In Adult Music Students – Part 1, I described my own experience as an adult music student, how I was a relative latecomer to the clarinet, and entered music school at the ripe old age of 26. If I had to summarize my own clarinet learning I would say that love, impatience, and frustration, were the central themes. I loved playing, loved the sound of the instrument, its range and moodiness, but often my approach to learning was frantic, born of feeling like I was playing catch-up for all the years I had missed playing. Impatience is the enemy of mastery. I learned this lesson as an adult music student, and am still learning it today. Impatience begets imperfection which in turn begets frustration, which leads to impatience, and so on. This is an obsessive cycle of incorrect learning that affects most students, but I believe it affects adults students more.

The topography of learning a musical instrument for any music student is steep at the beginning, a hill that the student climbs with relative ease, jumping boulders along the way, until that hill begins to level off and a plateau is reached. This plateau stretches on to infinity, with no discernible point of arrival. Where the steep hill requires muscle, the plateau requires patience as infinite as the forever stretching plain the student faces. Adult students who wish to move beyond the plateau must become masters of patience. Patience allows the mind to focus, patience conquers slowly where frustration fails quickly, patience means dwelling with equal care in the million moments of learning it takes to become a well practiced musician. Adult students must become Zen masters of patience if they wish any mastery over their instrument. I can add here that if you are happy playing imperfectly, or with imperfect technique, playing correctly half the time, and practicing whenever you have a moment, that is fine, but if you want to master your instrument, or come as close to mastery as an amateur adult musician can, patience then, must be your constant companion. I am not a master, but I can tell you that I know this to be true because having often taken an approach opposing it did not achieve the desired results.

I’ve learned the lesson of patience the hard way. I was always looking for shortcut to learning, not that I was unwilling to do the work, but that I was older and knew I did not have the luxury of time that young students have, being able to learn slowly, naturally. I was the embodiment of the eager but impatient student. Occasionally, I glimpsed my potential in moments of good practice and wanted the reap the rewards, play the music I wanted to play, then I would fall back into bad practice and learning habits, and bury that potential under heaps of dirt. I wrote earlier that obsession can be a good and bad thing. Obsession with my instrument of choice meant that I was willing to put in the hours, but it also meant I obsessively practiced incorrectly just as much or more than I obsessively practiced correctly.  If I had put in the hours of perfect practice over these past 20 years, I would be a musician who plays close to perfectly, most of the time, but I obsessively practiced incorrectly. I think you may get the picture.

5 Learning Habits for Serious Adult Musicians

1. Learn Patience First, Music Second
   It can’t be overstated, patience for any student is important, but patience for the adult student,  is vital if that student wants to achieve mastery. As the fabled turtle knew, slow and steady wins the race. You need patience to practice correctly, to put into place correct practice habits. You need patience to dwell with equal care on all aspects of musicianship. It may even help to meditate on practice before practicing to muster up the courage required to sit with each moment of a practice session as a Zen Master does with each inhalation and exhalation. Don’t think of time, or troubles, or failures, or the mountain of knowledge yet attained, but each step on the journey: a scale or piece you are practicing, a passage in the scale or piece, a phrase within the passage, a pattern in the phrase, a beat in the pattern, the movement between two notes in the beat, the note you are playing, the note you are about to play: each fraction of a moment with equal attention. I am overstating, but only slightly, because I know it to be the truth.
2. Have a Place and Time to Practice
   A place to practice can be a corner of your room, but it should be your place, a quiet temple conducive to learning, well lit, quiet, with a place for your things. Let your housemates, wife, partner, roommate, know that this is your time. Try to minimize interruptions. Practice daily and try to pick a time to practice. It doesn’t have to be the same time daily, though if that works, do it, but you should know when you will practice the day before you practice. Practice rarely just happens, it is planned.
3. Plan Your Practice
   With all that one needs to learn (scales, arpeggios, articulation, tuning, sight-reading, ear training, etudes, repertoire) a plan is a must. You will not master or close to master your instrument if you don’t know where you’ve been and where you are going. That means you need to allocate some practice time to each  aspect of technique.  Maybe you’ll play all major and relative minors slowly as a warm-up, then concentrate on one scale and all its permutations each week, slowly, then move on the etudes, repertoire. Regardless of what you are practicing, know where you have been and where you are going. If you can’t remember what you’ve practiced, or mastered, how will you know what to study next? Much has been written about clarinet practice routines and plans, and I’ll add an article later about my clarinet practice routine, and other recommended practice routines for clarinet, but paramount is not what you are playing, but how you are playing it: quality is more important than quantity.
4. Learn to Play Perfectly by Practicing Slowly
   If you learn any lesson as an adult student of music, this lesson is the most important. My own experience as a student of the clarinet, obsessively practicing my mistakes, has led me to this truth. It is hard won and I wish I had embraced it earlier in my studies. I knew it, but didn’t apply it and more is the pity. It seems obvious, but it escapes us, though it is likely the most important lesson toward mastery of anything. We have been told about the importance of slow practice by our teachers, our teachers’ teachers told them , and the teachers of our teacher’s teachers told them, and so on. Practicing perfectly is vital to a correct and fluid technique on any instrument. Practicing perfectly means practicing slowly. It is also the fastest way to learn in the long run. This is counter-intuitive, but going slowly reaps faster rewards than flailing away and playing quickly and imperfectly, practicing your mistakes. I read an excellent analogy about slow practice, which described the way a child learns to tie her shoes. She slowly learns to make the loop, to make another, to cross the loops, to pull one loop end through the hole made by the crossed loops, to pull and tighten the knot. This is learned slowly. A child doesn’t try to quickly tie her shoes on the first attempt, fail, and then having failed try again to quickly tie her shoes. The child, quite naturally, learns slowly from the beginning of her shoe tying learning. After many slow, careful attempts, she can do it. Then she does it slowly several hundred more times, then one day, she realizes she is not thinking about the “moves’ required, she is just tying her shoes, can do it blindfolded without any thought and during a hundred distractions, and can do it perfectly every time. She has become a master of shoe tying because the basics were learned slowly in a relaxed manner, and  repeated slowly and perfectly many times. Speed flowered from the slow mastery of each moment of shoe tying. Speed grows from slow practice. It is not an end in and of itself, but a by-product. I and many students, and possibly more adult students, employ a hit-and-miss method of learning. Think about this: why do we always seem to fumble on the same bar of music, or even the same note or movement between notes, in a passage or scale? In the hit-and-miss method you play, you come to the bar, your fingers tighten up, you miss a note or two, or play the rhythm incorrectly. You slow down, perhaps a little. You play once incorrectly, a second time incorrectly, a third time right, a fourth time wrong, a fifth time right, a sixth time right, and then you attempt the passage again at tempo. You come to bar, your fingers tighten up, you miss a note or two. This is how many people practice. In this common scenario, which is all too familiar to me, the brain has learned to play incorrectly three times and correctly three times. With this play-and-hope-for-the-best method, the brain has only a 50% chance of getting it right the next time you play. You cannot play fluidly at fast tempi without first practicing fluidly, extremely slowly. To fluidly and flawlessly play a fast or complex passage of music, all finger movements, breathing, articulation, and relaxation, required to execute that passage at tempo must be transferred from conscious memory to sub-conscious through focused, relaxed, SLOW repetition.

   Each time you play 100% correctly you are strengthening the dendrite connections in your brain, but if you change the pattern slightly this won’t happen as each new pattern means a new connection, not strengthening a current connection

   — Simon Horsey in Practice Makes Perfect.

   The brain will learn imperfect technique as well as it does perfect technique. If you practice mistakes you are learning mistakes and learning them well. The longer you  practice them, the harder they are to correct. You are becoming a master of your errors. You are learning very well, but you are learning the wrong things the right way. The brain will master the good and bad equally. It does not differentiate. So practice slowly, practice slowly, practice slowly.

   Fast playing is not based on fast practice. It’s based on flawless execution at slow speed

   — Daniel Bonade, world renowned clarinetist, teacher.

   Daniel Bonade was arguably one of the greatest clarinet players and teachers that has ever lived. He was a proponent of slow practice technique and it was central to his teachings.  His slow practice teachings are even being used to teach golf. Though I’m not a golfer, it is apparent to me that slow practice can be applied to nearly any skill involving complex motor skills: golf, tennis, skiing, shoe-tying. The book, Slow Practice Will Get You There Faster by Ernest Dras, teaches a slow-motion method of practicing every aspect of golf technique. The book asserts that all masters from clarinetists to karate senseis , mastered their art by using similar slow motion practice techniques. This golf book contains a chapter about Bonade and his teachings, because slow practice is relevant to nearly any complex physical endeavour that requires attention to fine motor skills and control over one’s body and mind.

   If you learn one thing, learn to practice slowly.

5. Train Your Ears
   Many amateur musicians forget about the importance of playing by ear. If you are a would-be jazz musician, some kind of ear training, formal or informal, is vital. All the jazz patterns in the world will do nothing for you if you can’t carry them over into improvisation. At the center of improvisation is translating what you hear in your head to your fingers, and instantly. Each day, you should practice something from memory, a familiar tune, a nursery rhyme perhaps, even if just for a few minutes. Pick a different key per day and improvise, anything, for 10 minutes. Listen to one bar of a favourite jazz lick and SLOWLY try to reproduce it on your instrument.You may want to consider making solfege a daily part of your routine. I’m certainly not a  jazz master, but I can tell you by what is missing from my own bag of tricks, that aural training is important not only to improvising, but to your relationship with your instrument. You gain an intimate understanding of where a pitch lives on your instrument. Beyond improvising, ear training helps you develop a keen ear for what you are hearing when you are listening to and playing music. Playing from memory or extemporaneously, will also help you memorize music. When you are staring at printed music, the aural realm is largely being neglected as are your memorization skills. Remember, long before music notation, musicians played music, had a repertoire, and they learned to be masters, without the aid of notation.

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