Practice makes perfect by Antony Copus

Practice makes perfect? We’ve all heard this expression being bandied about and perhaps it has become a bit of a cliché but is there any truth behind this platitude much beloved by everyone from music teachers, and sports professionals and parents?

When we learn a new skill, whether it be mastering a new piece on the clarinet, how to swerve kick a football or even how to drive a car, there is a lot going on in our brains and bodies. Some of the information we have to take on board is cerebral, that is information, which we need to comprehend, process and learn to call upon when needed. For example if we are learning to drive, we need to understand rules of the road, what to do when we get to a junction, who has right of way, what the colours on traffic lights mean. Without understanding and being able to recall this important information we would quickly get into trouble with other drivers!

But learning to drive isn’t just about remembering information, of course. Particularly if you drive a car with a manual gearshift there are a lot of motor skills to learn. Anyone who has passed a driving test will remember that exciting moment when they first climb into a car, put on the seat belt, started up, put the car in gear and…jerked to an embarrassing stop as the engines stalled. The control needed to pull away smoothly can’t be learned through reading. It doesn’t matter how well you understand the theory, to master the skill requires spending time (for some people a lot of time!) sitting in the car and practising and practising until the ‘feel’ of lifting the clutch and pressing the accelerator becomes natural. This type of learning is called muscular or ‘kinesthetic’ memory; it’s what we use whenever we perform complex motions naturally and without having to think about them.

But what does all this have to do with music and learning an instrument? Well, learning to play the trumpet, violin, piano or any other instrument requires a combination of the skills we have just discussed. There are certainly cerebral elements (knowing fingerings, understanding notes values and rhythmic notation, etc.), but there is a huge and often underestimated chunk of motor skill learning to do (the musician’s equivalent of changing gear). Sometimes it’s just not enough to understand what you are supposed to be doing, you have to spend a lot of time actually doing it!

Perhaps this all sounds a bit obvious but think for a moment about the way you actually spend your practice time. Many people work on a piece, starting from the beginning and simply playing through to the end. Perhaps they then go back to the top and have another go, but often they make the same mistakes, don’t really improve anything and will then go on to practise something else. Of course, thanks to muscular memory, if you get something wrong and then practise it often enough it will become natural to play it wrong and then very difficult to put it right.

It is vitally important, therefore, that when you are practising you make sure that you are playing the piece or passage correctly, even if this means going really slowly to start with. In your lesson, make sure you understand exactly what it is your teacher is expecting of you; ask if you’re not certain. Then, when you practise at home, concentrate on the passages which need work, play as slowly as you need to in order to be accurate, and repeat…and repeat…and repeat.

Don’t think that this need be a long and boring way of working. It can be very rewarding, especially if you use some of the hundreds of accompaniments available for download on www.opuscopus.com. This will also almost certainly speed up the rate at which you can tackle and perfect new repertoire.

You may well also be surprised at how easy it is to learn things from memory like this. Kinesthetic memory is one of the most important elements of memory learning. For pianists the ‘feeling’ of the fingers moving from note to note, the shape of chords, the resistance of the keys; for wind players, the ‘feeling' of the diaphragm pressure, the firmness of the embouchure; for string players, the movement of the bow, the shape of the left hand.

And if you reckon this is just a technique aimed at young or inexperienced players think again. This is exactly how the very best classical, jazz and pop players in world master the most difficult repertoire. Muscular repetition is absolutely vital to effective learning and performing on any instrument but it must be informed.

So if you want to be perfect, get cerebral, then get physical…and do it again and again!