No Talent Required: An illuminating collection of truisms, attitudes, and practice habits that are guaranteed to pave the road to mastery…
Practice Habits: No Talent Required (Micro-Lessons)
How to make highly-effective and efficient study and practice habits a routine part of every one of your study and practice sessions… Let’s go!
If you want to get good, you have to do more than just play. You have to STUDY and PRACTICE. ~ frank peter
The quality of your performance is absolutely determined by the quality of your study and practice habits. ~ frank peter
Getting good is the inevitable reward for replacing a very short list of UN-productive study and practice habits with a very short list of productive study and practice habits. ~ frank peter
When you practice the wrong things the wrong way, learning is slow and insecure. When you study and practice the right things the right way, learning is fast and enduring. ~ frank peter
The reason you make mistakes and seem to forget the music is that you never really learned the music properly in the first place. ~ frank peter
If you study and practice the right things the right way you should expect fast and explosive progress… not painfully slow kind of sort of progress only after years and years and years of arduous effort. ~ frank peter
Quality first, quantity second. In other words, Study first, practice second. ~ frank peter
Never practice something faster than you can hear it, think about it, see it, and execute it ACCURATELY. ~ frank peter
Exercising makes your muscles tired. Studying makes your brain tired. If you want to get good, you don’t need to exercise. You need to study! ~ frank peter
Five minutes of mindful attention beats five hours of mindless repetition. ~ frank peter
The best way to remember something is to make it memorable! ~ frank peter
Music that is merely “memorized” is at risk of being forgotten. Music that is understood is never forgotten. ~ frank peter
Once your brain recognizes a musical pattern, it doesn’t have to “try” to remember it. It automatically becomes a permanent part of your musical mind. ~ frank peter
A mistake is like a good friend telling you that you still have something more to learn. ~ frank peter
Every mistake is a mental error, not a physical error. ~ frank peter
Practice makes permanent. So stop “practicing” your mistakes! ~ frank peter
Record everything, listen to the playback immediately, and ask yourself: Is THAT what you intended to play? And if it isn’t what you intended to play, experiment with different ways to think about the music and move your body until you get it.” ~ frank peter
If, at first, you don’t succeed… please try again… but try again in a different way. ~ frank peter
Mindless practice, sloppy performance. Mindful practice, crisp performance! ~ frank peter
Stop wasting time doing things that don’t help you perform better! ~ frank peter
Stop wasting time “practicing” stuff you already know how to play! ~ frank peter
Stop going back to the beginning of the piece every time you make a mistake! ~ frank peter
“Men trip not on mountains, but on stones.” ~ Hindustani proverb
You know you know the music when you can imagine playing it with your ears, intellect, eyes, and muscles! ~ frank peter
Doing a little bit every day beats doing a lotta bit once a week. ~ frank peter
Mastery is largely about discovering simplicity in apparent complexity. Once you see the simplicity, you realize that complexity is just an illusion. ~ frank peter
One reason to play music is to discover your limits… so that you can transcend them… and realize that they weren’t limits after all. ~ frank peter
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