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Separating Playing and Practicing For Musical Success!

by Lawrence Russel

Probably one of the most common things I have discovered in students of all skill levels and playing styles are that the concepts of "playing" and "practicing" are often confused and do not have a clear definition in how they are thought of and approached. Time and time again, as a guitar teacher, and specifically in jazz education, when the focus of improvisation may lend a hand in the ambiguity within these two terms, a pupil may have a hard time separating them, resulting in their progress becoming stunted and their musical vocabulary getting stale.

Various times where I have asked a student of mine: What specifically are you working on? Or: How specifically are you practicing that? Many times comes an answer involving playing passively with out concentration, or with out having a clear definition of what they are trying to work on to start with. In answering this, I define what practicing should likely be, and how this is a separate entity from "playing" or "performing". This definition and analogy can be applied to all types of music.

This is the idea that practicing is like in baseball, warming up with a weight on your bat, so when you take it off the bat is light, easy to swing, and you have much more power and control than you previously had. In musical terms, it is limitation. Practicing should be the (or a given form of practicing should be) giving the student clearly defined exercises, or concepts or ideas, that are compartmentalized to work very specific areas of overall musicianship.

Here's an example: Give your student (of self) a scale pattern to use, and to work up to a specific BPM in several different keys. This will be the "weight on the bat". When they or you have worked it up to tempo, now "go up to bat" in which they should use this exercise in an actual musical context. I would have the student improvise a solo using the pattern, and by me having them worked with the concrete limitation of the exercise, their soloing will take on a feeling of being natural and more musical than it had previously been, resulting in "taking the weight off the bat"

Now, in my eyes to define the "playing" distinction in which they will do after working up the "practicing" as well as performing live, is to me, playing with eliminating the analytical, conscious mind; simply just "in-the-moment performing" with all aspects of self focusing on the music, leaving everything they had practiced at the door. All too often, a student's playing will get caught up in trying to remember what they had practiced, or being too forceful while trying to insert what they had been working on, and this will immediately take them out of the moment, and cause a barrier between their mind, their ear, and their hands, leaving their playing to suffer.

This definition and analogy of "practicing" as opposed to and related to "playing", could be looked at as fairly simple in these terms, but being conscious about it and clarifying this in the big picture, can provide huge growth opportunities for a student, and can result in exponential room for success in the practice room and on stage.



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New Unique Article!

Title: Separating Playing and Practicing For Musical Success!
Author: Lawrence Russel
Email: kwashington444@yahoo.com
Keywords: music, music education, education, jazz, jazz education, music lessons, music teacher, music lessons, guitar lessons, piano lessons
Word Count: 544
Category: Music
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