Micro-goals

Goals of all sizes are worth setting when it comes to music. I just got a text message from a teenage student of mine who set a goal in October to write ten new songs by January 1, letting me know that she had completed the task. Some students are working on even bigger goals: college admissions, recording an album, and so on. We prepare for these lofty achievements by breaking the goals down into tiny pieces. If you are having trouble making something happen, try working it on a microscopic level.

Perhaps you are learning a new piece of music. Your ultimate target might be "be able to play this piece of music well from start to finish."

Too many of us attempt to do this without having prepared for it. We mess up and go back to the beginning, mess up and go back to the beginning. By doing this, you are programming your fingers to fail you.

A different approach
This procedure works best when you are playing from a printed score, but it can be adapted to by-ear styles as well.

The micro-goal: play the last chord. Or even one note of a chord - if  you can't play the chord all at once, your micro-goal becomes, "play the chord correctly." Let the entire world be just one note at a time until you've got it.

Now play the second-to-last note, or chord. Put them together, in time. Go as slowly as you need to go, but do play the notes in rhythm - use a metronome if necessary. Your micro-goal is "play from the second to last note to the last, comfortably and cleanly, in time."

Once you have accomplished this goal, add another note, and so on.

Most people can expect their focus to start to waver after fifteen to thirty minutes. You can tell when you are getting tired because you start to make weird mistakes you haven't made before. This means it's time to take a break, or move on to another type of musical activity. Perhaps you'll discover another goal, such as playing a piece up to speed, memorizing a piece, or improvising a song.

My role as a teacher is often to help students identify micro-goals within each of their musical activities. The more you can do this on your own, the more successful your practice will be - and ultimately, your larger goals will reflect this stronger foundation.

The most important day to practice

Besides today, that is?

The most important day to practice is the day of your lesson, immediately following the lesson. Playing for even a few minutes is enough. This simple act will affect your practice results for the rest of the week.

There are two reasons for this:

1) Reviewing what happened in the lesson while it is still fresh will reinforce the improvements and tweaks made during your lesson, and greatly increase the possibility that you'll remember and implement the suggestions your teacher made throughout the week. If you wait until three days later, you may not even remember what the suggestions were about even if the teacher's comments were written down, thereby making the lesson useless.

2) Practicing when you come home after the lesson creates a sense of momentum that will carry you through the rest of the week. When you make the effort to practice a little right when you get home from the lesson, you'll feel good about yourself and your results, and you'll be that much more motivated to get back to it then next day, and the day after that, and so on. This creates even more momentum, as you and your teacher will be thrilled by the improvement you'll exhibit and you'll continue your achievement into the next week and the next.

If you can't practice immediately after your lesson, at least practice the day after the lesson. Try this and you'll be amazed at how much more you will enjoy your practice time.

The Metronome Game

Okay, it’s not really a game. But it is a way to make something that could be really boring a bit more interesting and engaging. And it will help you to get to the fun stuff faster.

The Concept
The goal is to switch between chords precisely as required by the music, rather than when your fingers get around to it. What is happening right now is that you are hesitating when moving from chord to chord. We are going to slow the music down to the point at which you no longer will appear to hesitate, because the time between beats will take so long that you can’t help but get to the next chord on time. Then, we will make that gap between the beats smaller, so gradually that it will be almost imperceptible.

For our example, we will imagine that you are working on switching back and forth between G and D, although you can play the game with any other chords.

Step One
Set your metronome to 60 beats per minute. Once you are used to that tempo, play this:

G (click click click click), D (click click click), G (click click click)…

In other words, you will play G on beat one, strumming it only once. You will then spend beats two, three, and four switching as quickly as possible to D, then spend beats two three and four of the next measure switching as quickly as possible back to G, and so on. Remember, you are not playing whole notes – just a quick “brrringgggg!” and then get out of there.

The goal is to be precise and clean, strumming exactly on each downbeat, neither late nor early. Aim to place all of your fingers down at once, and do not strum until all fingers are in place.

How many times do you switch back and forth? That will be different for each person. As you play, rate your comfort level on a scale from one to ten (one being “I am desperately scrambling from chord to chord like a drowning person trying to stay afloat with various small pieces of driftwood” and ten being, “G and D chords alike bow down before the magnificence of my chord switching prowess.” If your score is seven or below, keep working; if your score is eight or nine, stop and move the metronome a notch higher (or two beats-per-minute faster if you’re using a digital metronome). Keep going! Don’t try to get to ten or you will go mad and begin to see visions of animated, human-sized metronomes laughing and jeering at you like something out of a scary out-take from Walt Disney’s Fantasia. You’ve been warned.

Step Two
Continue the process of gradually getting faster until you reach 120 bpm. This may take you more than one session, more than one day, or even more than one week. If it makes you feel better, track your progress in your music journal. Suppose you get to 90 bpm in one day – the next day, try starting at 75 bpm. Say you get to 110 bpm that day; the next day, start around 90. In other words, don’t feel like you have to keep pushing forward all the time. You might find that you’ve got to stay at one tempo for awhile. That’s okay! All the time, you’re training your fingers.

Once you get to 120 bpm, drop back to 60 bpm. Then play this:

G, click, D, click, G, click, D, click….

You may notice that this is exactly the same tempo you were just doing, except that now you are only allowing two clicks per chord. Continue until you can do 120 comfortably. What happens next?

Step Three
If you guessed “one click per chord,” you are right! Go back to 60, and play this:

G D G D G D…

You are now switching a chord every second, which is pretty fast. If you were playing a song that has a tempo of 60 bpm, you would be able to switch from G to D and back again, right in time.

Continue to play and get gradually faster until you reach 120. You are now switching to a new chord every half-second. Congratulations - you have won the game!

By the way…
You won’t have to go through this game with every chord there is. You have now trained yourself to move faster on everything that you play, as long as you know where your fingers are going. If you do decide to do the game with two new chords, you will get through the whole process much more quickly.