Productive Practice: Master your mind, find your focus, and transform your playing

By Matthew Mills

Do you want to make the most of your practice time?

The author, Matthew Mills, has spent over 25 years teaching pianists of all ages and levels. Many of his private students have gone on to study at top UK universities and conservatoires.
In this book, he draws on this wealth of experience to examine in detail the process of practising a musical instrument. Starting with what motivates musicians to practise, he goes on to explore the process of learning, and how to apply this in the most effective ways to planning and evaluating your practice sessions, helping you make the most of your time, maximise your progress, and find joy at every step along the way.
As this book is written in general terms, you will find here ideas, practical advice, and inspiration to engage more profoundly with the practice process, regardless of your instrument, age, or level of ability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781387797066

Book preview

PRODUCTIVE PRACTICE

MATTHEW MILLS

First published in paperback in 2022

by Matthew Mills Music LLC

www.matthewmillsmusic.online

Copyright © 2022, Matthew Mills Music LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-387-92829-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-387-79706-6 (ebook)

to all my students, past and present, who have shaped the thoughts and ideas in this book

PRODUCTIVE PRACTICE      1

MATTHEW MILLS      1

1: DEVELOPING A PRACTICE MINDSET      2

PRODUCTIVITY POINTS      8

2: DIAGNOSTICS and EVALUATION      8

PRODUCTIVITY POINTS      17

3: The THREE Ps of PRACTICE      17

PATIENCE      17

PERSISTENCE      20

PERFECTIONISM      22

PRODUCTIVITY POINTS      23

4: The THREE Fs of PRACTICE      24

FOCUS      24

FLOW      25

FORGIVENESS      28

PRODUCTIVITY POINTS      30

5: PLANNING PRODUCTIVE PRACTICE      31

6: THE JOY OF PRACTICE      41

ABOUT THE AUTHOR      41

1: DEVELOPING A PRACTICE MINDSET

There are a few basic principles with which we must all come to terms in order to practice well.

These are:

•      practice is about improving;

•      practice requires patience, persistence, and focus;

•      practice is difficult;

•      practice should always be a source of joy.

Trust me, I am not a monk, nor am I crazy (others may wish to disagree), but I love practising. The comfort of a daily routine, the thrill of feeling that I’m working towards, and achieving, goals—these are so essential to my sense of self, to my filling my place in the world, simply to being me, that if I cannot for whatever reason do my regular daily practice session for a couple of days, I start to feel intensely frustrated. I recently had a period of about eight weeks without access to a piano, and it was possibly the most depressing experience of my life.

I’m amazed at the number of students and recreational pianists I meet for whom practice is a chore, or for whom practice simply isn’t joyful. Given how much of it is necessary to achieve a decent standard on any instrument, surely there can be no better incentive than for practice to be fun, right? But the number one question about practice is always about quantity—as if a certain amount, a ‘target’, is enough—and as if practice is as much about endurance as anything else. No pain, no gain, and all  that.

Let’s get one thing straight right now. No amount of practice—yes, no amount—will yield results if the practice is bad. And one of my motivations for writing this little book is that, in my experience, most of most people’s practice is bad. As a teacher, over the last twenty-something years I’ve been very lucky to work with more than my fair share of motivated, interested, and dedicated students of varying ages and levels of experience and expertise. Several of them have gone on to advanced study at top universities and conservatoires. Not one of them, in my opinion, has practised well. I mean them no disrespect by saying this, but I know that most of the time the majority of them have ignored most of my advice when it comes to practice. How do I know this? Because they didn’t make the progress I knew they could have if they had actually done what I said.

One of my adult beginner students once rather proudly announced to me that his New Year’s resolution was ‘to actually do the things you suggest and see if it makes a difference’. Yes, really. Of course, it is human nature to ignore advice when it doesn’t fit our preferences or prejudices. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I once had a PT who set me a whole bunch of bodyweight exercises, which I hated. In my defence, I did tell him that I didn’t enjoy bodyweight exercises, but there we go. Every time I went to the gym, he was there, and I felt so bad about not doing what he had set me that I actually went to the gym less, just to avoid the exercises I hated, and the awkwardness of him seeing me not doing them, and my feeling bad about it. When he wasn’t seeing the expected results, I don’t know if the surprise he expressed was genuine. Eventually I just joined a different gym.

From my point of view as a teacher, I cannot understand why the student wouldn’t have taken my advice: I can obviously play the piano much better than he can, and I had shown him the precise steps in a process he needed to follow in order to achieve his assumed goal of being able to play the piece better, even if not as well as a seasoned professional with thirty years of piano-playing under his belt.

But from my point of view as a student, I can also understand how difficult it can be to force yourself to confront your own inability. Especially as an adult, with more acute faculties of self-assessment, and various achievements in life which have perhaps conditioned you to expect more of yourself, it can be incredibly frustrating not to ‘get it’ straight away.

The first concept to grasp, indeed, to make peace with, is that playing a musical instrument is much harder than a professional makes it look. Those people who have achieved a high standard of playing, just like those people who have achieved a high standard in any activity, will have worked very hard to get there. And they will have had a great deal of help and advice along the way.

As with all advice, if it isn’t working, then ditch it and try something else, but you must also give it time to work. If you dismiss an altered fingering, bowing, or whatever before you have spent enough time with it to know whether it will be effective or not, you will potentially deny yourself the means of achieving your