Why Every Wrong Note is a Step Towards Mastering Music
1. Approaching Failure
Having taught beyond a thousand students one-to-one over the past 15 years I have come to notice particular patterns in how different people approach learning an instrument.
Some people are impatience, expecting their hands to do what their head wants them to do straight away and becoming frustrated when they don’t. Other people learn very carefully, meticulously working on a single piece for a very long time in pursuit of absolute perfection. There is, of course, a spectrum in-between these two extremes as well. But there is one key similarity between these types of learners; the avoidance of getting it wrong!
There are several reasons why we naturally avoid failure; perfectionism, a fear of failure, a fear of being judged, etc… Yet, failure is the cornerstone of learning. Without mistakes, there would be no learning - you would already know everything!
One of the key reasons that music is a fulfilling endeavour is that there is always new things to learn, be that new techniques, new pieces or new perspectives on life. This is why we have the cliche phrase “it’s about the journey, not the destination”. Without failure, there is no opportunity to learn, grow and change.
This is why how we approach failure is so vital!
2. Two Wrongs Make a Right
Getting something wrong when learning an instrument is actually an incredible opportunity because it shows you exactly what to practice! The worse case scenario when practicing is playing aimlessly without knowing what you are trying to improve or learn. Making mistakes eliminate this problem if you notice and act upon them.
The problem arises when players fear mistakes so much that they ignore or avoid them. This results in playing a piece of music through from start to finish without really addressing any of the problems. Highlighting the mistake and spending some time fixing it is a sure way of guaranteeing improvement.
This concept doesn’t just apply to practice - it’s equally true of performances! One of the biggest fears musicians face is performing and this is almost always due to the fear of making mistakes and looking stupid (something I am very good at without performing). Even in this situation, if you make mistakes; that’s great! You’ve found out that you need to practice performing or that the piece wasn’t as secure in certain places as it could have been.
The nervousness that we experience when performing does an excellent job of testing whether you know a piece of music as well as you thought. Unfortunately, many musicians who have a bad performance experience avoid performing altogether and therefore never improve. Mistakes, whether in practice or performances, aren’t a bad thing - they’re stepping stones to success.
3. Practicing Failure
The key to changing the way that we view failure is to practice failure. We need to become acquainted with what it feels like to come across something, get it wrong and then build evidence that working on it will directly improve our playing. This is why designing your practice is so essential.
I often say that I split practice into three sections; Scales/Technical Exercises, Sight Reading and Pieces.
- Scales and Technical Exercises - These improve your ability to physically play the instrument (along with a bit of theory surrounding scales).
- Sight Reading - This improves your ability to instantly recognise notes and symbols in sheet music.
- Pieces -These allow you to apply your technique and reading skills to improve your musical expression and understanding of music.
Each of these areas comes with unique opportunities to fail:
- Mistakes in scales or exercises highlights issues with your physical technique.
- Mistakes in sight reading shows weaknesses in your ability to process sheet music.
- Mistakes in pieces can be many things but is often an issue with your technical, interpretive or expressive ability. (side note: any technique issues found in a piece should become a technical exercise at the start of your practice).
However each of these three elements can be approached in the same way and that way is to “fail and isolate”.
Let’s say you play a scale and get the fingers wrong. That’s great! You’ve found something that is going to make your scales and technique much better. So, isolate the mistake and only play up until one note beyond that mistake.
Let’s say you play wrong notes while sight reading. How wonderful! Try to identify why the mistake occurred, maybe it’s identifying notes, jumps between notes or rhythms. Then make a mental note of the issue for your next exercise (side note: only practice sight reading exercises once, otherwise its not sight reading).
Let’s say you are playing a piece of music and you are struggling to remember to change dynamics in a specific bar. Excellent! Play that bar repeatedly with intentional dynamics and then practice transitioning into it from the previous bar.
The key is to acknowledge your mistakes, isolate the problem and then practice it deliberately. When this becomes your natural approach to learning the instrument, not only will you learn much quicker but you will also learn to appreciate the mistakes you make for the value that they provide!
Matthew Cawood
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