How much practice is enough

I find that meditating for fifteen minutes or so between practice sessions is very effective for me. It not only rests my mind, but slows it down and re-centers it; allowing my 2nd and 3rd practice sessions of the day to be longer and more productive. While there are many forms of meditation I prefer mindful meditation. Focused, deliberate practice is exhausting.

I love your ideas, they are really amazing. I play the Cello and the writing pad to write down your ideas and your thoughts about what your doing wrong, how to fix that problem, and etc is useful. I think it is really thoughtful of you to be explaining to people who need help about their instrument usage and what they could try to do better or a little less with their instrument. I absolutely love the 5 keys for more effective practices that you wrote about.

I love how you showed and explained what performers and psychologists say and think about how many hours to play, how much practice is enough, is there a thing for practicing enough, and is there an optimal number of hours that on could practice.

Like the other person who responded, I also do other tasks between practice sessions. I find reading or watching tv is the worst things I could do.

I never seem to be able to get back into practice mode. I find doing tasks like housework are a good break, like handwashing dishes, vacuuming or dusting. Getting out also helps so cutting grass or going out to run errands.

Great article! So many think that if they spend more time that solves the problem or gives them an excuse. Thanks Dr. Kageyama, excellently thought out and conceived article. These ideas are SO important. I wish somebody had taught me how to practice when I was a young kid. So many wasted hours. I spend so much of my time in lessons teaching my students these ideas. Thanks for helping me focus my ideas and inspiring me to renew my goals to move my students in this direction!

What a great article! Thank you for writing this so concisely:- , Ingrid. Would you suggest that these guidelines for practice are the same or similar for all variants of musical genres?

Classical, popular, jazz, folk? I play guitar, bass and piano but find it hard to practice on the bass because I am only practicing a part…yet when I play piano or guitar I play melody AND harmonic accompaniment and thus can hear and feel the entire form. So when I want to learn a piece, I do so by playing and practicing the piece on BOTH guitar and piano…then it seems to just fall in place on the bass. Is that practicing with my head? Thanks for a thought-provoking presentation!

One of my favorite books that addresses the topic of what it takes to achieve mastery is called, simply, Mastery , written by George Leonard. Your idea of learning the other parts involved in the group, so as to have a better sense of where your bass part fits into the whole is a great idea. Classical musicians can benefit from this kind of approach as well, especially when it comes to orchestral excerpts, which, played in isolation out of context, often feel and sound more like etudes than great music.

I have found practicing with one of the computerized music practice programs with the bass helped me tremendously. Of course, already mentioned is recording one part so you can practice the other parts. Years ago there was available, MMO for music minus one. An orchestral arrangement, complete except for your part.

You might want to check and see if they are still available, and for the particular piece of music you are wanting. These are ideas all worth remembering. I find them most difficult to remember when I have an enormous work load to practice. The industrial psych literature indicates that people are more productive when they take breaks; I expect that this finding would be just as applicable to musicians in the practice room as well. Your email address will not be published.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Learn the 1 thing that top practicers do differently, plus 7 other strategies for practice that sticks. If performances have been frustratingly inconsistent, try the 4-min Mental Skills Audit.

It won't tell you what Harry Potter character you are, but it will point you in the direction of some new practice hacks that could help you level up. Take the MSA. Popular Articles. Is Slow Practice Really Necessary? How much is enough? Is there such a thing as practicing too much? Is there an optimal number of hours that one should practice?

What Do Performers Say? Some of the great artists of the 20th century have shared their thoughts on these questions. Other great artists have expressed similar sentiments. Violinist Nathan Milstein is said to have once asked his teacher Leopold Auer how many hours a day he should be practicing.

You know, this is not a bad idea — one of my own teachers, Donald Weilerstein , once suggested that I establish a hour period of time every week where I was not allowed to pick up my instrument. What Do Psychologists Say? When it comes to understanding expertise and expert performance, psychologist Dr. Note that the real key here is not the amount of practice required as the exact number of hours is debatable but the type of practice required to attain an expert level of performance.

Mindless Practice Have you ever listened to someone practice? Have you ever listened to yourself practice, for that matter? Tape yourself practicing for an hour, take a walk through the practice room area at school and eavesdrop on your fellow students, or ask your students to pretend they are at home and watch them practice during a lesson.

What do you notice? There are three major problems with the mindless method of practicing. It is a waste of time Why? For one, very little productive learning takes place when we practice this way. Even worse, you are actually digging yourself a hole by practicing this way, because what this model of practicing does do is strengthen undesirable habits and errors, literally making it more likely that you will screw up more consistently in the future.

This makes it more difficult to correct these habits in the future — so you are actually adding to the amount of future practice time you will need in order to eliminate these bad habits and tendencies. You may not be able to play it perfectly every time at first, but this is what repetition is for — to reinforce the correct habits until they are stronger than the bad habits. Instead of fighting a never-ending battle against the weeds, your time is better spent trying to cultivate the grass so that over time the grass crowds out the weeds.

We tend to practice unconsciously, and then end up trying to perform consciously — not a great formula for success. Recall from this article that you have a tendency to shift over into hyper-analytical left brain mode when you walk out on stage.

It is tedious and boring Practicing mindlessly is a chore. The curves showed a period of "noise" until the participants completed an average of 20 cases. Then, the curves reached an inflection point after which learning slowed but did not stop even after cases. The final cumulative sensitivity was 0. Applying a reference criterion, the authors classified learners into formative categories.

Conclusions: Learning curves describing deliberate practice of radiograph interpretation allow medical educators to define at which point s practice is most efficient and how much practice is required to achieve a defined level of mastery. But really, probably not. Is there a number, an actual numerical goal that we could work towards, that would get us to about 8 th grade piano? Yes, there is. This is not so. There are diploma examinations after 8 th grade, if one still wishes to be in the examination system, and then of course there is the whole world of undergraduate and postgraduate study at University, piano competitions, overseas study… the list goes on.

In my teaching experience, the amount of practice needed, over a period of years, to be prepared enough for an 8 th grade standard of exam is… about 1, hours. How easy is that! So here is a more realistic breakdown of how the hours would eventuate.

The teacher has asked that you practice mins 4 times per week perfectly reasonable. If you actually do this, after a couple of years or so you will have invested around hours into piano practice. Now you and your teacher might be thinking about working towards a Preliminary Grade piano exam so that you can join in with your friends in the playground when they are all talking about what grade they are up to.

So if we can say that hours has seen us through the beginner stages, how much more practice do we need to put in to do well in a Preliminary grade piano exam?