‘Practicing is an intense, complex procedure that requires calm, balance, and complete concentration.’
Book available here (Mel Bay).
Technical exercises are necessary to fully develop technique. (Viloteau: Keep them to a minimum, learn by playing music. Yang agrees.)
In sports, drills are necessary. No-one has run a legitimate four-minute mile by only practicing running one mile at a time. I don’t know how far this analogy goes though. Drill practice tends to be highly regular, e.g., the Guiliani arpeggios, while actual songs are rarely as regular. Do the simplified versions (the drills) transfer to the more irregular musical applications (etudes and songs)? Clearly, yes: break it down and master the simplest version; that is the foundation for transfer upwards in complexity. If you can’t make a round tone with a single finger on an open string, how can you expect to control tone in a complex passage? But equally as clearly, no: practicing artificial regularity makes you skilled at artificiality, a form of practicing a mistake. (Example: consistently stumbling when swapping RH finger order in arpeggios.)
I don’t know the answer. Viloteau recommends drills for tremolo (and I’m caricaturing his comments: for instance, in arguing against the Guiliani arpeggios, he presents a Guiliani arpeggio etude, a song instead of a simple LH repeating pattern. To jump forward, Viloteau strongly advocates ‘always play music,’ representing I think the insight that musicality, which we experience as an effortless pleasure while listening, is a skill that needs constant practice and development.)
Are there elite classical guitarists who have not spent significant time on drills? It seems exceedingly unlikely.
Technical exercises should be varied, and intermixed with music-playing. Kappel would say, for example, that my former pattern of playing scales for 90 min straight was a mistake, or at best, a sub-optimal approach. (Noting that I started in the Segovia era and—I was taught—he claimed one or two hours of scales a day would fix everything.) Better according to Kappel would be (say) 15 min of scales, 15 of a current piece, 15 arpeggios, 15 etude, &c.
Kappel says that anything played without full concentration is ‘wrong,’ that is, suboptimal and potentially damaging if ‘small’ errors are allowed that are then learned. (Small in quotes because it’s so context-sensitive, and in places even very slight things, like string-scrape, can detract from the song.)
On perfect practice: Chopin said, ‘Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.’ The importance of ‘perfect’ (I’m guessing) arises from the difficulty of changing almost-right patterns. Habits and patterns that are close to the desired are like grooves next to where you want to saw: the blade wants to slide over. Easier to replace ‘very different’ than ‘almost the same.’ From this view, perfect practice means avoiding digging those almost-but-not-quite-right channels that are so hard to climb out of. (It’s possible/likely this is a consequence of the network architecture of the brain.)
Varying technical exercises, varying content, is spacing and (depending on content) possibly interleaving. It’s common sense that to improve at, say, tremolo, focusing your practice on tremolo is the way to do it. Common sense, here, is wrong, and Kappel is congruent with current understanding.
‘Maximum gain per unit time.’ (This theme repeats in Viloteau and Mathews, and I can’t imagine any of the authors disagreeing.) To achieve this, every practice session must have clearly defined objectives. These can range from playing specific notes in a section to RH positioning to consistent tone production to relaxation of the fourth finger of the right hand—a lot of possibilities. Focus should be determined by an assessment of what most urgently needs work to improve. Dwell, in practice, on what’s weakest. This is a recommendation to engage desirable difficulty. It’s problematic though in not restricting focus to ‘nearby’ weaknesses (proximal learning). That is, it may be more productive to dwell on what’s weak but close rather than what’s weakest because it’s far from current capability. As well, achievable goals (or at least goals one believes are achievable) are necessary to reinforce motivation; goals that are too far away, with too big a gap, diminish it.
Kappel does not mention end-of-session self-assessment. Setting a goal without considering whether progress was made, whether the means chosen to pursue the goal were effective, &c, leaves out the self-generated feedback that (one hopes) advances learning. Since accurate self-assessment is necessary, this is a lacuna.
In discussing aspects of learning, judgments of learning (JOLs) were mentioned, with the note that we’re pretty bad at this. Part, then, of the value of end-of-session assessment is developing our skill at JOLs, viz., by regular practice at checking/testing them.
Kappel insists sound is never to be sacrificed. I interpret this partly as sound being the commonality between technical practice and music, and more, that sound is always the main thing being practiced.
‘The musician’s bible begins with the words: In the beginning, there was rhythm.’ (Quoting Heinrich Neuhaus, a well-regarded piano teacher/pedagogue.) (Assent from Mathews.) Catherine Cho has her students literally walk the tempo.
‘Sound and rhythm the primal components, the main parameters of music.’
- Practice slowly. Simplest version, half-speed; begin something new much slower than half-speed; this is physically easy but musically hard
- Even for things mastered, revert to slow tempo
- Sometimes alternate between slow and fast
- Use the metronome to ‘force’ tempos, with the caveat that it is never a pace where there’s potential to lose control: ‘success can only emerge if your practice slowly with a metronome over a long period of time.’
In this, Kappel provides my favorite clickbait: ‘Try this simple trick for classical guitar success! Practice conscientiously and with utmost concentration for thousands of hours over multiple years!’
Memorize in small parts:
- For multi-octave scales/runs memorization is necessary so you can look at what you’re doing; same for upper positions.
- Viloteau, below, emphasizes anticipation (where you’re going) and as well looking (at where you’re going), both of which require memorization.
‘Practicing is, in large part, the constant repetition of measures, phases, lines, and entire movements’
- ‘Only repeat a section with the utmost of attention and concentration!’
- Quotes Gerhard Mantel’s ‘practicing with rotating attention:’ repeat 1 is clarity of articulation, repeat 2 is volume control, repeat 3 is optimal LH finger positions, repeat 4 is intentional tempo or dynamic variation, repeat 5 is sound, &c. For clarity, sound is a broader term than it may seem: since the guitar has a small dynamic range, changes of tone and RH attack create the impression of dynamics, so sound encompasses the technical elements to create and control the tone color and shape you want for a musical phrase or section.
- Suggests ‘Sliding window’ (my phrase, from a common software algorithm): for instance, for a scale passage, practice notes 1 – 12, then 2 – 13, 3 – 14, &c. Can be notes or measures, depending on the material, with the technique being shifts one unit per. Kappel suggests) 6 — 8 repetitions (though he also says increase the number of repeats for difficult sections). ‘This practicing method is very time-intensive but more effective than any other!’
- Along these lines, Mathews (below) mentions the ‘arbitrary interruption’ technique, used by pianist Lang Lang and others, where you (ideally) have someone interrupt you at a random place, that is not a natural musical pause, stop, then later begin seamlessly from that spot. Great for memory, difficult to do.
The sliding window approach recruits incompleteness, that is, our tendency to recall almost-done things better than completed. The sliding window means that much practice will be with phrases that either don’t begin or don’t resolve. This would seem (probably) to improve savings.
Playing from memory is important for interpretation and in some passages necessary to even be able to play.
- Associate different areas of memory, e.g., motor memory, cognitive (formal and harmonic analyses, melodic and harmonic/chordal progressions, interval structures, bridges, &c), visual memory (eidetic scores, ‘seeing’ hand motions a la Iznaola), musical/emotional memory (interpretation, feeling, dynamics, mental analogies [water over stones], &c)
- Kappel suggests two memory-training methods, extreme slow-playing and mnemonic reference points, e.g., break the song into distinct sections (of roughly equal length) and nail the beginning of each section, playing sections back to front. This seems to me to be a close cousin to ‘sliding window,’ but the units are changed to sections with ‘natural’ musical boundaries, and the back-to-front breaks Izanola’s warned-against ‘inertia of musical flow.’
- Practicing or learning new pieces end-to-beginning is often recommended, though the above is Kappel’s only mention; the idea is, in performing you’re always moving toward increasing mastery (assuming you play through the piece, which is generally not recommended unless practicing performance.)
The computer scientist and coauthor of the Logo programming language Seymour Papert liked the phrase ‘mind-sized chunks.’ Kappel does not use this phrase but it implicitly runs through his recommendations. Presumably, work with what can fit into working memory.
Kappel provides a huge volume of material, along with (non-coercive) examples of how to assemble and sequence the various scale, arpeggio, chord, stretch, &c exercises. If, following Iznaola, you diagnose a particular weakness, Kappel very likely has an exercise that directly addresses it. (The point remains, though, that if you don’t understand the source of the weakness, you run the risk of simply adding a layer on top of a problem to get to a short-term solution.)
Like Pumping Nylon this is a terrific, comprehensive reference book, with a generous sensibility behind it, and I’m certain I haven’t done it justice.
Learning music on guitar 