Even world class guitarists don't overdo it with the whole practice thing
Ana Vidovic on focused practice
I've never had a guitar teacher who was really hard on me.
In all my experience I never studied Classical music (until much later, when I did just a little) or other types of strict programs. I learned the music I wanted. My guitar teachers were easy going. That’s just how I grew up. With that said, I now find it hard to force myself into a strict practice routine where I have dedicated exercises designed for me to improve systematically.
I could always start doing it now but it’s not currently in the cards, to be honest.
What my past guitar learning experience has given me, though, is a different perspective on practice in general. It's not intuitive to me to practice all day, going for six, seven, eight hours. I’ve always sensed that diminishing returns creep in around the two hour mark. The progress grinds to a halt, I’m not as focused, my hands start feeling sore, and I’m just going through the motions.
So in a recent episode of Conversations With Tyler, Ana Vidovic, the world class Classical guitarist, caught my ear when she mentioned the same idea.
It just takes a lot of years to get to a point where you know what you need to work on. Two or three hours of focused practice is more efficient than seven or eight hours because sometimes there is a danger of just playing the piece through and not really working on sections and things that we should work on. I think at the eighth hour, we should all stop.
Even for her, as a highly respected classical guitarist who is technically perfect and musically thoughtful, two or three hours of focused practice is good.
She's not just running through repertoire over and over again without thinking about it. As she mentions in the interview, she picks a section she thinks needs work, isolates it, makes decisions about what she wants to do, then practices until she reaches it. This is the nature of focused practice: purposely deciding what you want to produce and figuring out how to make it a reality. This is a much more fruitful and high impact way of practicing than just running the same thing over and over again without deliberately thinking about what needs to change to make it better.
What is she thinking about in this performance? What decisions make her performance better than others?
Well, if I had to speculate, the way she controls each voice (the fast tremolo with her fingers and the lower notes with her thumb) is a big concern. The balance between them is perfect at all dynamic levels. She also controls the tempo with precision. I bet she consciously decided how she wants to portray the melody and let the tempo remain steady, slow down, or speed up based on that.
Vidovic’s approach to practice dovetails nicely with the work of Noa Kageyama, who I also mentioned last week.
In much of his material, he argues for making decisions musically, then figuring out how to get your fingers to do it. In one of the emails you get when you sign up for his list, he lays out the case for mindful practice:
Deliberate practice, on the other hand, is highly goal-directed and centers around identifying specific solutions to specific problems. Instead of mindless trial and error, it’s an active and thoughtful process which involves taking the time to stop, analyze what went wrong, why it happened, and how one can correct the error permanently [...].
This type of practicing sounds harder, but I think, overall, it makes it easier.
Because you always have a direction, it takes less time. And if you don’t have a direction, then you start figuring it out. You end up practicing out of a desire to bring your ideas to life rather than mimicking exactly what someone else presents which is inherently more interesting.
Anyway, something to think about this week. Until next week!