The Top 10 Music Practice Techniques

1. Play through the piece. This is intuitive. If you are going to learn how to play a piece of music you need to play it many times. You have to play through it the first time.

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.