@herve-amiot And this is a bit of an oversimplification perhaps, and an attempt to apply something from outside music to music, but conceptually, it makes sense to me that there are moments when playing with eyes closed could help (especially if playing from memory):

https://bulletproofmusician.com/do-musicians-perform-better-with-eyes-open-or-ckosed/

I’m sure Molly will be able to weigh in on the more neuro-related aspects of your previous question. 😁

@herve-amiot Interesting observation. Have you tried recording yourself to see how much of a difference you notice in the recorded version of your playing when you have headphones on vs when you don’t?

My initial thought was to wonder if you’re naturally less self-critical and self-evaluative when playing with headphones on, because when you can’t hear as much of the nuances and details that we otherwise tend to obsess about, maybe it’s easier to let go of that? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were more naturally focused on bigger-picture things, like phrasing, as opposed to the pesky tiny details of sound production, etc. that we can easily over focus on, and which can lead to a tendency to try to overcontrol.

I’m assuming you’ve seen the movie The King’s Speech? If not, I think you’d enjoy it, as it applies this idea to stuttering.

@grace-ueng Yes – interleaved would be rotating between different passages in the three pieces multiple times in the same practice sessions. Where you’re practicing getting things right the first time, essentially, instead of getting better at making adjustments and getting a passage “right” on the 2nd or 3rd try. Just like how you would study vocabulary words with flashcards, cycling through the deck multiple times, testing yourself.

And variable practice would be practicing selected passages/pieces with more variation from one repetition to the next. Like, playing it louder, softer, faster, slower, phrased this way, phrased that way, bringing out this character or that character, etc. Instead of trying to play it the exact same way every single time.

@sandra-lacroix It’s in the Module on Getting Into the Zone – https://members.bulletproofmusician.com/courses/beyond-practicing/modules/lesson-2-attention-control-strategies/lesson/2-1-anticipatory-auditory-imagery-pc15/

Hi Helen,

The pulse strategy can be a tricky one for younger students, though it really depends on where they are in their development and how much of this sort of thing they’ve already done for other musical reasons.

The audiation strategy though often comes much more naturally to folks, and those at the 14-19 range will often be able to implement this in their practice and performance. Especially if they already have some familiarity with mental practice and visualization. This could even be a good place to start, as this can have some benefits too, of course!

Hi Elisa,

Good question. So, the order of the strategies and the weekly structure is really just so that you can get a taste of each strategy and see how it works for you. So you don’t have to go through it linearly. It’d be nice if there were a single practice formula you could just plug and play, but it’s very difficult to come up with a practice “formula” because our practice goals and needs are always changing from day to day, week to week, for each piece, and depending on what our learning priorities and performance timeline look like.

But long story short, the idea is that deliberate practice is something you would do most of the time with most repertoire, whether it’s new or old. That’s just what effective practice looks like at every stage of learning.

Interleaved practice is just a practice organization or scheduling strategy, not a learning strategy, in the sense that in each interleaved practice segment, you’d still be doing deliberate practice within each…

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Hi Albert – I’m not sure if you’ve gotten to this part of the module yet, but I wonder if it will help to differentiate a bit between practicing and performing?

As in, the idea is to run or “perform” some portion of the music that you’re working on as if it were a performance (even if it’s not anywhere close to performance-ready), to naturally expose the bits that are most in need of work. The goal in these run-throughs is not to look for problems while you’re playing, but to practice performing (this will make more sense in the focus module), and allow the problem passages to expose themselves. And then you can use the deliberate practice process to figure out why it’s not sounding the way you want, and find a solution to that problem.

As things become increasingly polished, you’ll continue to do the same thing, but with increasing use of recordings, so that you can identify more subtle details, but also so that you don’t have to spend so much of your mental bandwidth…

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@john-bochnowski You’d think this would be a pretty straightforward thing, and I grew up with the 50/10 split that I think came from Dorothy DeLay or maybe Galamian, which I think remains pretty popular, but beyond all of the traditions, studies about breaks, productivity, etc., I think the most important factor, is how effectively you can concentrate and stay focused on the task at hand.

For instance, it may be that a 45/15 split works great for you in the morning. But by the afternoon, after you’ve already practiced and maybe done some teaching, maybe you can only stay focused for 25-30 minutes at a time, and need longer breaks too.

It might be worth a) mapping out your energy levels from hour to hour for a week (print out a calendar and rate your energy from 1-10 every hour), and then b) paying attention to how effectively you can stay focused during your practice sessions. Whenever you find your focus starting to fade, make a note of that, so that over the course of a…

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@herve-amiot It’s possible that even without any formal sheet music to work off of, it may still be useful to try to sketch some sort of visual outline for yourself or a “map,” to help give yourself something of a structure to navigate with your mind as you play through a piece.

Hi Hervé,

A couple thoughts:

1. I can’t say for sure, but think it could very well be that you might fall in the normal range for mind-wandering – but that doesn’t meant you couldn’t improve of course!

2. The thing that seems most positive to me is that you notice your mind wandering now quite regularly. I wonder if the next step isn’t so much to prevent your mind from wandering, but to be able to redirect your mind back quicker to your mental script and the present moment? As in, maybe it’s fine if your mind wanders off multiple times in each song – so long as you notice immediately, and can then redirect your thoughts back to the music pretty much right away.

3. If you do want to work on or practice enhancing focus and attention control, aside from practicing this in your practice, have you experimented much with meditation? This can be a really helpful way of developing your focus muscles, not just for music but for life in general.

Yay – that was exactly my experience as well. There wasn’t one single thing that changed everything, but an integration of a lot of things that all seemed to come together eventually. 😁

It can be simultaneously easier or more difficult in an orchestral context as there are more potential useful targets for your attention (conductor, other sections or instrumental parts to connect or blend with, a little like chamber music perhaps?), but also distractions and non-relevant things that your mind can go to as well (what colleagues might be thinking, worries and doubts, non relevant parts of the orchestra, audience, etc). I imagine with so much repertoire over the course of a season, one may not get as much time to really develop a script for attention like one might for a solo performance or audition where there’s much more time to prepare too…but hopefully even the awareness of there being useful and less useful targets for attention will make it easier to start redirecting attention to more task relevant elements from one moment to the next, as each moment is a fresh new opportunity to make a new choice. 😁

Glad to hear things are coming along, Heather! Indeed, the attention control part can take a while, as our minds are quite squirrelly indeed, but it sounds like you’re starting to feel that difference weren’t we can keep things quieter up there – yay! 😁

Hi Margaret,

Yours is a very straightforward and seemingly simple question, but can actually get quite complicated pretty quickly!

Carolyn Christie talks about this a bit in her recent podcast episode here: https://bulletproofmusician.com/carolyn-christie-on-overcoming-nerves-with-healthier-internal-dialogue-and-phrasing/

Challenge #1 is figuring out what to spend time working on. One way to do this is to record yourself at the beginning of a practice day, listen back, and put together a list of problems you’d like to find solutions to.

Challenge #2 is deciding which of these spots to spend time working on, because there’s never enough time to solve them all! Carolyn talks about assigning each a priority, in three levels – like red, yellow, green, or difficult, medium, easy, etc.

Challenge #3 is figuring out how much time (or how many repetitions) to spend on each. Carolyn talks about this as well, and recommends a mix of difficult, medium, and easy. I agree with this mix…

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Hi Lan Shu! One of the toughest challenges is always trying to expose the things that are most likely to be most uncomfortable/unreliable on stage.

To that end, you might consider trying to orient these next 3 weeks around performance practice. For instance, you could plan to do runthroughs of your piece (or program) at or near the same time that you’ll be performing exactly 3 weeks from performance day. And then 2 weeks away and then 1 week away.

In an ideal world you’d be able to do this in the same venue on the same piano as you’ll perform on – but this pretty much never ever happens, so the next best thing would be to play on different pianos and in different places for each of your practice performances, so that you develop this flexibility and get accustomed to playing in (ideally) larger spaces more like the performance venue.

This will help you clarify and identify goals for each week’s practice, as you can listen/watch the recording and decide what needs the…

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Hi Helen! You know, that’s a good question. I actually haven’t looked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of those realities of motor learning and performance that’s so evident from experience and theory, that there isn’t much research comparing performing a motor skill with excess tension vs. performing it with more physical ease and freedom.