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5 Tips To Perfect Practice
To get truly good at music, you have to practice. There is no other way to get good at playing a musical instrument or singing or much of anything else without extensive practice. Music can be so complex and intricate that without practice, you'll never be able to play it perfectly without making any mistakes with perfect emotion, and to make it sound really excellent.
The quality of your practice is much more important than the quantity. The old saying "practice makes perfect" is only true if the practice itself is nearly perfect. Here are 5 tips to help make your practice more effective and efficient.
1. Practice motions slowly - The muscle memory of our bodies allows us to physically carry out patterns of motion with little or no conscious involvement. Examples of muscle memory include walking, riding a bicycle, typing, and of course playing a musical instrument. In order to develop this memory, the muscles require training in the form of repeated conscious guidance from the mind. First the mind must learn the pattern. Then the mind must "teach" the pattern to the muscles.
2. Pause between repetitions - When dealing with repetitive activities, the mind is better able to focus when the repetitions are broken up by short pauses. After two or three repetitions, pause for about 30 seconds to regain focus. If you lose your focus and concentration, you won't have effective practice. You'll just be spinning your wheels.
3. Don't practice mistakes - For every repetition required to learn a pattern of motion, it takes 7 times the number of repetitions to change the pattern. If in the course of your practice you make an error, stop. Review in your mind the pattern. And further reduce the speed of your motions. Make sure you learn the pattern slowly before learning it fast. Once you have the pattern down pat much a year to speed it up to the speed of the song. If you are not wrong, you'll does have a harder time fixing your mistakes.
4. Practice in small sections - A "practice section" is simply a finite series of motions. Musical sections can correspond to anything from a few notes to an entire work. When practicing, it is important to practice small sections of just a few notes. Practicing small sections limits the amount of information the muscles have to learn at one time. It also facilitates the mind's focus and concentration.
5. Take frequent breaks and don't "over-practice" - B.F. Skinner and other experts have found that the mind's ability to learn drops significantly after prolonged intense concentration. Research shows that studying too long can deplete chemicals in the brain necessary for learning. Therefore, it is best to take frequent breaks and practice no more than 4 hours consecutively.
Go ahead and try these techniques the next time you are practicing. If you want to get good you have to practice, but if you want to have real success you need to have good practice.
About the Author Brian is a writer and an music junkie. He loves spending time playing music and looking at vintage saxophones. You can learn more at http://www.saxaddict.com/instruments/vintage-saxophones.html
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