Quality v. Quantity « The Practice of Practice

[archerships]

Some research shows that the amount of time doesn’t really matter, although it does matter a little since if you spend zero hours doing something, you’re not going to get better at all. But it turns out that the number of hours practiced doesn’t really matter, it’s all about the quality of your practice. What you do is important, but not how much you do. Duh, right?

This seems like a no-brainer issue, but researchers are notoriously skeptical about common-sense issues. We want to know for sure whether things are true. That’s one of the reasons behind a study by Duke, Simmons, & Cash (2009), titled It’s not how much; it’s how: Characteristics of practice behavior and retention of performance skills. These researchers had 17 graduate and advanced undergraduate piano players practice a 3-measure excerpt of Shostakovich’s Concerto No. 1 for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra

Here’s what they found:

1. A few things didn’t seem to affect how well the players did (no statistical significance): practice time; total number of practice trials, and number of complete practice trials.
2. What did separate the better pianists (statistically significant), was:  the percentage of all performance trials that were correct; the percentage of complete performance trials that were correct; and the number of trials performed incorrectly during practice (this was a negative relationship, or the less mistakes the better the player ranked).

So what does this mean? In a nutshell, you have to practice slow enough to get things right as soon as possible. Playing anything incorrectly ever is teaching your motor neurons to play incorrectly. They don’t know any better and this is a great example of the GIGO principle: Garbage In, Garbage Out. What separated the top-ranked players from the others was how they treated errors when they occurred (p. 318):

via intentionalpractice.wordpress.com

From here:

http://intentionalpractice.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/quality-v-quantity/

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[writerspleasure.livejournal.com]

Rules for practicing the pianoforte

1. Practise the passage with the most difficult fingering; when you have mastered that, play it with the easiest.
2. If a passage offers some particular technical difficulty, go through all similar passages you can remember in other pieces in this way you will bring system into the kind of playing in question.
3. Always join technical practice with the study of the interpretation; the difficulty, often, does not lie in the notes but in the dynamic shading prescribed.
4. Never be carried away by temperament, for that dissipates strength, and where it occurs there will always be a blemish, like a dirty spot which can never be washed out of a material.
5. Don't set your mind on overcoming the difficulties in pieces which have been unsuccessful because you have previously practised them badly; it is generally a useless task. But if meanwhile you have quite changed your way of playing, then begin the study of the old piece from the beginning as if you did not know it.
6. Study everything as if there were nothing more difficult; try to interpret studies for the young from the standpoint of the virtuoso. You will be astonished to find how difficult it is to play a Czerny, or Cramer, or even a Clementi.
7. Bach is the foundation of piano playing. Liszt the summit. The two make Beethoven possible.
8. Take it for granted from the beginning, that everything is possible on the piano, even where it seems impossible to you or really is so.
9. Attend to your technical apparatus so that you are prepared and armed for every possible event; then when you study a new piece, you can turn all your power on to the intellectual content; you will not be held up by the technical problems.
10. Never play carelessly, even when there is nobody listening, or the occasion seems unimportant.
11. Never leave a passage which has been unsuccessful, without repeating it; if you cannot do it in the presence of others then do it subsequently.
12. If possible allow no day to pass without touching your piano.

- http://www.rodoni.ch/busoni/bibliotechina/letteregerdaEN/gerdaEN1.html