Ever wonder why it is that you can play a tricky passage perfectly five times out of five at home? But on stage, the one time you need things to go right, everything suddenly becomes more hit or miss?
It can be tempting to redouble your efforts and aim for 10 perfect reps out of 10. Or try to keep the notes in your fingers by playing the tricky passages over and over while warming up before the concert. Or continue to play silently backstage, until the very last moment before you walk onstage.
Spinning plates…
It can feel like being that guy on TV who keeps all the plates spinning up in the air. Scrambling frantically from one to the next, trying to touch everything every few seconds to make sure nothing comes crashing down.
Of course, it’s exhausting to try to keep all those plates spinning indefinitely. And you don’t have the time or energy to practice everything in multiples of 10 consecutive “perfect” repetitions (whatever that means anyway).
So the good news is that you don’t have to run frantically from plate to plate.
It turns out there’s a way to tweak how you practice, that could help you play more accurately and with greater consistency when it matters.
And what might that be?
A third type of practice?
Learning can be a rather curious thing. Have you ever gone into an exam thinking that you knew the material only to discover in horror that you didn’t know nearly as much as you thought?
It can be the same in the practice room. The rapid improvement you hear when learning a new skill by repeating the same passage over and over is deceptive.
We have a tendency to confuse the rate of acquisition – or how fast we improve during practice – with learning. A better measure of learning is how much of that skill is still retrievable, an hour, day, or week after a practice session.
We’ve explored several key practice strategies that can help increase this kind of stable learning in previous articles. Like deliberate practice vs. mindless repetition. Interleaved vs. blocked practice.
A third paradigm is variable vs. constant practice.
An accuracy study
One of the classic studies in this area (Kerr & Booth, 1978) compared two groups of 8-year olds who practiced tossing beanbags to targets at various distances over the course of 12 weeks.
One group practiced tossing beanbags to a target 3 feet away (“constant” practice group).
The other group practiced tossing beanbags to targets 2 feet away and 4 feet away (“variable” practice group).
At the end of the study, when the kids were tested on their ability to hit the 3-foot target, the ones who practiced from 2 and 4-feet – but never from 3-feet – actually demonstrated significantly greater accuracy on the final test than those who practiced at 3 feet the entire time.
Wait…what? Was this some sort of weird fluke?
The illusion of learning
Nope!
Subsequent studies have replicated such results, and suggest that practicing the same skill over and over in exactly the same way does help to improve your performance during practice, but really just creates the illusion of rapid learning.
Meanwhile, if you want to demonstrate a high level of skill and mastery when it’s time to perform and develop skills that are more long-lasting, practicing multiple variations of the same skill (i.e. louder, softer, more vibrato, less, etc.) is the more effective strategy. Even if you may not appear to improve quite as rapidly during practice.
Because ultimately, this variable practice approach appears to create more robust motor programs. Which will enable you to be more flexible and play your best whether the acoustics are dryer than you expected, the pianist is playing slower than they did in rehearsal, or your hands are freezing cold.
Ok…but how robust are these gains, really? As in, how long do the benefits of variable practice last?
Loooong-term retention
In a 2006 study (Memmert) 32 college students were asked to practice shooting free throws.
Everyone started by taking a shooting test to establish a baseline of their shooting abilities.
Then, each participant went through a 90-minute training session where they either shot 160 baskets from the free throw line (constant practice group) or 160 shots from a number of different positions (variable practice group).
And would there be any difference between the groups?
Two performance tests
When tested immediately after the training session, the constant practice group performed better than the variable practice group. No surprise, right?
However, the researchers surprised the participants a year later by having them return to the lab for another test. And this time, the results were reversed.
Despite not practicing free throws for a year, the participants who took their free throws from a variety of locations a year ago shot more accurately than those who practiced only from the free throw line.
So what are we to do with this?
Take action
Well, one key takeaway is to remember that rapid improvement can be deceptive. In that the progress you appear to make during the acquisition phase of a skill isn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of how much deep, durable, retrievable learning is taking place. As Itzhak Perlman once said, “things you learn quickly you forget quickly.”
Doing lots of repetitions in a row might be satisfying and feel like you’re putting in the time and making rapid progress – but don’t confuse the temporarily high “accessibility” of the correct motor program with the “underlying habit strength” of that motor program.
So instead of practicing with a metronome at just one speed, try practicing slower and faster than the target tempo. Louder and softer. With vibrato and without.
The goal is a type of practice that neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein called “repetition without repetition.” Where you change things slightly from one repetition to the next within a range of variations.
Does this make practicing a little more challenging in the moment? Perhaps – but I think that’s kind of the point. Because this type of challenge will help you develop skills that can serve you well in any situation, not just when you’re playing alone in the familiar comfort of your practice room.
Plus, a little challenge can be good! I think you’ll find that the particular kind of challenge provided by repetition without repetition actually makes practicing more engaging and much funner than regular old repetition. 😁
References
Kerr, R., & Booth, B. F. (1978). Specific and varied practice of motor skill. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 46(2), 395–401. https://doi.org/10.1177/003151257804600201
Memmert, D. (2006). Long-Term Effects of Type of Practice on the Learning and Transfer of a Complex Motor Skill. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 103(3), 912-916. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.103.3.912-916
Good ! I’ll try it especially for the vibrato which i’m trying to learn.
Good One! I’ll use the information with my students. It’s recital time!
Thanks, Noa!
My mind is just flooded with ideas to use in my bagpipe studio, and with my own practice. We tend to either get lost in the endless practice of the highly technical embellishments of the musical genre called piobaireachd, things like taurluaths and crunluath a machs lip. Or we just give them service and hope nobody notices. This idea is just what I have been looking for. We are all going to have to be more flexible mentally to use this, but this will break a lot of chains, especially mine. And yes, there are pipers who are as serious musicians as anyone in your world. I am not one of them. 😉
One thing that I try to do is to practice in different places in my house. Including the bathroom! Hearing completely different acoustics (such as the echo-y bathroom) can really throw you off, and who knows what that stage will sound like! Even turning around in the same room can be disorienting. Also, if I am going to be playing from memory, I practice without a stand in front of me. You can feel really naked if you’re not used to being without a stand.
If a friend comes over, I ask them to hear my piece. This is also helpful, having the distraction of people in the room.
I like the other ideas, too! I’ll try them.
Really good advice. I try to vary the rhythm – play slower or faster, make the rhythms different. It keeps the mind engaged in a way that just endlessly practicing the same thing cannot do.
Great article! I notice that the weaknesses of the “constant” form of practice most obviously turn on students when they’re trying to play those “really fast” songs they’ve been thinking about playing for weeks on end. Using the “Amazing Slow Downer” app on my iPad what I have them do is play through the songs past the album speed (100% speed on the app) to break them of the tension built from a “constant” approach.
Excellent read as always, application is key again. Thanks for the free content, we are all very appreciative.
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Hi!
What I do is play the first note in each beat, especially if it is a quick passage. If you manage to get the first note in time with precision, the rest will just ‘click’ into place. I also use different bows, maybe all separate, then two notes per bow, whole bow or just a tiny bit…the combinarion is just endless.
Dr. Noa, I want to thank you for all these fantastic and helpful articles that you write to help us improve. I discovered this website less rhan a month ago and I have learned more about practicing and performing in this tine than in my entire life. They never really teach you how to practice…anyway, thanks
Great! It will try to incorporate this in my practice!
One obvious way to do it for us guitarists that are fortunate enough to have more than one guitar is to practice on different guitar. So far I tended to practice only on one.
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