyond your favorite licks or ways of contouring a melody.

In summary, it doesn’t take many times through a new piece, or etude, or section to know where you tend to mess up. Once you spot the places, resolve to work them out.

If your piece has more than two such spots, mrk them with pencil. I put a wavy line over such places. It symbolizes, “Caution, dangerous curves ahead.”

Just slow down and succeed.

But, it was clear from his handlng of Handel tha he had not practice seriously. I made him do the 3 times drill. I talked him through the double stops part of practicing the moves from one pair of notes to the next. I had him listen for the pitch of the same note remaining exact from one instance to the next a few notes later.

That last item is more important for fretless stringed instruments, I suppose. The 3 times, and coordinating critical moves as simpley and directly as possible…those apply to other instruments.

What I really don’t know is whether the stern persona is effective. I seldom adopt it.

My usual approach is supportive. If I can find anything that a student is doing well I acknowledge that first. Then, I offer tips for improvement. Finally, I say something generally supportive to put the last layer on the sandwich.

Students have sometimes expressed great appreciation for this supportive attitude. They cite previous experience with a critical teacher for comparison.

I have heard violin drop outs speak of the Nazi violin teacher from childhood.

Strengthening your strengths is the advice of psycologists of learning. The weakest link is not the best metaphor. What a student is best at will create the satisfaction to keep on. As long as the student stays the course, the game is won.

Is it just a cultural factor of Western harmony? Or is there a scientific explanation involving overtones, cross vibrations and harmonic perception?

Both factors may be in play here. I lean towards the scientific opinion that the output of three harmonically related tones exceeds the input.

If you play a musical instrument that produces chords you must already know a little music theory. Maybe its only intuitive, but you have soaked it up automatically just by playing chords.

If your instrument is melodic and plays one note at a time, you have to think about chords to get an understanding. The music theory you learn can be applied to your instrument, even if its your voice.

In academic music, theory is oriented towards keyboard. If you play flute you are on your own to relate music theory to what you do in the practice room. You may only play a chord one note at a time, but you can still identify it.

Theory is most useful in certain kinds of music that permit or encourage improvisation. But even in classical music, an understanding of theory can help you follow what the composer is doing. You can understand and emphasize the dramatic quality of the melodic line as enhanced by the chord progression.

I have been putting a series of short music theory lessons for fiddlers on YouTube. I intend to continue until I’ve covered playing 12 bar blues. But, I may do a little more on this subject. I find it intensely interesting.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle for more.)

Applied to learning music we get this, 80% of the benefit of a practice session is gained from 20% of the effort. Could this be true?

When I get started in the morning I usually play over a tune slowly and carefully. I pay attention to how my notes are tuning in to the open strings. I listen to the sympathetic resonance. This really warms up my ear as well as my fingers and arm.

Playing the tune through the second time is easier. If I play the tune five times it’s beginning to sound solid by the end. If the second time through sounds 80% as good as the fifth time, then we have an example of the 80/20 rule.

Until this relationship struck my mind, I had not been aware that practicing by fives lets you employ the Pareto Principle.

Sometimes, instead of playing the same tune five times, I’ll play one tune three times and another twice. That chunk of five repetitions is a basic chunk. No matter how many different tunes I play, and the maximum is five in a chunk, after five reps I move a marker from one place to another.

I settled in to the use of five silver dollars and a Sumerian footed bowl for counting. After the five coins get in the bowl, I have done a minimal session of practice. It’s the least I do every day. That is a total of 25 repetitions.

Again, looking at the 80/20 rule, Maybe I got 80% of my results with the first five tunes. That’s possible.

Another way to look at it is to ask how much can you gain by additional practice.

If you typically practice about a half an hour. then you could enhance your ability 25% by continuing two more hours. (The half hour is 20% of two and a half. The marginal increase in results of 100% over 80% is 25%.)

How well I play, or how well you play is subjective for us. Even so, I suspect there is al least some truth to the application of the 80/20 rule in music practicing.

One last visit to this idea: consider the standard of practicing 3 hours a day to reach real mastery after years of effort. The handful of concert violinists put in much more time. And they are beyond basic mastery.

Here’s the bottom line question. Can you get 80% of that mastery level by practicing only 45 minutes a day? Maybe you can, but that is not very close to mastery. Imagine playing a fiddle tune up to speed and one note in five is flubbed, played out of tune or missed. Would you like the sound of that?

On the other hand, if you play in that fashion with a group of fiddlers, your missed notes are not so obvious. And you are contributing to the over all sound and effect of the group performance.

One last thought. It may be the number of times you play the same passage, piece or etude. That may be the constraint that brings the 80/20 rule into play.

Go over tough spots three times.

Suppose you are singing a new song and one spot just gives you some resistance. Maybe it’s the words, could be the intervals, or even the rhythm. But it doesn’t go smoothly.

Then, stop! Go over the hard spot three times. Maybe slow down a little. Make it easier to do. The, do it three times

If you have studied music with a teacher, I’ll bet you heard this already. It really is the gold standard of practicing music.

I recommend taking brief pause before each repetition. Don’t try to be a tape loop. Reset your mind to learning mode each time. You will make fewer errors and learn more quickly.

f you want to increase the speed, that’s good. Just allow yourself to go over the part three times at a doable speed. Then, push ahead a little and do three times more. This encodes your brain synapses for success.

The hard part for beginners is focus on the difficult part. Find a good starting place just before the challenge area, and a good stopping place just after. That’s the new skill to learn. And it is a very valuable skill. Expert musicians can do this effortlessly. But, it didn’t happen overnight.

If you haven’t mastered the skill of isolating a short, hard part, do it right away. It will pay you huge dividends.

Learning to use one is not the easiest and most intuitive skill. But with a few tips you will be having more fun and making faster headway with your instrument.

If you are a student, the most important thing about getting a metronome is to get one that is easily audible. Those little electronic ones are good for pros like conductors, but in the practice room you need some volume.

That narrows the field. We will be taking a look at the best choices in the near future.