Practice Habits: The Proper Mindset

FACT: The quality of your music-making is absolutely determined by the quality of your study and practice habits…

The Proper Mindset (YouTube)

---

The Proper Mindset Takeaways

Twenty-two insights and principles that will get your whole attitude regarding studying and practicing moving in the right direction…

1. The quality of your performance is absolutely determined by the quality of your study and practice habits.
2. The real reason you are not making progress is typically not that you are untalented, but that you are studying and practicing the wrong way.
3. The reason you make mistakes and seem to forget the music when you perform is that you never really learned the music properly in the first place.
4. Quality first, quantity second. In other words, five minutes of mindful attention beats five hours of mindless repetition.
5. If you study and practice the right things the right way you should expect super-fast progress… not painfully slow kind of sort of progress only after years and years and years of arduous effort.
6. Every aspect of music-making… including how you conceive the music, how you perceive the music with your senses, and how you move your muscles… is controlled by your brain. Not some of it… not most of it… all of it! Therefore, the goal of studying and practicing is always… not sometimes… not most of the time… always… to change your brain.
7. Because your muscles do exactly what your brain tells them to do, every mistake is a mental, not a physical, error. To use a computer analogy, when you’re having difficulty playing a piece of music, there’s nothing wrong with your hardware. When you’re having difficulty playing a piece of music, it’s because you are running inefficient or buggy software.
8. Music is a language… a language that is unique, universal, and un-translatable… with its own wordless grammar and vocabulary. And so, studying and practicing the right way is the process of learning how to speak the language of music.
9. Your brain is naturally wired to seek, appreciate, and respond to patterns. It enjoys patterns. It does not enjoy randomness. Once your brain recognizes a musical pattern, it doesn’t have to “try” to remember it. It a becomes permanent part of your musical mind.
10. Studying and practicing the right way engages all four Musical Intelligences: Aural (how you want the music to sound and feel), Analytical (your theoretical understanding of the musical patterns), Visuospatial (the arrangement and sequence of notes on the keyboard), and Kinesthetic (the Fingering & Choreography).
11. If you study and practice with all four musical intelligences engaged, you are doing more than merely memorizing the music. You are internalizing the music in multiple dimensions that mutually reinforce each other. So, instead of just kind of sort of knowing the music “by finger”, you’re understanding the music with your ears, brains, eyes, and muscles.
12. Studying and practicing the right way… with all four musical intelligences engaged… builds enormous confidence when you perform… and is the best antidote to stage fright.
13. If you study and practice the right way… with all four musical intelligences engaged… your musical intentions will automatically trigger the appropriate choreography when you perform.
14. Every growing musician should be doing two things simultaneously: Adding music you love to your repertoire… and working on your general musicianship.
15. Each piece of music you play is a unique combination of patterns… that you want to get into your ears, intellect, eyes, and muscles. To that end, general musicianship… things like scales, chords, chord voicings, chord progressions, tonality, form, meter, and rhythm… properly studied… give you the knowledge and skills required to hear, understand, see, and execute these patterns.
16. Any behavior that you repeat eventually becomes an unconscious habit. In other words, practice makes permanent. In other other words, poor practice habits make it is possible to become quite “skilled” at making mistakes. So, you must be extremely careful about what and how you practice.
17. Never ignore a mistake. A mistake is like a good friend telling you that you have something to learn… But a mistake is valuable only if you have the honesty, humility, and discipline to address it constructively. THIS is the hard part of learning to play the piano and what mastery is made of.
18. You will never master something by repeating it poorly over and over and over again, hoping that it will someday, somehow become easy. In fact, you are just making matters worse by ingraining bad habits.
19. When something is wrong, the very worst thing you can do is play it again the exact same way. To put into positive terms… If at first you don’t succeed… please do try again, but try again in a different way… by thinking about it in a different way and moving your body in a different way.
20. What lots of people consider practicing is little more than mindless repetition and a bunch of bad habits… typically always starting at the beginning of the piece… typically going back to the beginning after making a Boo Boo… typically “practicing” at a tempo faster than you can play accurately… typically “practicing” with sloppy rhythm… and typically “practicing” with sloppy technique. Of course, this is not studying or practicing at all. It’s just playing poorly over and over and over again… and ingraining bad habits even deeper.
21. Talent alone can take you only so far… The key to success is as simple to say as it is hard to do: If you want to get good, you have to change your study and practice habits!
22. Getting good is the inevitable… I repeat INEVITABLE… reward for replacing a very short list… I emphasize… a very SHORT list… of UN-productive habits with a very short list… and I emphasize… a very SHORT list… of productive study and practice habits… to be explored in depth in the next video! I look forward to seeing you there!

---

learn more… Practice Habits