Efficient Music Practice: Learning Before Practicing

🎵 Getting better at music by practicing less.

📚 Differentiating between practice and learning.

💃🍳 Examples of how practice and learning apply to different domains (dance, cooking).

🎶 To improve at music, it's important to first understand the piece and be able to physically play all the notes on your instrument.

⏩ Practice is about refining and reinforcing skills, while learning is about acquiring new knowledge and understanding.

⚠️ Skipping the learning phase and only focusing on practice can lead to wasted time and inefficient improvement.

🎮 Video games allow you to move on after beating a level, but in music, mistakes can accumulate.

🎶 Practicing a mistake in music can result in learning it incorrectly and struggling with it later.

⏩ Prioritize practicing for accuracy over speed, as accuracy leads to smoother and faster performance over time.

🍔 Learning first and then practicing is more effective than rushing through practice.

📚 Don't skip the learning step and jump straight to practicing.

🎵 Start by learning the notes and rhythms carefully and accurately.

🔄 Avoid practicing mistakes and focus on continuous improvement.

📖 Make time to learn new things and challenge yourself.

🎵 Challenging yourself with new scales, pieces, exercises, and repertoire improves your musical skills and helps you play old repertoire even better.

🧩 Learning new things and developing the ability to learn unlocks every new challenge and brings satisfaction and happiness derived from growth.

📚 Make time to learn and grow with new and challenging exercises, songs, and projects instead of practicing the same things over and over again.

🔥 The warm-up section is about physically preparing to play by adjusting your space, loosening up your body, and tuning up.

💪 The technique section focuses on maintaining and enhancing mechanical skills like scales and patterns, improving key fluency, and working on accents and articulation.

🎶 The projects section involves preparing repertoire and making progress on specific pieces or songs, even if it means struggling and sounding inexperienced.

🎵 Don't worry about what others think of your playing, focus on deliberate practice to improve

💪 Have different projects at different levels of readiness and work on them with attention to detail

🌟 Maintain and revisit repertoire, and remember to have fun with music