BEGINNERS
“The start of Hailey’s new piece is sounding fantastic. In fact, the
start of Hailey’s pieces always
sound fantastic.
But the ends of
her pieces are a different story. No
matter which piece she plays, the closer she gets to the last bar, the worse her playing becomes… until everything collapses in a tangle on the last page.
What’s going on? Why do her
pieces sound great at the start, get
sick in the middle and die at the end?”
~ 0 ~
There’s
a song in The Sound of Music that says
something about the beginning being “a very good place to start.” That might be
true if you’re reading a novel or competing in the 100 metres final
at the Olympics, but it’s not always
great advice when you’re practicing.
For
a lot of students though, the beginning of their piece is always the only place to start.
No
matter what the task in front of
them, they always handle it in exactly the
same way.
Task: To memorize the development section of
the new sonata
Solution: Play from the start of the piece
…but
that’s how the Beginners Trap works.
Here’s
the same student handling a completely different task.
Task: To work on the tricky cross-rhythms in bars 27-51
Solution: Play from the first bar (?!)
And
if the student suffers from this disease badly
enough, then even the following insanity is possible:
Task: To work out an effective fingering for
the final 6 bars of the piece
Solution: Give
me a second, I just need to play from the start…
Of
course, the result of building bias like
this into your practice is that the opening
of your piece just keeps getting better and better, while the end sounds as though it’s hardly been
practiced at all…
…which
is largely because it’s hardly been
practiced at all.
Always
starting from the top puts in motion a whole series of unintended consequences.
Unnecessary
commuting
“Beginners”
don’t actively discriminate against the end of their piece. They’re just not factoring in the reality that regions most distant from the start can take
serious practice time just to get to.
To
take an extreme example, let’s
imagine that you had a piece that was 25
minutes long, and your task was to tidy
up the ending. If you’re starting from the beginning, it will take you 24 minutes of playing just to get to your target…
… which in a half hour practice session
leaves 6 minutes to actually work on
the problem.
You
might as well have started from where you needed to, and then only done 6
minutes of practice.
So
the first price you pay for being a “beginner”
is extra practice, to cover the commuting
you need to do each day – from the start of our piece all the way to the
passage you really needed to fix.
But
this wasted travel time is only part
of the problem.
Stopping
to pick weeds
The
24 minute commute might sound bad enough
by itself, but that assumes that you’re playing straight through.
The
reality is that if you always start from the beginning, you’ll notice things
that need work while you’re traveling.
And
so you’ll stop. After all, you've noticed a problem, and you’ll want to fix it. Hard to argue with that.
But
since you've stopped, none of the
problems that come after the one you’re working on will be visible to you yet. They’ll
only be covered once your journey resumes, and if there’s time.
Worse
still, for hard-core “beginners,” the
journey might not resume. Having dealt with the problem
they spotted, they dust their hands off, toll their sleeves… and start again from the beginning…
Stuck
in a stationary line
All
of this creates an imbalance:
·
Problems near the beginning are guaranteed to get noticed, because
the journey to them is short,
fitting neatly into even the briefest practice session.
·
Problems near the end though are waiting in line – and it’s a line that items from the beginning
can push in whenever they feel like it. If the practice
session ends before you get to them,
then that’s tough – they’ll have to wait until next time…
…except that, if you’re a “beginner,”
next time you’ll start at the beginning again too… so there is no “next time.” The problem at the end of the piece is always at the back of the line, and the
line never seems to progress.
End result?
Large slices towards the end of your piece remain not only underpracticed but sometimes unpracticed
entirely – no matter how hard you may have been working.
And if things go wrong on concert day…
…there’s only one thing you’ll know how to do. You won’t
be able to just pick up from near
wherever you got lost, because that’s something you've never done.
Instead, “Beginners”
handle that problem the same way they
handle every problem in their practice sessions. They start again from the
beginning…
The groans from
the audience will be almost loud enough to cover the sound of your teacher
sobbing. J
Creating new home bases
If you’re a “Beginner,”
then it’s not all bad news – will all the attention it’s received, the beginning of your piece will be in great shape. You can then use similar bias in your practice to ensure the rest of the piece is in great shape too.
Remember you didn’t
end up being that good at the beginning because the beginning was easy. Or because you liked it more. It happened simply because that was always the place you started
from.
If you had a new place that you always started from,
then the same thing would happen. Because of the commuting factor, passages near that new start point would receive more attention than the rest of the
piece…which is great news if the need more attention than the rest of
the piece.
This is exactly
how you can turn the Beginners Trap into a powerful
practice weapon. The idea is to continue to work with a “home” but to
ensure that the home is located near
wherever most of your assigned tasks are.
Evolve to nomadic
practice
Being smart about
the location of your “home” for the week is a great start to correcting some of the imbalances that Beginner
practice causes.
But in the end,
you want your practice to evolve so that there’s no “home” at all. That way, every note you play is geared towards
trouble-shooting, and improving your piece.
You’ll be
stunned by the amount of practice time you can save when you work in this commute-free way – and by how much more
even the quality of your piece will be.
Using positive
discrimination
If your piece
has already been affected by the “Beginners”
practice trap, then you don’t need to panic. It’s just time to even the score a
little. Starting immediately, you would work exclusively on the last page
of the piece.
This bias in
favour of the end would continue until it’s the same standard as the beginning. Given that the beginning has had a
tremendous head start, this might
take a while.
And then, when
everything is square once more, you’d focus on the second last page of the piece – again, until it’s caught up.
Because it’s
that much closer to the beginning, though, it will probably have had a little
more attention than the very end originally
had, and so shouldn’t need to pedal as
hard for as long to catch up. So the process gets easier and easier as you
gradually get closer to the start.
Your next new piece
Mix up the order you learn your piece in the first place. It’s
very hard to suffer from “Beginners” syndrome when the beginning was actually
the 14th section in the piece that you tackled…
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