How to Practice
I grew up near a lake. We had fifteen-foot-wide plot of pebbly beach that we shared with three other families. The plot was mostly taken up by our dock which stretched out about 30 feet into the water. In the summer, my friends and I would invent lake games that mostly involved people being pushed or thrown into the water. Most of our games devolved into something like king of the hill, where the biggest kid would continually throw people in until we either got too tired to keep playing or someone got hurt, usually from being thrown onto our old splintery dock instead of into the water. One summer, we built a bike ramp at the end of the dock and would spend hours trying to do flips and tricks before we crashed into the water. Inevitably someone would get hurt or the bike would sink to the bottom and we’d have to dive down and find it.
Nearly every summer my grandpa would buy me and my sisters an inflatable boat of some sort. Not a big fancy one with an outboard engine, just a cheap one that would start filling with water if more than one kid got in. We were always thrilled about getting that little boat because that meant we could start playing our favorite lake game. I don’t think we ever came up with a name for it - maybe we called it “Throw the Boat” or something. All I remember is how is was played:
THE RULES
Person #1 tosses the boat frisbee-style out off the dock into the water
Person #2 runs as fast as they can and jumps off the dock to try to land squarely inside the boat
If you manage to stay on the boat, you win
If you miss the boat entirely or you fall off while landing, you lose
The boat games were usually done for the summer when someone would dive headfirst into the boat and rip the bottom completely off. It happened every summer.
Admittedly, its barely a game - easily rigged, no points system, no consistency, and no real rules. I’m not sure if person #1 and person #2 are teammates or opponents. It wasn’t fun at all to throw the boat an easy hop away from the dock but it also wasn’t fun to throw the boat out 20 feet when the person clearly couldn’t jump that far. It was the most fun when the boat was just barely within reach. The sweet spot.
I’ve been thinking about this game a lot lately because it reminds me of a crucial element of practice. Learning to practice guitar is a game of finding your sweet spots. If you never push yourself you won’t see a whole lot of improvement, but if you push too hard you might not get a sense of what it feels like to succeed. The sweet spot is where you are working hard but your brain gets time to process what you’re doing and the goal seems feasible but barely within reach. You get to feel what its like to accomplish something, but you also have to work for it.
Practice vs. Performance
We’ve all been hearing performances our whole lives. Recordings are all performances. Live shows are performances. But we rarely get to hear what good practice sounds like.
Often, an intermediate student comes to me and says something like “I’ve been practicing and practicing this song and I just can’t get it down.” My response is “show me how you practice.” Most of the time the student starts playing the song and then continues through the entire song. This is not practice, this is performance.
Imagine you’re on a flat 5-mile bike path with a jump right in the middle.
You’ve been biking the whole 5-mile path once a day but the jump is scary and difficult so you decide to ride the path two times a day to practice. This is not very efficient because you’re spending so much time NOT doing the hard part: going over the jump. The most efficient use of your time would be to bike to the jump, then practice going over the jump as many times as you can before you have to go home. Maybe once or twice a week you could do the whole path just to make sure it feels better. Learning to practice is learning to hang out at the jump.
Its so easy to play through a difficult part of a song and think “Yes! I made it this time!” But the point of practice to to make nailing that part feel less lucky and more familiar and predictable. Its about making the jump less scary. Sometimes practice sounds like a broken record. Sometimes practice sounds bad. Its about exploring the boundaries of what you’re capable of (finding your sweet spot) and creating a plan to slowly push your boundaries in deliberate ways.
I work with each of my students to find their boundaries and craft specific ways to help them practice efficiently. Sometimes its about slowing down and working specific sections of songs. Sometimes its about focusing more on a specific hand and ignoring the other hand for a while. Sometimes its about removing a few fingers from a chord to practice switching and slowly adding them back in as your muscle memory gets stronger.