Hello and welcome to another episode of Heard It Through The Grooveline. My name is Will Bennett and I'm the founder of Grooveline Music Education. I'm here to help you know how to best support the musical education of your child, even if you are not musical yourself. At Grooveline, when the lesson ends, the learning doesn't stop.
And so as part of our wraparound approach to music education, This episode, we'll be talking about designing your practice routine and the power of taking micro actions.
Hi guys. Welcome to another episode. We're jumping straight in here. This is part two. So if you haven't yet listened to the previous episode, please listen to that. That was all about setting goals. And what we're going to talk about today is how we can design our practice routines. And take micro actions to ensure we achieve those goals with consistency and discipline throughout this year.
So we have set our goals.
We've discussed this, we've talked about type one goals, and we've talked about type two goals. We've discussed how we can. Figure out exactly what it is we want to achieve and break it down into a longterm short term. And a medium term goal as well.
I always love doing this.
It feels really kind of optimistic and almost cleansing or therapeutic to do these kinds of things. Set these goals, especially at the start of a new school year, a new calendar year. I always think of it. Like I love buying stationary. It really makes me feel optimistic. Like I always buy. The most expensive. A notepad. And nice expensive pens.
And I feel like high value ideas are written on expensive paper. I don't know. It just feels like a therapeutic cleansing kind of thing. And I think it's the same when you are creating goals as well. So that in itself has been a kind of fun optimistic, but whilst you're writing it and doing it and feeling in that optimistic Headspace. You know, you are setting goals. The R process possibly. You know, Quite lofty and now it's like, oh, we need to actually follow through on this. And maybe you're not every single day waking up feeling as optimistic as you did when you were writing with your nice new pair on your nice paper, these nice goals and dreams and things like that. Now it's time for the hard work.
So let's talk about that.
So we want to get into a routine. And we want to take consistent small bites of the elephant.
So how many times a week should you be practicing or your child be practicing? How long should they be practicing for what should they actually be doing within each practice session?
That's what today's episode is all about.
So we're going to start off with frequency of practicing. It's much better to do music little and often than it is to, for example, practice once a week for two hours straight. Music is something that needs to be consistently, almost drip fed. And practiced.
So when you're thinking about, you know, how many times a week should you practice? My answer would be, of course, the more you practice, the better that's always going to be true. The more frequently and the longer you practice, that's always good, but you know, To set a realistic goal, I think 3, 4, 5 times a week. That allows a couple of days where you were too busy or whatever.
I think that's going to be enough to keep the consistency going. That's in addition to your lesson. So you've got one lesson plus 3, 4, 5 practice routine. So you're picking up the instrument five or six times a week.
In terms of the length of practice. Obviously this does vary. And as I already mentioned, The longer, the better. But there does come a point where you can practice for so long that you're not really making effective progress anymore. You know, you can't concentrate for seven hours in a row, you know? It's just not realistic.
So when we're talking about practice in. We want to probably spend for a child, I would say 15 to 30 minutes. I think that's enough time to get done what you need to get done. How consistent and disciplined practice, what we don't want to do is say, yeah, we're going to practice an hour every day. And then not be able to follow through on that and feel like we're failing.
We want to set a realistic goal here. And something that's going to be enough that we can keep consistent.
One thing to, to mention as well is what I'm talking about here is practicing. That's different to playing. Okay, so we're going to have a practice routine. Which could be 15, 20. 30 minutes, but if you just want to play and explore and be creative, that comes separately to this. So what we're talking about is the kind of. Hard work that we need to do in order to improve.
And then the fun you can play for hours of, you know, writing a song before, you know it, six hours has gone messing around with your friends, having a jam. You know, that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the specific practice routine and session.
So within each session, we want to take micro actions.
And this is the key thing here. Learning an instrument is very hard. It takes a long time. I mean, You never really finished learning an instrument anyway, but you know, It's can take a long time to get good.
And so what we need to do is break that up into tiny actions. We want to take regular small steps towards progress. We don't want to take. Incoherent random attempted giant leaps. That's not going to be the, the way that we get to where we need to get to. It's consistent small steps that every day we just take him.
Those small.
Steps of progress.
So maybe for the first five minutes of a practice session. You want to be working on some kind of technical exercise. Now, this really ranges obviously depends on your instrument. Depends how far along the journey you are. It could be something very simple, just like changing chord shapes. You know, like a spider exercise on the guitar, maybe it's a finger movement exercise on the violin.
Some scales on the piano, some arpeggios Rudiments and paradiddles on the drums. Yeah, there's lots of different examples here, but something technical. And so for the first five minutes, just as a warmup, we just want to do just that. So let's take the example of paradiddles on the drums. She's just gonna take the snare drum. You just going to really simply do those actions right.
Left, right, right. Left, right left, left. And literally just do that. Okay. Just for a few minutes, you're warming your arms up and you just kind of drilling in that pattern. Maybe you could do it with a metronome to help you with your rhythm accuracy as well. But what we want to do, and this is the important bit is we want to apply that and contextualize that because on its own. A paradiddle. There's only so long.
You can do that before it's boring and it's not really applying and creating any kind of music anyway. So if you now apply it in context, You play a drum beat and then you do a drum fill, which uses a paradiddle. As the main pattern, for example, that's going to be a much more fun way. And you can actually see now why you did that technical exercise and how it applies to real life situations and real music. Because of course, when we started learning an instrument, we didn't do it so that we could get really good at technical exercises.
We did it because we wanted to play. We want it to play songs. We want it to create music, create, call sounds, have phone improvise. So it's important that we take those 10 clicks sizes, which are. In of themselves, very helpful with your fine motor skills and your discipline and all of those kinds of things.
Understand them. Rhythmic placement. Notes that make up chords a little bit of theory about our Petros, whatever it may be. But the fun bit is when we contextualize and apply that into real life situations. So I'd spend maybe five minutes doing that as well. So you've done five minutes for technical exercise, five minutes applying that technical exercise into a phone. Contextualized scenario.
The next part of the session. Oh, normally, especially as a child, you're learning some kind of peace or song. Okay. So, what we want to do is take that piece and break it again into tiny sections. We're going to take micro-actions of improvement. What is not useful to do. And this is a trap that, lots of people fall into because you would think this is what to do, but it's not what you don't want to do. It's just say here's my piece plant from start to finish. Two or three times and go there.
You got a practice it's really ineffective practice. It's, it's not really going to help at all. What will happen is you'll make a mistake and go back to the start again. And you never quite get to the end anyway, or you muddle you really struggle and muddle your way through you get to the end. None of it sounded coherent.
You can't really remember what happened at the start anyway. And no particular point of that piece has actually been improved by you playing it through today. Well, maybe it's been approved by no point nor nor 1%. It's not the most effective way to do it.
So, what you want to do instead is break it down into tiny sections.
And I mean, tiny, it might be just two notes, three notes, a certain phrase. It could be one bar of music. And you take that. And what I want you to do. This is advice that was given to me at university. Is play it slowly. Whatever you think slow means. I want you to have it. And I want you to Harvard again. And that is what slow practice really means. So I'm talking about, you know, If we go back to a paradiddle right. Left. Right.
You know, really slow. The reason for this is it allows us time to kind of process the information, make sure we're playing it accurately. But also what we're trying to do this whole time when we're practicing is we're creating. Neurological paths from our brain into our muscles. Now these neurological paths, they do not discriminate based on tempo or speed. Just like when a baby's learning to walk. The first few times, it just falls over, but eventually. It's brain learns accounting to put this foot here and this foot there. It's the same.
You need to learn. I need to put this hand here at the same time as my foot hits the S the base drug, for example. And then my left hand comes over and it hits this net or whatever it may be.
It doesn't matter how fast you're learning those patterns. You're creating those pathways. Once you've created those pathways at a nice, slow speed, you will find that speeding up is much easier because you've got that, you know, it's also known as muscle memory.
You may call it. You've got that muscle memory ready to play that particular pattern, those particular notes, that particular phrase or borrow of music that you've been studying. So take that one bar, play it super slowly and do it so you can do it 10 times in a row without making a mistake only then can you move on?
If on the ninth time you make a mistake, go back to zero. I know, it sounds like a lot, but realistically, this takes two seconds to play or a bar of music. So if you do it 30 times, it's only like a minute. It's not really that long. It feels intense and it's kind of scary for a child to say, I have to do it 50 times, but it's not a lot really.
So again, it's about taking the bigger picture, break it down into these micro-actions.
Now that we've done that. Just like how we took the technical exercise and applied that into the context. That's what we're gonna do now. We've, we've worked on a couple of bars of music. We've made them quite good now. Now we want to put it back into its context back into the greater four bar eight bar 16 bar phrase from which it comes, or maybe the whole piece, depending on how long the piece is that you're learning. And so now maybe those first four bars you're playing beautifully.
The next football's a pretty easy you've ha you had those all along. Now you get to bond nine. This one's the one that's kind of tricky, but 10, 11, 12. They're all fine. So the next day you were combined nine. And when you've done that, now you can play those first 12 bars. In context. So you do this throughout the week and maybe as you get towards the end of the week, you want to slightly adjust your practice routines, have a bit more time playing the whole piece in context.
Now that you've worked on all those individual bars. Maybe the last session or two before your lessons, that when you get your lesson, you can show the whole piece all the way through. And you've worked on all those little small areas that is going to be so much more effective than coming in and saying, I practiced four times this week.
And each time I played through the piece all the way through three times, because if each time you made, even if we've been generous and say you made 1% progress, you only made 3% progress this week. Whereas, with the micro-actions, they're so powerful. And you can really make huge leaps of progress that way.
So just to recap what I said, they're kind of the first five minutes might be some kind of technical piece. The next five minutes could be applying that technical exercise into some context, whether that be a song and etude or, you know, like we said, some creative like improvisor station. And the drum fair, like guitar solo, wherever it may be. Then you can spend the next, maybe 10, 15 minutes on working on these small sections of the piece that really need the most work. And then spend five, 10 minutes putting it back into its greater context against now you're playing those first 12, 16 bars of the piece really nicely. One kind of disclaimer, if you'd like is just a G what I just said, it just, it for the age of your child. Obviously, what I just said could be appropriate for someone who's maybe. You know, Well, basically any age where they're able to concentrate for that long. If they're a bit younger and they can't concentrate for that long, and it's not realistic. Let's not set that as a goal set.
Doesn't make sense. Let's take what I said and just adjust it down for their age. So maybe we're just gonna spend two or three minutes on a technical exercise, and we're going to put that into a game we're going to game-ify it, which is a thing that's come up along in previous episodes. Turn it into a fun game for five minutes, and then we're gonna, you know, just work on a couple of bars for three minutes.
I'm going to spend two more minutes. Putting it into context. It's just 10 minutes and we get it. But as it's already 10 minutes, we can do it every single day. And that will also be very effective. So there's only going to be a certain amount of time that your child at their current age can effectively concentrate for whatever that time period is.
We want to make sure we're making it as efficient as possible and getting the most out of it.
If you're a teenager learning, maybe you can go for even longer, you can practice for an hour maybe sometimes, but you want to have this kind of minimum requirement that we're going to do every single day or whatever it may be that you've set yourself five times a week. And then you can sometimes do that longer.
What you don't want to do is say I'm going to practice three hours every day, because it's not realistic. It'd be great if you can, you know, throughout times in my life, I have done that. I remember at school when. Probably do around GCSE time. Me and my friend, Brandon, we were practicing together for five hours every single day. You know, but. Not everyone's going to make that choice and gets to that point in their life.
And that's completely fine.
But you want to have this minimum requirement that you're doing every single day and that's where the discipline comes in. You can feel good if you do nothing else today, you did that 20 or 30 minute. Practice routine that you designed. And anything else is a bonus. So the actionable tip and steps or what I want you to do now, we've set our goals last week. We've discussed them.
We've got them on our fridge or whatever. Let's actually write down now with our nice stationary. If you'll have me, let's actually write down this little practice routine. Let's design it. So, , I might say, okay, for me personally, what I want to work on right now is X it's. My 16th note, funk guitar rhythms in my right hand. I've created an exercise, or I found an exercise online and my teachers give me an exercise about this for five minutes every day at the start of my practice routine.
I'm going to do that no matter what.
And I've actually written it down and I've designed it in a diary or a piece of paper over and I've written it down. Next I'm going to apply that, you know, and I've written down three different examples. I've got a drum beat back in track of YouTube that can play along with or I've got a song where this fits in. It's a disco song.
And I know that there's a, a break for 16 bars and that's where I'm going to try and show off this new skill I've learned.
Then on whatever the piece is at that week. So maybe we're working towards a grade, maybe. It's a song, whatever it could be.
And I'm going to write. Okay. I've got to work on., These four different bars that I'm struggling with. That's my focus for this week, so that when it gets to my lesson next week and I've contextualized it. I've got those four bars. And if there's four more bars the week after, that's fine. It doesn't, we're not going to always learn one song every single week.
It might take a few weeks to learn a song or even longer. That's fine as well.
So now you've got it written down. You've got your goals. You've got your practice routine. Well, we need to do now is remain disciplined. And make sure we follow through on it. If we fall along the wayside, if your child, you know, Occasionally doesn't quite achieve it. This is where we need to step up now as the adults, as the parents, as the teachers and the role models. To say.
Okay. It's okay. Let's continue anyway, because we can all fall into the trap of going, oh, I was on a 10 day streak. I missed day 11. I give up, well that's okay. Let's just do day 12 day 13. If you ended up out of 15 days, you did 14 of them. You've done brilliantly. Well, don't let that one. You know, mistake or one. Day where you were too busy, whatever it may be. Affects the bigger picture here.
So it's our responsibility to encourage the children to keep doing this. And I promise you, if you follow this advice, your child will improve massively. This year. I guarantee it.
Okay, thank you so much for listening to this two-part episode. Hopefully it's given you a lot of advice, a lot of guidance and hopefully some inspiration and a little bit of knowledge about how we can get the most out of our musical studies. I'll see you again next week for another episode. Have a great week guys.
Good luck with the practice routines. And let me know in the comments on social media, send me an email. How are you getting on with your practice routine? I'd love to hear from you. Maybe we can discuss some examples in future episodes as always. It would be really helpful if you could leave a review on Spotify, audible, apple, wherever you're listening. Because it really helps, you know, when people search keywords such as music education, it helps us get further and further to the top.
We can help as many people as possible. Thank you have a great week. Bye guys.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Heard It Through The Groove Line, the podcast that helps parents like you best support your children's musical education, even if you are not musical yourself. To find out more you can follow us on social media and don't forget to hit like and subscribe.