A Helpful Music Practice Technique - Build the Music

Have you ever sat down to practice your instrument and felt extremely overwhelmed looking at your sheet music? You skim through the lines of music, but by looking at the lines you immediately doubt your ability to achieve even one section of music. This may sound straight forward but it’s often overlooked with musicians (including myself). We as musicians have a bad habit of playing music from start to finish to see how many notes we can master on the first try. Instead of playing the music from start to finish through the whole piece, the habit that I’ve found that works for many musicians; and seems like an obvious answer, is to build the music measure by measure.

Here is a helpful practice strategy that can be used towards a new piece of music or a piece you’re currently working on.

1. Notes Only — I’m only focusing on figuring out which notes to play while not worrying about playing with a steady beat. I have a vision on what the final steady beat will be, but I’m executing the notes to how I feel about them in the moment rather than the expectation of putting the rhythms together. Confidence is the key indicator. If I feel confident about the notes, I’ll then move on to the rhythms.

2. Rhythms — Once I have the notes mastered and I feel confident about them, I then move on to figuring out what rhythms will sound like. For example, If I have quarter notes, half notes, and whole notes only in the music, I will count a simple “1-2-3-4” (or however many beats you’re counting to). If I’m working with any eighth notes in the piece, I will then change the counting to “one-and, two-and, three-and, four-and.” If you’re a beginner musician, I highly recommend writing in all your rhythms as this will help eliminate a few headaches when combining the rest of the steps at the same time.

3. SLOW Steady Beats — Now that you have the notes mastered and you feel confident about the rhythms, it’s time to put the previous steps all together to a slow comfortable steady beat. Keep in mind, steady beats may not require a metronome since the use of the metronome often feels overwhelming and exhausting in the early stages of practice. Don’t worry about using the metronome at this point. If you feel you can handle using the metronome, skip to the next step. If you feel the metronome is not going to work at the moment, keep working on the rhythms very slowly until you can start increasing the tempo. If you play the measure (or measures) of music both fast and slow by yourself, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

4. SLOW Metronome Setting — At this step, you now have the notes and rhythms mastered at your own comfortable tempo. You are now ready to start working with the metronome. If you don’t own a physical metronome, technology today makes it so convenient to have a metronome digitally on an app or even Google. Yes, Google has a metronome. Just simply type in the Google search bar the word “Metronome” and a metronome will appear.

Working with the metronome can be a tough challenge when faced with all the different tempo settings. The trick is to start the metronome approximately where you naturally left off from in the previous step. If you felt from within a slow steady beat in the previous step, find the metronome setting exactly where that beat tempo is. All that matters is how comfortable you feel with the metronome in that moment. Work on your music with the slow metronome setting until you feel the slow steady beat begin to feel super easy and boring to play over and over.

5. Start Increasing Tempo — If you started with a metronome setting of 60 in the previous step and feel like the setting seems a little easy, start to increase your tempo of 5 BPMs (Beats Per Minute). Increasing the tempo setting by 5 BPMs will feel like going lifting little “musical” weights to start building the muscle memory at the tempo you’re looking for. If you’re starting at the 60 BPM setting and your goal is to get to 125 BPM, simply increase by 5’s until you reach your goal.

60, 65, 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 100, 105, 110, 115, 120, 125

You will notice in the list above, there are 14 different settings to work with. If you need to master your music in a week for example, divide 14 by the number of days you have for practice and you have the amount of metronome settings to work with in a practice session.

Depending on whether you’re working with just one measure at a time or an entire phrase, this concept of building your music came from the idea of toys that require a step-by-step building process like LEGOs or puzzles. If we treat music practice like the thought of building something, the experience of practice will not only be better and more enjoyable, but it will have lasting results that will make an audience give you a standing ovation.