[Noa Kageyama]

I always found that this forced me to be more intentional about each repetition when practicing. Or at least be more mindful in general, from moment to moment.

On a related note, you might have to try the two terms out to see how you feel about it, but some folks find it helpful to think of it less as a laundry list, and more as a shopping list. The latter having fewer associations with the idea of doing chores. ????

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Lisa,

The short answer is it depends. =)

As in, it kind of depends on what the goal of mental practice is in that moment. For instance, if you’re in the early stages of learning a new piece, and by mental practice you include things like singing through the score, solfeging, visualizing how you want it to sound, etc., it could be that mental practice could take up as much as 75% of your practice time. Danish trumpet player Kristian Steenstrup, for instance, encourages students to solfège through a couple lines, do some imagery through the same bits, then imagery while moving the body and/or listening to music next, and then actually play the lines physically.

In the middle stages of learning, you might do some mental reps away from the instrument while driving, etc., but not that much during the core part of your practice unless you want to save yourself some wear and tear and figure things out between physical repetitions.

And if you’re in the latter stages of learning, and preparing for an audition, it might be that your mental practice is more about visualizing full run-throughs, or anticipating things that could go wrong, and practicing contingency plans.

It’s really tempting to want to come up with a formula for how to practice that works all the time for everything, but for better or worse, things are pretty fluid and changing. The biggest constant, is the value of having a way to assess where you’re at (recording, run-throughs on a regular basis), having a way to set goals and prioritize which things need the most work (listening), and then having a set of tools to help you achieve those goals (the various skills in the course). Some days it might be more nuts and bolts of practicing, other days it might be more about confidence, or cultivating a routine, or honing focus.

That’s probably way more detail than you were asking for, but hope it helps to clarify!

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Kenji,

I’d be curious to see if there were any patterns or themes in terms of these rhythmic inconsistencies too. In terms of where they happen, whether it’s in rests or longer notes, or (depending on your instrument) if it might be related to string crossings, etc.

I do think the pulse strategy will help lots as you get increasingly comfortable with it (have you listened to Erik Ralske’s podcast interview? He talks about this a good bit).

But also, I’m not sure how you practice with a metronome, but there’s a big difference between learning to synchronize your playing to an external source, and cultivating a stronger internal pulse, and “normal” metronome practice tends not to help as much with the latter. There are two metronome apps that I’m aware of – Time Guru and Tonal Energy – that have an essential feature known as random beat silencing. This is where you can ask it to randomly mute a certain percentage of beats, so that you have to practice cultivating a stronger sense of pulse throughout a passage. I wonder if this might be helpful as well? You can learn more about the rationale and reason for this in these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwDB7aBcWfw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KBAnSOjWmU

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Liesbeth,

Ack, yeah, results like this can be frustrating and discouraging. Athletes often deal with this sort of thing too, for what it’s worth. Even in sports where the criteria are clear, it’s often the case that a team can play pretty great and still lose (also possible to play less than one’s best and still win too, of course), which can be pretty demoralizing.

One of the things that can help – though it’s much easier said than done – is to focus relentlessly on growth and the things you control, because we can drive ourselves pretty crazy thinking about things we really don’t control (whether the committee as a whole likes our sound, or agrees with how we played it, or whether they’re even listening or paying attention when we’re playing, or if they already have someone in mind, or if they had an argument with a colleague before and are being obtuse, etc., etc.). There’s a video on this that I like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIbL3N8OU-E

The other thing I’m wondering is, do you record your auditions? I know it’s frowned upon if not explicitly forbidden, but there’s a reason for recording regardless, related to the above. We can chat about it more if you’re not already recording.

The other thing I’m wondering is how you decide how to play each excerpt – like, how do you decide on an interpretation? Is there listening involved? And if so, how or how much? This could be another thing to tweak in your preparation as well, which we can talk about more here.

One last thing that I think might help is a perspective from the actor Bryan Cranston. I think these videos on auditioning in the acting world are as relevant in the music world, and hope you find them helpful with mindset in the next week:

• Inspiring advice from Bryan Cranston to aspiring actors
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVPxwh2UHOk

Have a good week!

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Stephan,

Great question. So there was a study that came out a few years ago that I thought I wrote about, but now I’m thinking maybe I didn’t because I couldn’t figure out how to make it apply to music. But this is perfect – because now I think I can write about it! Long story short, the goal is to be in your “zone of proximal development,” just outside of what’s comfortable, but not too stress-inducing. And that sweet spot for learning seems to be about 85%. So if you’re barely getting 80’s that might be a little too challenging. And if you’re getting above 90%, that might also be not challenging enough. Somewhere in the middle there is probably your best bet.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12552-4

Hope that helps!

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Martin,

Ah yes, when I say “excerpt” in the course, it’s a reference to an orchestral excerpt, for folks who are doing orchestra auditions. These are selected chunks of music that the orchestras want to hear at auditions, and are essentially standardized selections of various orchestral works that instrumentalists (and some pianists) will often spend years, if not decades working on.

I think the paper clip method could work – but a couple tweaks might be worth considering.

Tweak #1: For the purposes of interleaved practice, if it’s a piece that you feel somewhat comfortable with, and you’re past the stage where you’re trying to get the notes into your fingers, I think it might be helpful to select larger chunks of music for each interleaved segment. Like one chunk from the beginning of the piece, another chunk from the middle, and another chunk from the end. Or chunks from three different pieces, or different movements of the same piece. The idea being, if you’re working on different lines in the same section of the piece, the technical demands of each line might be similar enough that it doesn’t actually cause much “contextual interference.” This is not a great analogy, but it would be like eating three different pastas with the same sauce, instead of rotating between a pasta dish, tacos, and Indian food, for instance. Does that make sense?

Tweak #2: Going back to the paper clip method, I might be interpreting your description too literally, but another thing that might be worth trying is, even if you’re going to practice line by line, I’d suggest breaking your practice chunks up into meaningful phrases rather than lines. That will help even when it comes to memory, and even if you don’t play from memory, this will help to ensure that what comes out in your playing will sound a little more like one phrase connecting to the next. Instead of your brain thinking of one line, and then the next line, etc. It might even help to use colored pencils to color in phrases for yourself, so your brain starts thinking in terms of these structurally meaningful chunks, instead of lines.

Hope that helps!

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Emma,

Sure! Sometimes, it helps to think less of strengths, because we can get really hung up on whether it really is a strength or not, and to think instead perhaps about what you care about most, or pride yourself on the most. Like the way you can connect phrases together, or the quality of sound in a certain range of the instrument, or a type of vibrato that works well for certain things, or a certain bow stroke that you do well, etc. It might help to think small, rather than broad, to start. Does that help to give you some ideas?

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Emma,

To Mery’s point, you might enjoy this podcast interview with Keith Underwood, where he describes doing this sort of close, detailed listening and imitation.

Another thing to keep in mind is that playing more expressively does increase the technical difficulty of a passage, so it might help to practice this with easier repertoire too. In fact, violinist Pamela Frank has recommended practicing scales musically. And she makes the good point that when you encounter portions of scales and arpeggios in real pieces, you’d want to play them expressively anyhow, so why do we spend so much time practicing scales unmusically? So in your daily warmups or fundamentals or etude work, experiment with playing these things more musically too, so that these skills will more easily transfer to other repertoire.

It might also help to work with metronome apps like Time Guru, that enable you to randomly silence beats, so you can practice cultivating a stronger internal pulse. Or perhaps even better yet at first, to practice with really big beats. Like one beat per measure, or even one every two measures, so that there’s some guidance, but you work on that internal pulse too.

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Matei,

Good question! Yeah, Quiet Eye is really more about getting centered before executing a specific skill, and indicative of a moment of mental quiet, so I don’t know what it’ll be as useful during one’s performance. That’s where the attention control stuff in Lesson 4 (focus) comes into play.

But as you say, it could be something that could work in a rest before an exposed entrance, or difficult passage during which you take a moment to get re-centered.

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Augustas,

Have you experimented much with the Pulse strategy in Skill #4?

2.2 Pulse (+PC#16)

Just a guess, but it might be that you’re thinking of too large of a pulse unit or group of notes, perhaps? If there’s more to think about or more to do in terms of highlighting or bringing out certain notes, it might help to slow things down. One of my teachers essentially suggested that I make things harder to keep better time – like more emphasis on a type of vibrato, etc., which gives you more that you have to do from one moment to the next.

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Luca,

The goal with at-tempo practice is to try to let your body figure out the solution to the problem intuitively, without changing the demands of the problem by slowing it down. So the goal is to play it as close to the way you’ll want to in performance, even from the get-go. Meaning, you’ll want to try to use the kind of sound you want, the kind of articulation, phrasing, vibrato, etc., so that you’re internalizing the actual motor movements that you intend to use in performance.

So if you’re having difficulty with the interval between notes 3-4, you would ideally solve this issue before adding note 5 to the chain. Otherwise, you’re just reinforcing the same motor movements that don’t work every time you repeat the chunk of notes.

If you’re really stumped as to why the interval doesn’t work, you can try slow-motion video to see if you can identify anything, and this is where you could do some deliberate practice as well, rather than trying to intuit your way to the solution if that leaves you feeling stuck.

Because the at-tempo practice will take you a pretty good ways toward the goal, but sometimes your body won’t be able to intuit a way to the solution to a problem, and you may have to slow things down to think your way through it, or analyze slow motion video to see if you can figure out why it’s not working.

If you haven’t already seen percussionist Rob Knopper’s take on at-tempo practice, you can see his video about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcNZsN0MRtE&t=1s

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Augustas,

Interesting – I suppose my first question is about your mocks. How nervous or how much pressure are you able to manufacture in these practice performances? It might be that these mocks have started to feel too routine, that the tension no longer creeps in…

The other thing I wonder about is whether it’s possible to play with less tension even in practice. I wonder if it’s possible that you’re not playing with too much tension in practice, but still more than is necessary, so when everything tightens up on stage, it exceeds the threshold of what you can get away with. Where if perhaps you can get more comfortable playing with less tension even in practice, when things tighten up on stage, because you have a lower baseline of tension, it won’t exceed the acceptable threshold of tension?

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Alfred,

It sounds like you’re trying to be really diligent about making the most of your practice time and improving in the most effective way possible. But sometimes, it’s important to have fun in the practice room too, and I wonder if this part is missing a bit? For instance, Frank Almond, former concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony, once said that sometimes he’d just play some Bach in the practice room, with no particular agenda, just because he likes Bach. I wonder if something like this could be helpful?

Also, in terms of cultivating a growth mindset, I wonder if there’s a tendency for your practice to focus more on results than on growth? For instance, has it felt different to listen back to your recordings, and writing down problems, like a wish-list, and then identifying solutions to these problems, instead of focusing on whether it sounds good or bad? As in, to find gratification and satisfaction from seeing the list of solutions grow longer from day to day, and in the process of solution-seeking itself, more than in the end result?

If you haven’t already, I think you’ll find some relevant ideas in building confidence, and the becoming fearless sections as well, in terms of focusing on growth, and having a little more fun in your practice.

Also, the upcoming podcast episodes with flutist Keith Underwood (to be released the next two Sundays), might also speak to your question. He talks a lot about mimicking or emulating other musicians we admire, and it sounds like a really engaging and curiosity-based way to approach practice too.

Hope this helps!

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Augustas, can I ask what your timeline looks like? As in, how many weeks/months do you have until the performance?

[Noa Kageyama]

Interesting. I think you certainly could do this, but is it possible that breaking up this 16-bar section into smaller chunks might be a little too granular, perhaps, and take away from the flow of the larger whole?

It could be that you could explore different harmonic progressions, etc. on the entire 16-bar section, and keep coming back to that 16-bar section multiple time within the same practice session, and that would be a way of using random practice, but on a larger chunk of music, as that’s probably closer to what you’ll have to do in performance?

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Yukimi,

Yes – in general, I conceived of most of the practice challenges being 1-week exercises. So the BEFORE recording would take place on Day 1, and the “Daily practice” activities would describe what you do during the week, and the AFTER recording would take place at the end of the week. But you certainly don’t have to spend the entire week on the challenge, so it’s ok to do an AFTER recording after a few days as well.

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Brenda,

If you go to your home page (click “Home” on the menu bar), you’ll see the two bonus courses listed along with the core Beyond Practicing course.

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Tracy,

I think random practice can be useful with memorizing. But that can potentially also add a bit too much complexity in the early stages of learning a piece. As in, from a motor standpoint, the idea is to make practice increasingly challenging as your comfort level grows. So blocked practice might be more helpful in the early stages of learning than random practice, whether you’re working on memory or not.

As far as memorizing with random practice goes, I think you can certainly use random practice with memory work, but the first step may be to divide up the music into musically meaningful chunks. For instance, my daughter was working on a piece which is pretty repetitive, and she kept mixing up the different sections, so we created a bunch of flashcards of the different sections, with different labels for each, and she tried pulling them out of a bag and playing those sections in random order. And then playing through the piece in its entirety to see if she could keep the sections straight in her head. The thing that seems to help most is having those chunks of music labeled in a structurally meaningful way, which fits with what some of the research on memorization for musicians seems to indicate.

Rather than getting into it all of that here, my go-to video recommendation for memorization in musicians is Univ of Arizona viola prof Molly Gebrian’s video and podcast episode on the research in this area. She was a neuro major in college so really gets the research in this area and how it applies to musicians. I think this will give you tons of ideas on how to approach memorization and how this fits pretty organically into the learning process itself – in that I think you can memorization a piece at the same time that you’re working on the nuances.

Here are the links:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7PO5fyuz1-xCNCZ9hii7SUpwQzLUZlU3

http://bulletproofmusician.com/molly-gebrian-on-efficient-effective-and-reliable-memorization-strategies-for-musicians/

Hope this helps!

Noa

p.s. Incidentally, yes, 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, 2c, etc. would indeed technically be called serial practice as opposed to random which would be truly random. I just tend to use random as a blanket term for that sort of thing, but probably ought to be clearer in the future. =)

[Noa Kageyama]

Hmm…good question. I have to confess that I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, sorry! Although, I wonder if posting this question in a forum like the ABRSM forum (link below) might produce some leads?

https://forums.abrsm.org

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Liesbeth,

There was a study of singers which found that generally speaking, focusing on filling the hall with sound led to better sound and performance than focusing on things that were closer to the performer (like focusing on soft palate, or a microphone in front of them, or the front row of the hall, etc.).

I wonder if you could practice in a variety of acoustical environments, but also get into a larger space at least once to practice this sort of focus, to see how it feels for you? Even if the acoustics of the hall will likely end up being different than any hall you get into for practice purposes?

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Augustas,

I’m not sure if you’re in the habit of napping, but a lot of NBA players nap as a regular part of their game-preparation routine. The league office apparently knows not to call them at a certain part of the day because they know they’ll probably be waking them. I wonder if this might be one thing that could help with your situation as well?

I think another thing that might help is to take it easy in your dress rehearsal. Where you avoid using too much energy (both physical as well as mental/emotional) in your run-through. Divers, for instance, will even deliberately mess up a little thing in practice dives to make sure they don’t “use up” their one good dive in advance of the competition. I don’t think you have to deliberately make mistakes, but do you think it would be possible to give a half-intensity performance at the dress rehearsal?

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Liesbeth,

A couple things come to mind. One thing that is really helpful for lots of folks are big, over-the-ear headphones, so you can listen to music or something that helps to drown out other noises and playing in the room around you. One of my students actually had some giant earmuff-type things that folks on the ground at airports use to protect their ears. You can certainly get in-ear kind that block noise too, but the benefit of over-the-ear headphones is that it’s very clear to others that you are not to be disturbed, while the in-ear kind are sometimes too discreet.

The other thing that can help is to do more listening in the early stages of preparing your list. Where you listen to not just a handful of recordings, but like 20 or 30 recordings of each excerpt, so you know every single detail of how other orchestras have played these excerpts. Where you have notes about the mean/median tempo, dynamics, articulation, etc., etc. The idea being, to have such a clear concept of how exactly you want to play each excerpt, and a deep understanding of where your choices fall relative to the choices that dozens of other orchestras have made, that your brain is less tempted to listen to others warming up, and there’s (hopefully) less curiosity about what choices others have made, because you believe that you’ve already made the best choice for yourself and aren’t missing anything.

Hope this helps!

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

That’s a great question, Grace. I had a conversation recently about this exact thing with Molly Gebrian, the UArizona viola prof who I think I probably reference a time or two in the course, and who has some great videos on YouTube that I think you’d enjoy if you haven’t already seen them. And I don’t know that we came to a real one-size-fits-all sort of consensus, as there can be some tricky individual differences between students to overcome.

Did the rubber duckie debugging help at all? I’d be curious to know if creating that extra bit of distance between the self and the strategy/technical adjustment helped at all with changing their emotional experience of practicing.

I’m guessing that you’re already familiar with Carol Dweck’s work on growth vs. fixed mindsets, but if not, that part of the course might be helpful (Mental Resilience – 2.0 – Your Mindset). It’s admittedly a bit more abstract, and a more direct application might be helping your students experiment with cultivating a more coach-like (vs. critic-like) inner voice in the Building Confidence – 1.2 – Coach & Critic lesson. The Becoming Fearless part of the course might also be a fun thing for students to try – especially the Becoming Fearless – 2.0 – Building Courage section. Especially the practice challenges #20 and #21.

Let me know if any of those sections seem to help with approaching challenges with more curiosity and play, and help to reduce some of the shame/etc. that can sometimes arise.

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Caleb,

I think centering for sight reading is going to be more about clearing the mind than anything else, so that you can prepare yourself to be open and focused on just that narrow window of music/time that you want to be attentive to, as well as feeling loose and at ease physically so your shoulders don’t hunch upwards to your ears, and you’re not creating tension that could get in the way of you playing technically demanding rep.

I think hearing the rhythm of the first phrase (or even the fastest part of the excerpt) makes sense to me – but I have to confess that I haven’t looked into the literature on sight reading a whole lot, and suspect there are other folks who might have a much more systematic approach to both practicing and “performing” sight-reading…I wonder if there are other strategies or techniques that collaborative pianists and ear training teachers use that you might be able to find out about?

[Noa Kageyama]

That’s a great observation. Yeah, I think it’s easy to forget the overall goal of these smaller problem areas, and why we consider them problems anyway. Perhaps it’d help to add a column to the left, where you remind yourself the overarching character or mood or expressive goal with some key words, or something along those lines?

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Liesbeth,

Good question about how to mic your audition recording. You’re right that it’s helpful to record from a distance when preparing for an audition, so that you can practice hearing what the committee will be hearing, but I’m not sure what the best thing to do is for a recording that you submit to the orchestra. I wonder if you could ask folks who have been on the listening committee to ask what their preferences have been?

I’m reminded of something that pianist Stephen Hough said in a podcast interview – that he actually approaches recordings in a more creative way (in some ways) than a live performance. If I understood correctly, it’s like he tries to approach each take in a slightly different way, and he tries to do new and different things in his recording, so that he has various options to choose from, and actually seems to enjoy it more than if he were to approach it as an exercise in getting one single “perfect” take. Does that make sense?

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Liesbeth, indeed, luck unfortunately does play a role in these things (though honestly it can go both ways – we can sometimes be the beneficiary of good luck which is helpful to remember too!). I have a student who was in the finals of the same top orchestra 3 or 4 times, and each time it was a no hire result, and then the final time, the panel had a few different people on it, and they got the job.

And just to clarify, because playing the average of 20 different recordings does indeed sound kind of dull, the idea is to identify the middle ground as a starting point, and then figure out what the extremes are, so you can figure out how to play within the space between the extremes. Kind of like in tennis, there are definite lines that you have to keep the ball within, but there’s a ton of room inside the court to play with. And you see so many different styles of players who find creative ways to use that space differently. And of course there are those who aren’t very creative with the space and just try to hit hard/accurately. =) Hope that makes a little more sense!

As far as making a tape for pre-screening goes, I wonder if you have any specific questions about the preparation process? Like, how are you inclined to prepare? That might give me a way to suggestions some little tweaks to your existing process, instead of making too many changes that might not be necessary!

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Ack, Liesbeth – I’m sorry I didn’t respond! I forgot to “subscribe” to this thread and didn’t notice that you had posted updates.

So a couple thoughts. The purpose for recording your auditions is actually two-fold.

1. One reason is so that you can compare it with your most recent mock auditions, to see how similar or different they might be. For instance, maybe there is a tendency to rush slightly in certain places, or clip rests, etc., and unfortunately, getting feedback from folks on the committee can be less precise, because they can’t tell you what exactly changed relative to your last few mocks. So even if they say it sounded great, it’s hard to know what exactly that means, and what you can continue to hone and refine in your preparation, and where you can continue to grow in general as a musician. Which can sometimes help with motivation too, in terms of knowing what exactly you want to work on.

2. The other reason is perhaps more important, and it has to do with helping out with attention control. When you’re not recording, it’s tempting for most folks to devote some of their attentional resources to self-monitoring, and keeping track of how things are going in the moment. Which is a good thing to do when you’re practicing, and you’re listening for imperfections and paying attention to what needs work, but makes it really difficult to fully engage with your mental script, and all of the things that bring you into the present, and into “the zone,” like singing brain, pulse, micro-improv, imagery, etc. Recording your audition, even with a phone in your pocket makes it easier to give yourself permission to just play, and to be fully present with zero resources devoted to evaluating your performance in real time.

Some folks can switch things off like this even if they’re not recording, but for most, it’s easier when they know there’s a recording they can listen back to later.

As far as motivation for this season goes, and staying engaged in the process with the same excerpts, a few thoughts there as well:

1. the micro-improv strategy can help with this sort of “staleness”

2. the other thing that can help is a two-pronged strategy:

a) If you haven’t already, it can help to listen to more recordings (like, not just 5-10, but 20-30 different recordings), to establish the ballpark of what is stylistically appropriate for each excerpt, but expand the range of possibilities you can experiment with. For instance, one of the percussionists at the Met (Rob Knopper) would take a week to listen to dozens of recordings for each excerpt, tapping out the rhythm of each section, determining the mean and median tempo of each section, the dynamic range, phrasing, etc., and throwing out the outliers. This way, you can experiment with different new ways of playing each excerpt, but be assured of playing in such a way that isn’t extreme, so you don’t risk alienating any of the committee members. Which is related to the second thing.

b) The goal is to get as many votes from folks behind the screen as possible, which I’m assuming includes people other than those who play your instrument. So the goal is to play in a way that does feel like it’s your own take on the excerpts, but also aligns with their experience of the excerpts. It’s impossible to know though, what the overall committee’s preferences are, not just those who play your instrument, or a select few whose votes count the same as the others. Some may have gone to music festivals and played the pieces in a very different way, or studied abroad and had teachers who had varying preferences, etc.

In an ideal world, you’d be able to play for every single member of the committee multiple times in advance to see what version of the excerpts resonates most with every single person, but that’s not possible, of course, so the best we can do is try to assemble a representative sample of the committee by playing for other musicians who are like them. But here too, like listening to recordings, playing for just a few people leaves you susceptible to “sampling error” where if you play for just a few people, if they’re not representative of the people behind the screen, you can be unduly influenced to play in a way that won’t get you the maximum number of votes. Like, if you play for 3 people, and two encourage you to take a little more time in one passage, those two may actually be advising you to play in a way that alienates the folks behind the screen.

Whereas, (and this is something Rob did as well), if you play for 30 people, and two people encourage you to take a little more time, but 28 don’t, then you can ignore that advice, because it doesn’t fit with the overall trend of the musicians, and probably won’t be representative of the way the committee will see things either.

This can make playing for other people funner as well, because it means you can try new things and see how far you can take things before it starts to become too much or too far outside the ballpark of what listeners’ expectations might be.

It can be more of a commitment to get this many different folks’ opinions on things, but even if it’s just a dozen or 20, it can hopefully make the process of preparing more interesting and fun, rather than just playing the same excerpts the same way for yourself, over and over.

Hope that helps – and I’m subscribed now to this thread, so if you have any questions about any of this, just let me know!

[Noa Kageyama]

Yeah, it’s one of the things that can be difficult to prepare for in the absence of opportunities to practice under pressure. When you do mock auditions and play for people, how much pressure do you feel? It’s not always easy to make mocks realistic, and try to make them feel like high-pressure events, but how close are you able to get them to feeling “real”?

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Luca,

Yes – I think you can certainly trial and error your way to a solution through adjustments, at which point I’m guessing that you can probably articulate for yourself what some of the key characteristics of the “new” way are, and also articulate what some of the key elements of the “old” way are?

You might then be able to exaggerate the old way, so that it becomes more distinctive, and easier to differentiate from the new way.

I don’t think you need to do this for everything, of course – just those few passages where there’s a tendency for your habits to revert back to the old way of things!

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Alfred,

This mindset switch can be tough, because a good portion of practice is generally devoted to cultivating this kind of analytical mechanics-focused thinking.

Have you gone through the lesson on focus (#4)? With the attention control strategies of audiation, pulse, and micro-improv?

I ask because it’s really difficult to silence the analytical mind, and much easier to keep the mind so busy with something else, that there’s no bandwidth left for analytical thinking. And these three attention control strategies can be a really effective way to replace unhelpful inner dialogue with something more useful. Thereby enabling you to go for things more in a tangential way, without trying to attack it head-on.

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Yes – I think building up your deliberate practice “endurance” makes a lot of sense, and whether it’s with a timer, or simply checking in with yourself every so often to gauge whether you’re still practicing effectively/thoughtfully or not is a good idea.

As far as replacing old habits with new ones go, sometimes it can help to amplify the “error” of the old habit, so that the old and new habits become increasingly distinct.

https://bulletproofmusician.com/how-exaggerating-mistakes-could-improve-your-technique/

https://bulletproofmusician.com/when-mistakes-are-good-a-counterintuitive-strategy-for-rapidly-fixing-bad-habits-in-our-technique/

Even alternating between old and new habits a couple times can sometimes help to reinforce the new habit – something like old way x1, new way x1, old way x1, new way x3, old way x1, new way x3.

[Noa Kageyama]

Hmm…interesting. I’m not really sure how pianists approach the sync issue, but that does sound like a good analogy. The closest thing I can think of on the violin is the difficulty synchronizing bow arm movements with finger movements in fast passages. But I’m not sure if the solution here translates to the bassoon at all (one thing that can help is to simultaneously finger the passage in both the left and right hands, which often helps to get the two hands working together a bit better).

If there isn’t anything obvious you can tell from the video (like one finger moving more than it has to, tension, etc.), I wonder if there are etudes that address this sort of thing? Or even etudes you could create for yourself that would help you practice this?

I’m also curious – are there other passages where you don’t have this sync issue, where for one reason or another it just works fine? Might be interesting to compare the two and see why one works, and why one is more inconsistent?

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Luca,

I was wondering if a good way of testing a possible solution would be to imagine how that solution would look like? Like if I’m trying “anticipate the thumb” would it work well to imagine the physical feeling of anticipating it, or would it be better to just think “anticipate the thumb” and then focus on staying relaxed?

I think either could work – maybe you could try both and see which works better? Because I think the important thing is to get a sense of what your body is actually doing differently when you anticipate the thumb, and I could see either of these getting you there.

What are your thoughts on the two? If I’m sure that the problem is that the thumb is moving too slow would you recommend I practice that motion in slow motion or at tempo?

Any idea what is holding the thumb back from moving quicker? Or is it really the speed of the thumb itself, or the timing – like is the thumb too late to get started moving, or is the thumb placed in such a way that it has to move a greater distance than necessary, etc.? Here too I think either slow or fast practice (or both) can help in trying to figure out what the solution might be.

Another related approach is the “work place method” at the end of the post here. The idea being, to make sure that you’re playing with inflection and expression even when playing slowly, so that your muscles are doing what they’ll need to do when you eventually play at tempo. Similarly, violinist Catherine Cho has suggested the inverse/expressiveness rule of thumb, where your expressiveness is inversely proportional to the reduction in tempo. So if you play at half speed, you play twice as expressively. Or if you play at 1/3rd speed, you play with 3x expression.

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Luca,

From this description, it does sound like a lot of your time is going towards repetition-heavy strategies, that are largely implicit learning-based. Like the chaining, rhythm/note groupings, etc.

And especially if you’re noticing yourself checking out mentally in some of these repetitions, I wonder if you could try doing more deliberate practice-type work? And this might be a little extreme, but see what happens if you give yourself a maximum number of repetitions to solve a problem before you have to move on. Say, give yourself maybe 5 chances (or 7 or 3, etc.) to solve a problem, and if you can’t solve it, move on to a different problem area, give yourself 5 chances there, etc. You can perhaps come back to the initial problem area later in the practice session, but the idea is to make each repetition more valuable, and avoid getting sucked into more and more mindless or unhelpful repetitions. This is a strategy that violinist Pamela Frank has suggested, and implemented herself because of her experience coming back from serious injury, but could be used anytime, even if there are no injury issues.

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Luca,

Indeed – that’s a lot to think about. The goal is to focus mostly just on playing with ease, and just integrating that new note into the phrase. Where hopefully there isn’t too much thinking required for the previous notes that have been chunked together. And it’s not so much that you should be thinking about the note after the one you’re trying to chain, but I do think it’s important to think about how that note connects to the next one, in that if that note has a smooth connection, it means playing it one way, but if it has a dot on it, or there is some separation between the note you’re chaining and the note that comes after it, you’d play it differently. Does that make sense?

It sounds like you’re figuring out when to use this, and how to use this most effectively though, so that’s great to hear! There isn’t really a one-size-fits-all approach to this, from what I understand, so it’s more about figuring out how/when to use this for maximum effect.

Hopefully you’re hearing differences in your before/after recordings!

[Noa Kageyama]

Sounding better! Just FYI, I don’t know that you necessarily have to do both forward and backward chaining, just to do it. Or, if you do go back to this passage and want to do some more chaining, I think you could chain one beat or half a beat at a time backwards, so that it’s not one note at a time. But make sure the passage really needs at-tempo practice, and wouldn’t benefit more from some other kind of practice. Perhaps ask yourself the question, what’s the most important thing about this passage that I want to find a solution to – in terms of intonation, sound quality, rhythm, and expressiveness in particular. Because the practice strategy that would be most helpful in finding a solution to that issue might not necessarily be at-tempo practice.

[Noa Kageyama]

Interesting question. Yeah, I think one way to approach this would be to do reverse chaining from the end of the passage up until that tricky interval. And then you could do some deliberate practice to see if you can figure out the solution to that interval (even if you can’t get it perfect). And then you could do the inside-out chaining, where you start with that tricky interval, and then add the note after, add the note before, after, before, and work a few notes in each direction, and then try to then play the whole chunk altogether, because you’ve already chained the first few beats, and the last few beats, so there’s no reason to have to re=chain the whole thing one note at a time. Does that make sense?

[Noa Kageyama]

It’s sounding good – smoother and more effortless in the beginning few notes. And I wonder if why it sometimes sounds better when you add an extra note is that a more meaningful chunk of the phrase is there and so it’s easier to think in terms of the direction of the phrase?

Also, one other thought. I wonder if it would help to mentally think the next note after the last note you play? Because if you listen to how you play the last C that you add on at the end, do you hear how you’re elongating it, because it’s the last note in the chain? Instead of playing it as you would if it were being played in the context of the phrase, each last note is being practiced differently than you actually want to play it, right? It’s occurring to me as I write this that that might be one of the benefits of reverse chaining as well – in that you always play the last note the way it is going to be in the final version.

[Noa Kageyama]

Just my opinion, but I wonder if you’re using too fine a filter for these first few notes? In terms of rhythm, it’s certainly important to have stability, but all in the context of where the phrase is going, with inflection as well. And I wonder if at the moment, in just those first few notes, it might sound/feel uneven because it’s still being played a little out of context? Like once you put it into the full phrase, the direction of the phrase will be clearer, and the little micro-deviations from a theoretical ideal rhythm won’t be noticeable? This also speaks a bit to the idea of variable practice, and how it’s important to be able to play things in various ways around the ideal (faster, slower, with the inflection on this note or that note, or lingering more here or there, etc.)

[Noa Kageyama]

Yeah, 20 overlearning reps does seem a bit high. I think I’d try to aim for something closer to 10 or fewer. It not only adds time and physical wear/tear to the equation, but there’s a point of diminishing returns and it can also start to be a little like how if you keep saying the same word over and over, it starts to sound wrong – you know what I mean?

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Luca, I only got a link to this video in my email and not the deliberate practice one. You can also leave a link to iCloud or google drive or dropbox or whatever is easiest for you here too.

In terms of overlearning reps, the idea with the at-tempo chaining process is to actually not think that much, but stay loose, aim for physical ease/effortlessness, be attentive and give your body a chance to intuit its way to a solution. I don’t know if there’s an “ideal” number of overlearning reps, but fwiw, I think Rob found that his number was something like 6-8, if I remember correctly. As in, whether it took him 3 reps or 12 reps to get to the first “correct” repetition of the note grouping, he would have to do another 7 or so overlearning reps beyond that to lock it in deeply enough that it wouldn’t revert back or fall apart after adding the next new note.

In terms of when to move on, the at-tempo practice is definitely not going to get you to “concert-ready” or anywhere near perfect, so please do give yourself permission to move on once the passage is relatively smooth and hiccup-free and essentially good enough to be played at tempo. Chaining will help you get a passage to a pretty decent playable at-tempo state, but it’s not going to be performance or audition-ready. You’ll still have to do some deliberate practice, or slow practice, or note groupings, or interleaved/variable/other kinds of practice to keep honing and refining the passage. Rob has said that he thinks of the chaining as getting him about half of the way to performance-ready, and deliberate practice or more conscious problem-solving as getting him the other half of the way there. And even then, performance-ready doesn’t mean a passage is literally perfect.

An analogy one of my teachers used with me (I got stuck trying to perfect the first page of the Bach Chaconne for about a month) was to think of working on a piece like filtering water. You don’t want to go to the river and use your finest filter, because all of the rocks and mud and larger particles are going to wreck that filter. You want to use the filter that filters out big things first, and then use a finer filter to filter out smaller particles, and eventually progress to the finest filter that filters out the bacteria and stuff that you can’t see. All this to say, make sure you don’t get too focused on trying to perfect the first measure of this piece/excerpt at the expense of bigger problems that might exist elsewhere in the piece! The goal is to solve the biggest problems first, then increasingly smaller ones.

[Noa Kageyama]

Thanks for posting, Luca! I take it that eventually the video did go through? I’ll have to look into this some more and see if there’s something going on with the video posting settings if this wasn’t the video you were having trouble with…

In the meantime, a couple observations:

1. I know I said to be wary of doing too many repetitions in a previous comment, but at least from this video, it seems like there were a couple times when you moved on to add a new note pretty quickly, without having established a comfort level with the previously added note. If say, you find it takes about 5 reps after adding a new note to the existing group to get to an accurate level of performance, do you have a set number of “overlearning” reps in mind to lock it in? Like another 3-5-7 or so reps beyond the first successful repetition?

2. Maybe you’ve already mentioned this, but have you experimented with reverse chaining? Where instead of doing Bflat, Bflat+Bflat, Bflat+Bflat+A, you would start at say the C#, then the Bnatural+C#, then C#+Bnatural+C#, etc. It can be a little more challenging for wind players, because you have to think about where in your breath you’ll be, but I wonder if reverse chaining might actually be more helpful in this passage than forward chaining.

3. Take this with a grain of salt, because I know nothing about the bassoon, but it sounds a bit to me like you might be more focused on note precision and evenness than phrasing in your chaining. Is that possible? I wonder if it would help to think about phrase direction and which notes you mean to emphasize – like are you thinking about emphasizing the Bflat, E, and C# and driving to each of those notes, like 123, 223, 323. Or are you thinking more about bringing out the 2nd note in each group, like Bflat, G, E – like 123, 223, 323? Or both? Or are you thinking about clipping the 8th notes a little and making it a little like a string player retaking the bow between 1 and 2 vs. how you’d play it if the slurs went across each group of 3 instead of crossing over into the next group of 3? Playing around with how you think of the direction of the phrase and note groupings may also help to organize the fluidity/coordination of your physical movements.

4. Keep in mind too that there’s always going to be a gap between what you can do technically at the present, and the ideal that you hear in your mind. What you hear in your head and aspire to is always going to be a few steps ahead of what you can currently do, so as helpful as chaining can be, it’s also not going to get you all the way to “perfect.” If you can get to a pretty fluid and “pretty good” version of playing through chaining, there are going to be some sticking points that you may need to work out in your deliberate practice phase. And some things that may just need some additional time and seasoning to be able to execute at the level you want as well. In the same way that you can undoubtedly do some things now that you couldn’t 6 months or a year or two ago, that may have frustrated you or perhaps didn’t even cross your radar back then.

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Luca,

Regarding your bolded question, it sounds like you may be doing too many repetitions in a row. There is certainly a place for repetition to internalize a particular solution to a problem, but that only goes so far. It may actually be better, once you’ve written down the solution so you know/can remember what it is, to switch to something else, and a little while later, come back to the problem passage so you can test out your solution again and see if it works. The goal being to practice retrieving or remembering the solution to that problem, rather than doing the solution over and over, where your brain doesn’t have to work very hard to remember the solution because you just did it already and there’s not much to remember.

And yes, I can’t promise that I’ll be able to figure out what’s going on, but if you’d be willing to share a video of yourself chaining or doing some deliberate practice, I’d be happy to take a look and see if I notice anything. With the deliberate practice video, could you try talking out loud as you practice? Where you describe what you’re hearing/noticing, what you’re thinking, and what you’re trying? That way I’ll be able to follow your thought process. With chaining, no need to say anything.

[Noa Kageyama]

Hi Augustas,

It takes quite a bit of energy to be able to really bring performance-like focus and attention to your playing, so if you’ve been practicing a lot, it could very well be that you don’t quite have the resources to focus 100% in your run-throughs/mocks. Are you getting enough sleep every night? Like, 8, 9, or even 10+ hours?

Generally, athletes (and increasingly, musicians) will tend to do some “tapering” in the weeks leading up to a big competition, where the volume of training decreases, but the intensity increases. Which would mean doing less drilling and repetition and woodshedding, and doing more run-through-type playing and more mental rehearsal so you don’t wear yourself out physically. I had a student for instance, who did 3 run-throughs 3 days out from the audition, 2 run-throughs 2 days out, and 1 runthrough the day before, and that was it. I know some folks who won’t play at all in the 24 hours before the audition as well. There are a number of individual differences so I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all equation for how to handle the week before an audition, but you just want to make sure you’re protecting your energy and not overplaying, where the playing that you do do is more along the lines of the kind of playing that you’ll be doing on stage, i.e. more retrieval practice.

Hope this gives you some ideas!

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Like anything, you’ll have to aim for a balance and not necessarily for “perfect,” because otherwise, yes, you could spend forever on one passage. It varies from person to person, but I think Rob aims for something like 8 over-learning repetitions beyond the point where you successfully add the next note to the chain. And if it takes more than 12-15 repetitions to get to the first successful repetition where the new note fits into the sequence, then it might be better to try a different approach. Meaning, either it’s a problem that instincts alone can’t solve, or you might be aiming for a higher level of excellence/perfection than can be accomplished at that point of the learning process.

Regarding the issue playing notes 1-3, when you record slow-motion video of yourself playing, do you see anything different when it works vs. when it doesn’t? As in, when you play 2-3 successfully, and compare it with what changes when you add 1 to 2-3, can you see anything you’re doing differently? Or, if you were to deliberately recreate the issue that happens in 2-3, what are you doing differently when you get it “wrong” in exactly the same way on purpose?

Regarding the problem-solving, any chance you could figure out why your thumb and ring finger are moving more slowly, or doing the thing they’re supposed to do a fraction too late? Is it that there is tension somewhere that causes this, or is it a matter of initiating the movement earlier, or something regarding your instrument or posture, etc. that is leading to this? Eventually you’ll totally want to have more of an external cue to access the correct movement, and focus more on sound and a general feel of things working smoothly in that moment, but for now, I think it’s actually ok to think internally and in really concrete ways about what might be happening in terms of the mechanics. This may not necessarily reveal what exactly is causing this, but what happens if you do this a few times via visualization, where you imagine how you’d like to sound/feel when playing, and maybe even allow yourself to move a little bit (dynamic visualization), before trying it on the instrument for real. If this ends up helping you to play that interval, it might be interesting to look at video and see what you do differently when it works.

[Noa Kageyama]

Great point, Grace. I had a student years ago who experienced some trauma in her life unrelated to music, but she said that seeing a psychologist who specialized in trauma work ended up being really helpful in her music life too.

[Noa Kageyama]

Ah, ok. So, a couple thoughts.

How often you could or would want to do this depends on the length of your program, but now is around the time that a lot of folks find it helpful to shift into more “performance-centric” practice, where your practice revolves more around run-throughs, and practicing for the demands of a performance, rather than nitty gritty work on small sections. With orchestral auditions, it’s often easy enough to split a list into 2 or 3-day rotations, where you might do a recorded “cold” (as in, first notes of the day after a short warmup) run-through of 20-30 minutes worth of music every day, and then work on the spots that need the most work based on what you hear in the recordings.

You could even arrange things so that you touch things every 1-3 days, whether in a run-through, or practice. For instance, if you had to prepare all three movements of a concerto, you could run one movement per day, but work on smaller details from each movement every day, so you’d be touching parts of all three movements every day, and at least all of one movement every 72 hours.

You could also run the whole program 2 times per week, depending on how long it is, and then use the recording to decide what bits need to be worked on or touched in the next few days before the next run-through.

You’ll want to make sure you’re not starting to feel burned out from the run-throughs, in which case you can back off of the run-throughs, and do more spots, but the goal with all of this is to practice getting comfortable doing what you’ll have to do on performance day, rather than working too much on little tiny spots and details at the expense of getting comfortable playing through things in one go.

Does this help to provide some ideas?

Noa

[Noa Kageyama]

Yes – I think you could certainly alternate styles. Maybe even take the same chunk and alternate styles every few minutes? Or even take multiple 16-bar chunks, and rotate amongst them, alternating styles every time, perhaps? It would depend on how comfortable or well-learned you feel they are. The idea is to increase “contextual interference” as you feel more comfortable, so start with less variability and complexity at first, and then gradually increase the difficulty as you go.

[Noa Kageyama]

This may not apply 100% of the time, but percussionist Rob Knopper tends to approach things by going fast first, and then slowing things down. Which sounds backwards, but the rationale is that going fast first gives you a better idea what the demands and constraints of the passage are going to be. And doing the at-tempo practice will get the gist of the motor movements into muscle memory. At which point, if you then slow things down to work out whatever remaining kinks might be there, you’ll have a better idea what you can and can’t get away with at tempo.

So I can see how it would sometimes make sense to start with slow practice when reworking things, especially if you already have played it at tempo before and know the constraints. But maybe it would also make some sense to do slow practice more as a way to refine your motor movements after doing some at-tempo work, than the other way around?