What is Practice?

What is practice? Is it just playing your instrument? Is it repetition of a song? Is it going over difficult parts of a piece? Is it working on technique, posture, or timing? Is it going over a piece in your mind? Is it watching or listening to someone else play music? The answer is: yes — practice includes all of these things.

Have you ever noticed that if every child in a family goes to the same piano teacher in turn, the second child often shows more promise than the first, and the third shows more than the second? And sometimes that child seems to have a gift for playing by ear, and doesn’t want to take the time to learn to read notes. That is likely because they heard their older siblings playing those same songs over and over again, and those songs are now familiar to them.

In other words, they have been exposed to practice without even realizing it. By hearing their older siblings practice the same songs over and over, those melodies became familiar. Passive listening became a form of early training.

Listening is a powerful component of effective practice. Hearing and listening to songs played correctly is very important to learning to play an instrument. The more songs you hear, the more notes, intervals, chords, scales, sequences, melodies and harmonies are in your musical vocabulary. And, the bigger your musical vocabulary is, the more success you will have learning to play your instrument.

Practice is much more than just playing your instrument.