Why Playing It Again Isn’t Practice
Repetition
When learning to play the piano, we can often fall into the trap of assuming that practice is all about repetition. If you play something lots of times, you get better at it, so the goal of practice is therefore to play something lots of times, right? If something goes wrong, the instinct is to simply play it again in order to build familiarity.
Repetition feels productive because you are able to sit down at the piano and physically do something without thinking about the process in order to try and improve. However, repetition isn’t necessarily a good thing, and it isn’t the only way of improving. In fact, if repetition isn’t treated more carefully, it can actually have the opposite effect.
When practicing, your brain doesn’t really know if what you are playing is the correct thing or if what you are playing is the incorrect thing. It just knows that if you are performing an action repeatedly, it’s an action that is obviously required, and therefore it will build the synapses in order for you to remember how to do that. Every repetition strengthens that brain pathway, whether it is correct or incorrect.
This is actually why some mistakes become persistent in your playing, for example, why you might become tense and find it difficult to undo that tension. It’s never doing something wrong one time that has caused that. It’s doing the same thing repeatedly and training your brain that that’s how it needs to perform that task.
This means that if nothing changes between repetitions, you are blindly reinforcing the way that you already play it. Sometimes that can be a good thing if you want to reinforce the correct way of doing something, but it can also be a bad thing if you are reinforcing the mistakes you’re making.
This is why it’s important that we don’t mistake familiarity for improvement…we can become very familiar with a section of music or even an entire piece, but still not be improving that piece of music. The purpose of practice actually often goes against the purpose of repetition. Practice is there to create change. Repetition is there to consolidate that change.
Feedback
When we are practicing, if we think about exactly what we are trying to do, we are trying to gain information from each note we press in order to improve. We might not be thinking that granularly, note by note, but the essence of practice is that we are playing in order to work out what needs improving. Which means that practice only works if each attempt gives you information and we act upon that information. So, repetition should answer these questions:
- What went wrong?
- Why did it happen?
- What can I change in the next attempt?
Without this iterative process and self-feedback, you’re left simply hoping that it will get better naturally.
There’s a concept in language learning called fossilisation. This is a concept where our pronunciation of a word or our use of some grammar in a language becomes very difficult to undo because we’ve done it so many times in that way. This concept also holds true at the piano. So, something becoming better naturally isn’t really possible in the true sense of it. What really happens when it feels like something is getting better naturally is we are reinforcing the correct things alongside reinforcing the incorrect things.
So in that sense, repetition by itself will result in improvement, but at the same time, it will also cause fossilisation. So instead of just repeating in the hope that the correct things reinforce themselves without the incorrect things reinforcing themselves, we can follow an iterative process to remove the incorrect things and reinforce the correct things.
So firstly, your ears are the greatest practice tool because we can often hear when something isn’t correct or not how we wanted it to be. The quicker you notice a mistake, the quicker you can alter your approach to that mistake in order to reinforce the correct thing. Improvements come from constantly adjusting your practice rather than just repeating. It’s a kind of continuous feedback loop.
Secondly, we then need to know what to do in order to make it correct. This often means either isolating the problem or slowing the problem down so that you can play it correctly at least once. Once you can do that, you have a starting point in order to start reinforcing the correct thing.
Progress
If you are anything like me, having structure and some concrete processes you can use are the most useful ways of practising.
So, here’s some steps that you can implement and use as a feedback loop:
- Acknowledge you’ve made a mistake.
- Stop.
- Before repeating, have a single clear goal (notice what needs fixing and don’t try to fix everything at once).
- Isolate the single problem.
- Slow down to a speed that you can successfully play it.
- If you play it successfully, slowly push the difficulty (increase speed or expand the region).
- If you make another mistake, go back to step 1.
Once that improves, you can move on to other focuses. But it’s also important to realise that some mistakes, especially technical mistakes where you’re trying to get your hand to physically do something, won’t be fixed in a single session. So, for those kinds of mistakes, it’s important to continue to play it at a speed at which you can get it correct. You can still move on to other things and come back to it in a future session.
It’s also important to remember that when we practice a piece of music, we aren’t just practicing that piece of music. We’re practicing on behalf of all future pieces of music that we learn. Spending what feels like an outsized amount of time on a particular problem is absolutely fine because what you spend time on now you won’t have to spend time on later. So remember that one thoughtful, iterative repetition is worth more than any automatic ones for your future playing.
Matt