We all know we should practice. We feel guilty if we don’t, yet sometimes we know that we avoid practicing because we don’t enjoy it. Practice it seems can be a little like eating your greens. we do it knowing it’s ‘good for us’ but despise doing it.

If you feel like this, it’s perfectly understandable. I went through it, and most musicians do. Practice should be something enjoyable, it shouldn’t be a burden. It’s an opportunity to improve yourself and if you take control of how you practice you’ll feel better, improve faster, and practice more.

For me practice was never practice, I just called it playing the guitar.

I’ve written this article to help you find your ideal practice routine, and I hope you get value out of it.

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What’s the difference between good and bad practice?

Bad practice is that thing you do when you’ve had enough of your teacher nagging. You sit playing scale patterns for hours and hours following what you ‘think’ you should do even though it makes you unhappy and gives you little value or progression as a musician.

Good practice, or to phrase it better deliberate practice is when you make a concerted effort to improve yourself. It’s when you have a command over your practice time because you are aware of your goals. And it’s when you focus and hone your skills by developing a routine that’s interesting and challenging to you.

If I asked you to close your eyes and imagine your perfect practice routine, I bet you it’d look more like that last one.

What are your goals?

We all want to be better musicians, we all want to improve, but that doesn’t mean the same thing for everybody. Some of us would like to be concert pianists, others conductors, rock guitarists, and jazz improvisers. Variety in music is what makes it great, and our practice routines have to reflect the types of musicians we’d like to become.

Practice routines will look different for everybody because we want different results. But to get those results we first need to know where we want to be as musicians. We need to know our goals.

To get a complete picture of your ideal goals as musicians we need to ask three focusing questions:

What are your ambitions? What actions can you take to get there? What should you focus on?

Once you’ve answered these questions you’ll be able to understand your priorities as a musician. And that in turn will allow you to shape what you do, and how you practice.

If you don’t know what your ambitions are, what actions you can take, or what you should focus on you’ll have very little to work towards in your practice. If you had trouble answering these questions, I’ve written some more below that should help spark your imagination:

What musicians inspire you?

What techniques would you want to learn or improve?

What’s more important to you sight-reading or improvising?

What skills would you most like to master as a musician?

What ever your priorities are as a musician, it’s important that you’re aware of them and it’s okay from them to change too. It doesn’t matter how ‘mature’ or ‘professional’ they are. Never let anyone tell you that your ambitions are too high.

So how should you practice?

The way I see it what we do as musicians can be placed into two categories: technique, and musicality.

Techniques are all those things you can improve simply by focusing on how you play your instrument. You probably associate words like ‘precision’, ‘accuracy’, ‘efficiency’, and ‘speed’ with technique. Musicality is a much bigger beast and it’s about how you perform musically. It encompasses a broad spectrum of things like ‘feel’, ‘groove’, ‘mastery’, ‘listening skills’, and ‘phrasing’.

Everything that we do can be separated into one of these categories, but it’s important to know that we separate them because they demand different types of practice:

Technique requires you to focus on how you play your instrument.

Musicality is about how you make music with the technical skills you have.

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Should we emphasise technique or musicality in our practice?

I think you’ll find different opinions on this. But I’ll be honest, in my experience I’ve met tons of musicians who have all the technical skill in the world. But the kicker is they can’t get a gig, bands won’t take them: musicality beats technique any day of the week.

Music was built on great musical ability, not technical prowess. Great technique can lead you to be better musically, but greater musicality doesn’t necessarily lead to better technique. I’ve never met an unhappy musician who focused on being more musical. Yet I’ve met many musicians who have tons of technique but struggle to play with a band or read charts consistently.

So how do we balance musicality with technique?

As musicians our goal, I assume, is to be musical. Which means being able to express ourselves with as little friction as possible. Technique should support musicality, but it shouldn’t override it.

It’s different for different people. But I believe that if your mission is to express yourself and to be as musical as possible that you should follow something called the 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s quite a novel idea that has been applied quite seriously to just about every field you can think of. The rule states that 80% of our outcomes, can be attributed to 20% of our focus. Or, to put this into context:

80% of our musicality comes from 20% percent of our technique.

I’ll rephrase that, out of all the technique you have just 20% of it will give you 80% of your musicality. There’s a huge amount of power in understanding that such little technique will give you such a great ability to express yourself.

I personally followed this rule after I had an injury that left me unable to play the guitar for a few months. I’d lost quite a bit of my technique, I couldn’t play as fast as before. But, I didn’t need to. Out of everything I knew, from the crazy scale patterns and sweep picked arpeggios only 20% of that really mattered.

And that 20% happened to be the really basic techniques we take for grated.

If you really want to balance your technique and musicality, it’s helpful to realise that the basics can take you very far. There’s a reason you learn them in your first few lessons. They’re the techniques that we use most often, and it’s because they give us the bulk of our musical potential.

So if you’re interested in balancing your musicality with your technique consider spending less time on practicing techniques and more time on using it in a musical way.

Creating your practice routine

In this article I’ve written a lot about things that matter to individual musicians trying to improve their practice routine. I’d encourage you at this point to write down:

your ambitions as a musician,

the actions you can take right now to improve, and

two or three things you can focus on for the long term.

Writing these down will make them stick in your memory, and they should form a part of your priorities as a musician from now on. Remember the best practice you can do as a musician is deliberate practice, focusing on one or two things you can improve.

If you can, look at this list you’ve written infrequently, It’s an exercise in making you aware of what you want as a musician. If you look at it too regularly you’ll probably focus on it too much, and lose focus. But, if you do it once every few months I’ll think you’ll find that you will improve faster as a musician.

Remember most importantly that none of this matters unless you’re having fun, music is about enjoying yourself. So get out there and play your instrument.

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