Go Practice
The Problem: From the Top
I’ll just start at the beginning and play through so I can find out where the mistakes are. Then I can work on them.
This feels like a perfectly reasonable approach right? It totally goes with human nature, and seems like an easy way to organize a practice session. Start at the beginning, just like the Sound of Music. Unfortunately, you end up with a really uneven practicing pattern. I think of it looking something like this:
When you always start at the beginning, the beginning of the piece gets a ton of practicing, but as you get tired or dig into mistakes, you often don’t make it to the end, and it inevitably falls behind. If, somehow, this doesn’t happen to you, congratulations, you probably don’t need this.
The Solution: From the…middle?
Track Your Spots
Realistically, your mistakes probably aren’t moving around randomly. They’re going to be in the same place as yesterday. Skip the playthrough and go directly to the places giving you trouble. Instead of spending a lot of time playing the sections you already know, go deep on the spots that need the most help. It feels less productive in the moment, but in just a few days, you’ll see huge results.
Mix it Up
Of course, if you play the same spots in the same order every day, you may fall victim to the same fall-off as starting at the beginning. Much better would be to mix up the order of the spots that you’re practicing so they’ll each get an appropriate amount of practice.
Spread them out
Practicing all your spots every day is great, but at a certain point, you might want to spread them out more. This gives you more time to practice other spots, but also solidifies them in your mind by forcing you to access them from longer-term memory.