Practising, Playing and Performing

It took me quite a few years of playing and teaching before I really started to understand the fundamental difference between practising your instrument and playing your instrument, and how that differs from performance. Most really good players, I think, have a really good understanding of the difference, but I think anyone learning an instrument, at any level, can get a lot a lot out of this distinction.

Playing

Playing should make up the majority of your time on the instrument. Playing is done in private - either on your own, or with other musicians. Not in front of an audience. The important thing is that playing is always done with a goal. The goal can be very simple - 'let's play this tune', 'let's improvise a piece' and so on, but it is playing with a goal that separates playing from mere noodling. Your playing might end up being unconscious and 'dreamy' (that's when it's good!) but you must start with a clear direction. When you were a kid I bet you didn't go 'let's play' - it would be more like 'let's pretend to be dinosaurs' or 'let's build a spaceship!' (SPACESHIP!!!! SPACESHIP!!!!) Well, now instead of Lego spaceships it's Manoir de Mes Reves.

Noodling is what you do when when you pick up the guitar with no end in mind and just play mindlessly around on it. Usually you will be playing stuff that you have played for years. Empty noodling is a particular bane of guitar players - other musicians moan about how guitar players tend to do it between tunes.

Perhaps it is because a guitar is an instrument that doesn't need much physical commitment to play when compared to the double bass or the clarinet. You don't need to focus on intonation like you do on the violin or bass, either. Also, much of the music we play is improvised, so there is a special responsibility on us to make sure we are improvising music with an intention behind it rather than running endless patterns and scales.

Music, of course, is exactly like Lego. You need to start with an end in mind. You can't put one brick on top of another and expect to come out with this:

(Now is the fact I am a jazz musician is probably down to the fact that I never made the thing on the box?)

So, a musician must learn the ability to deal with music away from the instrument - learning to sing melodies and solos is a traditional way to do this. Focus in on the sound you want to make before you play - perhaps even sing phrases before you play them. The great gypsy jazz guitarists are always ear players first - Django's music is taught via the aural tradition in Manouche culture. Everything else - published solos in tab and notation, fakebooks and so on are a 'cheat' or a quick fix.

I will write an article about 'practice away from the instrument', but for the moment let's concentrate on what you do when you are playing. Playing is not like performance in that if you find something you are struggling with, you can isolate what you are having trouble with and work on it right away. A band rehearsal obviously works like this. A good idea might get to the end of the piece, ignoring mistakes and work on the issues afterwards. That stops you from only playing up to the mistakes, and never carrying on through the rest of the music. An example might be a tricky spot in a written piece, or a difficult set of chord changes, that might use unfamiliar shapers, and so on.

Playing is useful for working out what to practice. In every guitar lesson I have been to, I am asked to play something first. The teacher then works out what I need to work on and suggests something to address the issue. As you get more experienced you can start to this yourself.

Practice

Practice is the development of a specific thing. When you go to a lesson and a teacher hears something that needs a bit of work, they suggest a practice activity. You will often be able to identify things that need work from your playing.

As a teacher, if I hear a student struggling with playing something, I suggest that they isolate a particular phrase that they have trouble with, and slow it down, paying attention to their fingering. Normally I'll break it down further and focus on either the left or right hand, perhaps just a couple of notes. Sometimes practice is more general and based around developing raw materials, such as: work on these scales, arpeggios, chord shapes and picking patterns.

Practice activities tend to have these qualities:

• Needing thought and mindfulness (so we often do them slow)
• Narrow
• Focused - as short and specific as they can be
• A good practice activity will address just one thing - if there's too much going on the brain can't focus on what needs work.
• Difficult and unintuitive
• Tiring
• Will sound bad - not for public consumption!

To me practice is best done in short bursts - no more than 5 minutes, followed by a short break of something else unconnected - maybe get up and walk around for a minute, or make a drink. Then try another activity after you've taken your break. I'm not sure anyone can do more than an hour of really productive practice a day. 

Good practice should be a routine. Try and have something that you always do when you pick up the instrument. Make sure its simple, memorable and short. When I give students practice activities I try not to give more than 1 or 2 a lesson, and I try to make them short and clear. That's a challenge in itself!

Without practice activities that are based around you, you may find your playing reaching a 'brick wall' or find yourself making the same mistakes that you have for years. Most people find going to a teacher helps with this. Eventually, you will be able to work out things to practice yourself.

I haven't made it sound like very much fun, have I? That's one of the difficult things. Practice is based around not being very good at something and learning how to be better at it. There will be a lot of failure along the way.

I love practice. I enjoy the feeling of not being good at something - it's very humbling. I also know that if I keep practicing the thing I am not good at, I will become better at it, and that's a wonderful thing. It's a lot like exercising.

Performance

Performance is the goal for many of us. We might have an aim to play a jam session by the end of 3 months of lessons, perhaps make a video of our playing for youtube. Different types of performance have a different dynamic. It feels very different to playing a concert for an audience to playing background music at a restaurant. A recording sessions is very different again, as is an audition.

Performance almost always involves some sort of pressure - even a restaurant gig where no one appears to be listening is very different to playing on your own. I'm not going to talk about performance nerves, but something very interesting happens in this situation.

It becomes impossible to think. Anything you do that is not automatic, ingrained and intuitive will crash and burn. Therefore, as a performer it is essential to separate yourself form your playing. Don't worry about it, just let it happen. Your performance will always be a reflection of where you actually are as a player - not where you think you are, and the best thing is accept this completely, and enjoy developing the sense of abandon.

Easier said than done! I will flesh this out more here and in lessons, but I'll leave it there. 

Anyway, here's a practical example of the three modes:

Practice - To play the rhythm guitar for minor swing all the way through. I notice I keep having trouble in the same spot - playing Bb E7 Am6.

Playing - Play the chord shapes for Bb E7 Am6 slowly and out of time for 5 minutes every day, taking as much time as I need to get my fingers in the right place.

Performance - Perform Minor Swing at a jam session with other musicians.