Practice: how do you decide when to move on to a new exercise?

General Music Discussion
#1

I’ve recently found out that my sweet spot to determine when to move to the next item when learning fast lines from a book or video instructional is if I can play a phrase at any equivalent of 16th notes at 140-150 bpm, and I feel that, from that point, my brain simply takes care of everything on its own and I am usually able to play at higher speeds once I stop trying so hard. I guess that’s the 85% they talk about:

Do you have any specific criteria to decide when to move forward in your learning journey? Do you stick to the one thing until it sounds “like the recording”?

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#2

If you spend all of your practice time on one single thing…you’re gonna get bored. You need different things to practice. You can even say…technique on Monday, ear training on Tuesday, tunes on Wednesday,…something like that.

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#3

That’s an excellent strategy. I really enjoy it because it adds a little variety to the practice. With that in mind, how do you define it’s time to take up a new topic or etude for, say, your harmony day routine?

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#4

I timebox things. Don’t practice something to death.

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#5

Well like…for ear training, I’m transcribing a solo by the great jazz piano player Keith Jarrett. So I’ll learn an idea. And especially the longer and more intricate lines,…just practice em until they become like second nature. Thinking of getting an app so I can slow the track down a little bit. You gotta put the reps in that’s really all there is to it. You can take breaks and work on other things but,…you gotta come back to it.

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#6

Absolutely! No shortcuts. All work. That’s what it takes.

With that in mind, what you mention about focusing on the tricky parts of something you are learning seems related to reportedly neuroscience-based recommendations for practicing and learning: it’s not about practicing for long periods rather than maximizing your reps per unit of time, and embracing (and why not, enjoying) occasional errors.

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#7

Blake Hawley has a thing about how to embrace your mistakes and turn them into vocabulary. I haven’t really dug into that yet but it’s probably worth checking out.