Following up on last week's article on ways to optimize your music rehearsal, I discovered a recent essay which focuses on the idea of "practice smarter, not harder." But what does that mean?
In a recent study, a group of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin studied practice habits of piano and pedagogy majors in an attempt to differentiate which habits were helpful and which were not. This lead to some interesting results, including the fact that neither practicing longer nor getting in more reps had an impact on how they performed.
What did seem to have a profound impact was how they handled mistakes. The best performers employed similar methods of fixing their errors, including playing with one hand on its own, playing only part of the excerpt, and perhaps most importantly, finding strategic ways to slow things down.
Read the full article by Dr. Noa Kageyama here.
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