— A Guide to Constructive Repetition —
If you ask google what Practice is, its AI, Gemini, spits out this:
“Practice in music is the… process of… mastering music for performance. It involves doing something repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill.”
Seems logical enough; however, practice goes far beyond playing a piece on repeat. In fact, simply playing a song from start to finish over & over is incredibly harmful. Doing so results in Destructive Repetition: Playing the same mistakes over and over without stopping to fix them. Your brain and muscles get trained to instinctively remember mistakes.
However, the Gemini isn’t completely wrong! Practice should involve repetition – in the form of finding problem spots & fixing them. This type of repetition is called Constructive Repetition, and should look something like:
Finding errors
Annotating them in your music
Figuring out how to fix them
Repeatedly practicing those corrections until you can reliably play the problem spot right.
As with anything repetitive, this process can get boring. That’s where Gamification comes into play! By turning your problem spots into games, practice sessions become a lot more fun. Check out my practice games here, or get creative with your own!parents greenlight that), or anything else you can think of!
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