[alinajaf]

This is a fantastic comment. I'd love to hear more about your experiences and any other insights you have about musical practice.

Since you program too, do you think there is much crossover? Some analogous form of practice that makes you a more effective coder?

[ianamartin]

Some thoughts about what crosses over:

One of the most unexpected things to me is how good I am at hitting deadlines. But it makes sense. As a musician, deadlines don't move. You're playing a concerto with an orchestra on such and such a day . . . that concert is going to happen whether you are ready or not. Your choices are to get up there and play like a badass or get up there and fail in front of a thousands of people. You learn that when you're 8, and it sticks with you. When I moved over to coding, I never thought twice about it. A deadline is a deadline. It doesn't move. That's a thing that's been consistently talked about in my career. I nail my deadlines. Not because of any magic about me as a programmer, just a mental inability to view those as flexible. I can see, however, that this would be a weakness for me if I were to get into management: I'm awfully impatient with people who don't hit deadlines.

Dealing with toxic environments. I read about brogrammers and silicon valley startups with all kinds of ego problems and sexism all the time. We all do. I've even worked for a startup or two that styled itself that way. I've never met anyone with the kind of ego that professional musicians have. Not all, mind you. It's been my experience that the best people in any field are quite kind and wonderful and humble. And the worst are the ones who are actually just mediocre. But there are tons of mediocre performers who have terrible sexist, racist, and generally toxic attitudes. I managed an orchestra while I was studying statistics after I dropped out of my music degree because it seemed like a good idea. I've never seen such a wretched hive of scum and villainy. As far as I'm concerned, even the most obnoxious of the party-boy, popped-collar, douchebag bros I've ever worked with are basically nothing compared to you run-of-the-mill regional orchestra player jerk.

Being willing to learn from anyone. There are many musicians (particularly string players) who subscribe to a certain philosophy of playing. All other methods of playing are ipso facto wrong. My best teacher is a violinist, Bruce Berg, who studied with Galamian, Gingold, and Dorothy DeLay. He did an undergrad, grad, and doctorate at the Julliard School. Where he claims to have learned very little (I doubt this is true). After finishing his doctorate, he went and studied with a Cellist--heresy!--named George Neikreug. What could a violinist with these credentials possibly have to learn from a Cellist? To this day, Bruce claims that he never actually learned to play the violin well until he studied with George. I've taken that same approach, (and I picked up a lot of George's techniques from Bruce), both in music and in technology, and I think it has served me well. Go to the dark side for advice some times. Go learn a language that you don't like. Go talk to people you don't think have anything to offer you. Go with an open mind and a warm heart. And a couple hundred bucks. Because people often charge money for their knowledge. But I've learned as much about programming from reading Marco Arment talk about how he does all his web apps in PHP because his needs are simple as I have learned from reading Eevee about how much PHP is a hammer with the claw part on both ends.

I could continue on about this just as much as the earlier topic. But I should probably shut it down. So I'll close with this:

Don't be afraid to contact big important people and ask them for help. I remember when I was just learning python, I was writing an extension for SPSS to do some statistical junk that we couldn't do with the interface as it existed. So I just went and wrote one that shouldn't have worked but did and emailed him the code and asked why it worked. I got completely schooled by a total master. It didn't really work. Slightly embarrassing, but since I didn't bring an ego to that situation, I learned a ton. John Peck is a really great guy.

[ianamartin]

Here are a few things off the top of my head about practicing. And I do think there's quite a lot of crossover as well.

Practice thoughts:

Have a plan when you sit down (or stand up) to practice. Know what you want to accomplish. This gets more and more important the older you get and the less time you have. When I was a kid, I practiced for 5 or more hours a day. Even more in college. As an adult with a job and a girlfriend, I will never have that luxury again. But what I do have is 15 minutes here and 20 minutes there. It is FAR from optimal, but that's what you have to work with. I do still get up early before work so I can practice scales for an hour every morning. That might be all I can do for one day. But even with scales, have a goal.

It helps to do this if you have thought about the piece you want to work on and what you think you need to do. It's hard to generalize because you are so often in different places. But give yourself a goal, break it up into manageable tasks, and check them off the list. I'm learning the Shostakovitch violin concerto right now to play with an orchestra in a few months. Each day of the week my schedule is different. Some days, I'm going to yoga after work; some days, I'm driving an hour to my gf's place, sometimes, I just go home. This week, I'll have a few 15-20 minutes time slots, and I'll have 1 2-hour slot. I prefer to work the "hardest" parts in the smallest time slots. I'll take those 2-3 short times and work a single measure that's tricky. I'll take the longer time slot and work on performing a larger chunk.

I was a violin performance/music theory/philosophy major in school (and dropped out after 6 years, of course). So it's natural for me to analyze the music I'm playing to get the best understanding of it I can. You don't have to be a music theorist to have some grasp of the form and structure of a bit of music you want to learn. Read about the music online. Understand it the best you can. This will help you remember it. I break up my practice goals when I'm doing the initial analysis of the music.

One good reason to do some analysis before you practice is to understand what parts are similar and what parts are different. Abstract the challenges as much as possible. If you are working on a piece in f#-minor, practice a lot of scales in f#-minor so that you have that key in your ear and your fingers and don't have to worry so much about intonation in general. If it follows a standard form, you'll spend some time in A-major and there will be at least some C#-Major(!). Practice those scales as well before you sit down to do the hard work. Composers tend to reuse material. Take the time to figure out what the composer is doing over time with the musical components, and you will save a ton of time in your practice.

In the classical world, the number one biggest priority is playing in tune. It doesn't matter what else you do or can do or what you can feel about the music or anything else: if you don't play in tune--and I mean really well in tune--no one cares. We are hyper-attuned to this because of recording technology that lets anyone sound like they can play perfectly in tune. In reality, no one does. No one even really agrees on what "in tune" means these days. But if you don't do it, you've got nothing. So! Train your ears. Spend some time, at least once a month doing exercises that are designed to maximize your ability to detect small changes in pitch. I apologize in advance to wind and brass players, I don't know what the analog is for this exercise. Obviously, this isn't relevant to fretted instruments.

The "ear cleaner" is an exercise you can do that will make you crazy obsessive about intonation. It's very simple. Start on a pitch. A fingered pitch; not an open string. You have to have total control for this. But it doesn't really matter which one because this isn't a finger exercise. It's an ear exercise. Now what you are going to do is gradually--and in even divisions--move from the pitch you are on to a pitch one half step above it. Over the course of 8 even bow strokes. So for each bow stroke, you are going to increment your pitch by 1/8 of 1/2 of a whole tone. It's very difficult. The point isn't so much that you be able to execute it perfectly so much as it is to get you to listen that closely. And when you practice this for 5-10 minutes, you'll hate yourself a little because everything will sound out of tune.

If there is a part of the linked article I agree with, it is practicing in smaller portions. I really don't think that randomizing is a good idea. But planning small segments is a great idea. The important thing to remember is that you are developing muscle memory. If you are practicing mindlessly, you are probably practicing something wrong. Which means you will be reinforcing something wrong. I suggest this: do not practice for any longer than you can maintain total focus on the thing you are trying to improve. There are too many things to think about already. If you are as planned and focused and you should be, you are still only working on one aspect of your technique, and others are not being executed properly. Choose one thing. Do it well. Stop as soon as you lose focus.

I could keep going on for a very long time, but I'll close the practice notes on this: remember to practice performing. Performing is a completely different mental exercise than practicing. When we practice, we have to be very acutely attuned to all of our little (or big) errors, and we need to note them for future reference because our ears and minds are the only error-checking mechanisms that we have (aside from audio recorders, which are a VERY good idea when practicing performing). But performing is different. You cannot and should not be thinking or hearing in the same way when you perform. When you perform you have to be focused on the music that you want to make (that you planned out, right?! Back when you analyzed the piece before you started practicing), and you can't let the inevitable mistake distract you from your performance or shake your confidence. You can't think in small chunks of technical execution one note or measure at a time. You have to think bigger than that. And you have to be listening to the other people you are playing with and responding to what they are doing. You don't have time for you when you perform. Performing is all about other people. You have to practice getting into that mindset and practice forgetting about what you are doing when you play. It's an entirely different skill. So practice that one too.