Playing and Practicing are two different things
The Third Big Idea from First, Learn to Practice
I lost control of my schedule this week and didn't make time to write, so I'm posting a chapter from First, Learn to Practice.
Playing and Practicing are two different things.
What do you mean when you say, “I’m going to practice for a while”?
Each of us has his or her own unique answer to that question. For the moment, though, let’s start with a very broad answer that covers everybody, and then narrow it down. Let’s say that “I’m going to practice for a while” means “I’m going to spend some time with my instrument.”
Now: when you are spending time with your instrument, there are many different things you can be doing, and practicing is only one of them. You might be:
Playing
Writing
Learning
Arranging
Fooling Around
Exploring
Practicing
All are good, important things to do. They overlap each other a bit (you can learn while you practice, for example), and each can help you become a better musician. In fact, it would be hard to get anywhere without doing all of them.
But we’re talking about practicing, and the first step towards improving your practicing is to identify it. We want the word ‘practicing’ to mean something specific. When you practice, we want it to be very clear that what you’re doing is actually practicing and not something else.
Practicing is not just spending time with your instrument.
AND
Time spent with your instrument is not automatically practicing.
So far, we’ve said a little about what practicing isn’t; now let’s describe what it is. We’ve already described practicing as a search for ideal motion. We can also describe it as an attitude.
The great New York Knicks forward Bernard King was known for his ‘game face,’ an imposing scowl that let teammates, opponents and fans alike know that he had come to play and was dead serious about it.
But King’s game face wasn’t just an expression. It was the outward sign of the mental and physical attitude that he brought to every game. The qualities that opposing players read in King’s face – intensity, determination, confidence, will power – came from the inside. You could say that his game face was his game.
FIRST, LEARN TO PRACTICE is about building your mental and physical attitude toward practicing. Ultimately, you’ll see that your attitude is your practicing, just like Bernard King’s game face was his game.
But what does that mean – ‘your attitude is your practicing’? It means that what separates good practicing from bad practicing, enjoyable practicing from boring and tiresome practicing, your practicing from the guy next door’s practicing, is what’s happening in your head. Yes, we’re practicing movement. Movement is our raw material. But our most important tools are mental. These are things like:
What we pay attention to;
What our standards are;
What our goals are;
Concentration;
Optimism;
Honesty; and
Patience.
Practicing and Playing are as different as cooking and eating. In some ways they almost completely unrelated.
Playing music is an artistic, emotional activity. Ideally, you’d like to get your conscious mind out of the way as much as possible when you’re playing – the less thinking and the more ‘flow’, the better.
Practicing is an analytical activity. It requires a completely different mental attitude. When you practice, you break things down into parts and study them. You look at everything – the music you’re trying to learn, the movements of your fingers, the results you achieve, etc. – and try to understand how all the pieces work together. You have to think like a mechanic.
The mechanic’s mindset
A mechanic works on an engine piece by piece. He tries to understand what each piece does, how each piece moves and how each piece interacts with each other piece. He investigates whether or not each piece is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, and then he adjusts the pieces individually and together until everything is behaving properly. When he’s done, he knows every part and every motion of the engine he’s working on. The engine runs smoothly because he has first made all the parts run smoothly.
When you play a composition, you start at the beginning and play through until the end. If you stop in the middle, that’s a big mistake. But when you practice, you take on the mechanic’s mindset. You rarely play a composition from beginning to end. Instead, you break the composition down into manageable pieces and play them over and over, making sure everything about them is just right.
When you play something, it’s because you enjoy it. Your enjoyment comes from the experience of playing it well. When you practice something, it’s because you want to get better at it. Your enjoyment comes from getting better.
Why does this matter? There’s a trap that everyone falls into. They think that if they just sit down and play for an hour or so, they’re practicing. But they’re not. In fact, they’re probably not even playing – they’re Fooling Around. There’s nothing wrong with Fooling Around, unless you’re trying to get better on your instrument. If so, then Practicing is what you want to do. And what makes Practicing Practicing is thinking like a mechanic.