“Practise for 20 minutes every day.”
It sounds like good advice. It’s easy to understand, easy for parents to enforce and easy for teachers to write in a practice diary.
I’m not convinced it’s particularly good advice.
The problem is that 20 minutes describes how long a pupil should sit with their instrument. It says absolutely nothing about what they should achieve while they’re there.
A pupil can do some extremely ineffective practice for 20 minutes.
They can play the whole piece from beginning to end five times, make exactly the same mistakes every time, spend three minutes looking for a pencil, play the bit they already know because it’s fun, and then watch the clock until they’re allowed to stop.
Twenty minutes completed.
Very little practised.
Give Them a Job, Not a Sentence
I’d much rather give a pupil something specific to accomplish.
Not:
Practise this piece for 20 minutes.
But:
Get bars 17-20 right five times in a row.
Or:
Work on the fill in bar 8 until you can play it cleanly at 80bpm.
Or:
Play the first eight bars without stopping, including the difficult change in bar 6.
Or even:
Learn these two bars.
That changes the whole purpose of practice.
There’s now a finish line.
And sometimes they might reach it in five minutes.
Good.
Stop.
You’ve done it.
More Time Doesn’t Automatically Mean Better Practice
We have a strange tendency in music education to measure practice by duration.
Ten minutes is better than five. Thirty minutes is better than twenty. An hour must therefore be brilliant.
Except it doesn’t work like that.
If a pupil solves the problem I gave them in eight focused minutes, I’d much rather have those eight minutes than half an hour of mindless repetition.
Likewise, if they’ve spent ten minutes on something and it’s getting worse, another ten minutes may not be the answer.
Put the instrument down. Come back later.
Practice isn’t supposed to be an endurance event.
“But They’ll Only Practise for Two Minutes”
Possibly.
Which means I need to make sure the task I give them is appropriate.
“Learn this bar” might take two minutes.
Fine. Perhaps there should have been another task.
“Learn this entire page” might take two hours.
That’s probably not much use either.
Part of our job as teachers is judging how much a pupil can realistically achieve between lessons and breaking the work into manageable targets.
I generally like pupils to leave with a small number of clear practice points. Not a vague instruction to “practise everything”, and not an enormous shopping list they’ll never get through.
Something they can look at and think:
I know exactly what I need to do.
Of course, some pupils will still arrive the following week having done absolutely none of it. I’ve written about that particular phenomenon in The Pupil Who Never Practises But Never Misses a Lesson. But giving them a clear task at least removes the possibility that they didn’t know what they were supposed to do.
There Is Still a Place for the Clock
None of this means time is completely irrelevant.
Beginners need to build a habit. More advanced musicians sometimes need longer sessions simply because there is more material to cover. Technical exercises can sensibly be practised for a set period. And sometimes saying “do ten minutes today” is considerably better than saying nothing at all.
But I think time should usually be the boundary around the practice, not the objective of it.
“Spend no more than 15 minutes working on these three things” is very different from “practise for 15 minutes.”
One defines the work.
The other defines when you’re allowed to stop.
Teach Them How to Finish
Ultimately, I don’t want pupils to become good at doing practice.
I want them to become good at identifying a problem, working on it and knowing when they’ve solved it.
That’s a much more useful musical skill.
It’s also why I’m increasingly reluctant to measure progress simply by how many pages of a tutor book we’ve completed. As I discussed in Stop Trying to Finish the Book, getting through material and actually learning it aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Find the difficult bit.
Slow it down.
Work out what’s going wrong.
Repeat it intelligently.
Put it back into context.
Check that it still works.
Done.
Maybe that takes three minutes.
Maybe it takes twenty.
Maybe today it just isn’t happening and you need to come back tomorrow.
That’s fine.
And the same principle applies when preparing for exams. In Do Music Grades Actually Matter?, I explore why passing the next grade isn’t necessarily the same thing as becoming a better musician. What matters is what you’ve actually learnt along the way.
Practise until the job is done, not until the timer says you’re allowed to stop.