I found myself talking to a young woman last night who is learning the piano. She was taking a class at our local city college, but since she works full-time and sometimes had to work late and miss class, she started to fall behind and dropped the class. Since then, she hasn’t been practicing much. This is something I hear from a lot of people. Of course, you have to practice if you expect to improve your technique on an instrument, but so often people get discouraged if they go for a while without practicing and then suddenly they think that they just weren’t cut out to be a musician, and they give up. That keyboard or guitar in your living room starts gathering dust, and every time someone comes over, they see it and ask, “Oh, do you play?” And you say, “Not really.” Well, I have a simple solution to this.
Most often, when someone hasn’t been practicing, and getting down about it, they make a resolution at some point like this one: Okay. I don’t have a whole lot going on this weekend. So, I’m’ going to learn 5 songs. or I’m going to practice for 5 hours. And then what happens? The weekend comes, and they don’t touch their instrument. The resolution to work really hard and put in all kinds of time in one day, when you haven’t been practicing much at all, is the exact opposite of what you should do. Here’s my recommendation.
Practice 5 minutes a day, every day.
That’s right: 5 minutes. Here’s my 5-minute-a-day practice program. Choose one small thing to work on; it could be a scale you aren’t comfortable with, a song you want to learn, or just a portion of a song, an exercise, whatever. Just find something small enough that you’ll be able to practice it a couple times in 5 minutes. Do not power through an hour’s worth of material in this time.
So as I said, do something small. Now do it for 5 minutes and no more than 5 minutes. Consciously limit your time. Practice those 5 minutes and then walk away. But most importantly, do it every day. Do the same thing every day for a while, until you feel like it’s really solid. Don’t despair if you have to go out of town and you can’t do your 5 minutes for a couple days. But in general, do those 5 minutes every day. Anyone can find 5 minutes out of their day to practice.
After a week or two of focusing on one small thing, you’ll find that you’re getting really good at that thing. Now move on to something else. Maybe at first you were practicing one section of a song; now go on to another section. Eventually, you’ll have that whole song down.
You might be thinking that this will take forever to get any good. That’s true, but how long will it take if you never practice? Also, by putting in only 5 minutes a day, and doing it every day, you’ll begin to develop better practice habits in general, because the key to practicing is showing up. It may only be 5 minutes, but you’re showing up every day, and that’s the most important thing. After a while, ease the restrictions on your time and allow yourself to go longer if you can. You may realize that you have 10 minutes to spare, maybe 20 or 30. That’s great, but remember that you should always have at least 5 minutes.
I have to admit, though I’ve presented it in my own words, I pretty much got this idea from Kenny Werner and his book, Effortless Mastery, a book that changed my life and I highly recommend. I will soon be writing an article that discusses that book directly. But if you’re interested, here’s a link to buy it: SheetMusicPlus.com
Also, see Daniel Mylotte’s article, how to practice
more articles by Brien Henderson
- Anatomy of the Blues Scale
- A Great Site for Old Music
- Every Musician Should Read This
- Saxes: Work Your Pinkies!, part 1
- Spice Things Up With The Tritone Sub
- Writing Your Own Music: How To Get Started
- Intro to chords in Jazz
