Practice Methods 101

In this post, I’m going to outline different approaches to practicing and playing music. It’s useful to know the differences and apply the best method for each situation and goal at hand. It’s a common issue I see too often where students mix different modes and end up spinning their wheels, so I hope this will help clear it up and make your time more efficient.

Practice Mode

This is what you use when you’re first learning a song, scale, chord, rhythm, technique. Anything you’re just starting on, or taking time to improve on.

• Play slow. Don’t try to make it sound like the song right away. It should sound like practice: choppy, repetitive, out of time. Speed develops naturally with time, you shouldn’t rush the process or else you’ll pick up bad habits and sloppy playing.
• Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition is your best friend. So much of learning a song has to do with muscle memory, and the only way to get that is through repetition. The students that progress the fastest all share the quality of being able to just lock in and loop something for a while.
• Spend a good amount of time on whatever small goal you have. Spend at least 10 minutes on just memorizing notes or learning 1-2 chords. It should feel like work, you will want to give up or move on but don’t! That’s where good progress happens. Avoid switching between different parts or goals too soon.
• Stay focused & engaged. A common pitfall is when students put the time in, but it’s not good quality time. Be as present and engaged as possible. It’s easy to let your mind wander during repetitive work. You retain more progress when you’re present and engaged in your practice.

Rehearsal Mode

After you practice the parts and get them down, you start to put it all together and actually start playing the song. Think of this mode as preparation for a performance. Practice the performance, not the parts. You’re no longer needing to work the details out, it’s about the bigger picture now. How is your overall dynamic? Your tone? How does it mix with other instruments/players? Are you staying in time? Maybe you need to go back to practice mode for a small detail you missed. This is also the stage where you start memorizing the full song format(verse-chorus). A good thing to do is record yourself performing the song. Look and listen back, you might see or hear something new, good or bad. Ideally, during rehearsal you want to perform the song as many times as possible before you do it in front of either bandmates or the audience.

Performance Mode

This is way different from rehearsal. If you do the previous 2 modes right, this is the fun and easy part. You get to let loose, relying on the prep you did. If you skipped out on the first 2 and cut corners, then you are now doing Rehearsal Mode but in front of an audience. Which is nerve-racking and not fun. For a performance, just relax as much as possible, trust that you’ll do fine. Even if you make mistakes, forget notes or parts, it’s probably not as big of a deal to the audience as it is to you. You should be proud of yourself no matter what, just for doing the performance and putting in all the work it took to get there. Performance isn’t about perfection, it’s about human expression, and guess what! Humans make mistakes all the time. Your favorite songs have mistakes all over the recordings that most people don’t notice. The imperfections are actually a good thing.

I also describe Practice Mode and Performance Mode as polar opposites. In Performance Mode, you play the song once, you start at the start and end at the end, you play at normal speed. In Practice Mode you play it many times, you play the sections you need to work on the most, and always slower than normal speed. After realizing this, it doesn’t make sense to mix the two.

Free Play Mode

I don’t need to teach anyone how to play and have fun. You just do it. Maybe I can suggest games or other fun things to do, but having fun is an inherent skill we all pick up early in life. Make sure you use it so you don’t lose it! I mention it as a separate section here because of it’s importance, and also to remind you to separate play from practice. I have another blog that elaborates about this, check it out here.

Creative Mode

This is another thing that is weird to try to teach. Creativity is spontaneous by nature. You can do things to facilitate creativity, but it’s hard to draw an exact blueprint. Again, I made this it’s own section so that you can make the distinction between this mode and other modes. Make special time for creativity, and don’t set too much structure, if any, to the process. If you want more guidance and help in this area just reach out! I love this part of music and am always happy to share it with others.