Are You Practicing Efficiently?

I was reading an interesting blog forwarded about how a famous Piano player practices. He admittedly puts in less hours comparatively to his counterparts. Just shows that sometimes its not the quantity of time put in but the quality of how you practice.

[quoted from here]


Strategy #1: Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy.
“The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”

Strategy #2: To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder.
“Strong pianists find clever ways to ‘complicate’ the difficult parts of their music. If we have problem playing something with clarity, we complicate by playing the passage with alternating accent patterns. If we have problems with speed, we confound the rhythms.”

Strategy #3: Systematically Eliminate Weakness.
“Strong pianists know our weaknesses and use them to create strength. I have sharp ears, but I am not as in touch with the physical component of piano playing. So, I practice on a mute keyboard.”

Strategy #4: Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness.
“Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs to feel, sound, and even look like in excruciating detail. In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image.”

So why do we instinctively practice without these strategies? Because its EASY.

Easy things means you don't have to think, you just blindly do it and hope for the best. Kinda like religion I'd argue, but that's for another discussion maybe later on.

We can apply these strategies to everything we do... or well want to get good at. Its strangely quite scary to do them actually... learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and accepting it.

I can definitely say that my last 6 months I haven't been practising efficiently. In fact, I've had more of a bias towards playing, rather then "practising" (altho I haven't been playing as much either lol). Meaning, studying off table. Relooking at HHs, and evaluating certain spots. Its easy to think of the game as being something that is solved. 

I like the analogy of looking at what I do as a sport. In professional tennis, a player has to practice and has to play. Practicing keeps his skills up to par when performing. But he must do both all the time, he cant leave out one or the other. Competing is not practice and just practicing is pointless without the experience of playing.