The ULTIMATE Music Practice Strategy: Deliberate Practice Explained!

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In this video, I show you how to use one of my favorite practice strategies, called deliberate practice (DP) and variations of it to help you get the fastest results in your playing and potentially double your progress in just a single practice session. Deliberate practice is what I consider to be the foundational practice strategy for effective practice and in this video, I explain exactly what it is, the steps you need to take to apply it to your music practice, and how you can use the principles of DP when practicing alone.
WARNING! Deliberate practice is WORK! It’s best used for musicians who are more serious about progressing faster and playing well. This is true for students who want to play for fun and for those of us who want to play at a professional level.
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[@strunkneb]

I am a full time music teacher of guitar, piano, violin, and other string instruments and I have found your recent videos highly useful both for teaching others and in my own practice. Many of the core tips you discuss reinforce and make clear habits I already encourage in my students but other things, interleaved practice particularly, are (to me) brand new challenges to the approaches I am more used to. Looking forward to more videos!

[@ClassicalGuitaristWannabe]

Very helpful. I find this is easier to do when learning a piece from scratch where I have no issue stopping and correcting. It becomes more difficult the more I know the piece and the mistakes are fewer. So when I know a piece 95% it's hard not to "perform" the piece. But when it is the first time i'm looking at a piece I find it a lot easier to concentrate on a bar or a note or two. My other problem is how to organise a practice. I wish to warm up, do exercises for both hands, tremolo exercises, warm-up pieces etc. So if I sit down for an hour the piece i'm actually practicing only forms about 15-20 minutes of that hour. So I guess i'm also interested on how you manage practice if you only have 30 minutes or an hour. Thank you.

[@luisgallardo1945]

I'm not a guitar player, but this logic applies to every instrument. Awesome video, clear and detailed! Thanks so much!

[@corneliaippers603]

Me neither, flutist here (longitudinal and transverse ones). I also appreciate the insights, which are indeed valid for all instruments!

[@vagabond197979]

Learning violin as a 45 year old so practice optimization is really important for me. Your videos have been really helpful. Thank you!

[@chrishinks46]

Thanks Diego. It makes such good sense to break practice down into these deliberate steps.

[@pocketlyle]

I’ve been working on arrangements that are difficult for me, and feeling like I’m plateauing. This seems like a promising way to move forward. Thank you!

[@rs3018]

Your practice tips are the best on KZbin thanks for sharing your knowledge

[@rob8482]

Awesome! Thank you, sir.

[@jeffreyparker587]

Very nice discussion on deliberate practice Thank you

[@2000HoursofBanjo]

I'm looking forward to incorporating these techniques in structuring my practices. Thanks.

[@atomic432]

Thanks for this really good advice.

[@jamalzada1718]

Great advice !!!

[@whoareyou_juan]

This is gold stuff

[@DiegoAlonsoMusic]

Thank you so much for commenting !

[@javierrodriguez4218]

Great advice! have you ever tried ways of practicing without actually using the instrument? I know it sounds weird, but I’ve been thinking that, for example, writing down the score of a piece from memory while mentally visualizing the fretboard could be a really powerful way to reinforce what you're learning. I heard Tal Wilkenfeld tell a story about when she was little their parents wouldn't let her practice more than 30min a day, so in order to make the most out of it she would during the day practice "mentally" trying to visualize as vividly as possible the fretboard going over whatever she was going to practice. I find that style of practice is underdeveloped.

[@DiegoAlonsoMusic]

Hi! Thank you so much for commenting! Yes, I have tried mental practice many times. When I used to perform and travel, I would run through sections of my pieces in my head on the plane. There’s some research that suggests that ending your practice session with a bit of mental practice can help reinforce the work you’ve done that day even more. Thanks again!

[@corneliaippers603]

That may depend on the maturity of the student and the instrument: e.g. if you are not sure about the rhythm it is great to tap/knock it, even to a metronome. So you focus only on understanding the rhythm, while none of the technical topics of your instrument are involved. Then as a woodwind player you can practice the articulation by saying or just moving your tongue along with breath. Or just finger the notes w/o blowing, either to practice in silence or to not overtax your stamina and really focus on just 1 level of difficulty, how the fingers change. This would be with the instrument, but still not fully playing. There may be equivalent tasks on a guitar, I guess?

[@kaelingovinden9605]

Hi Diego. Do you have any videos on how to improve on barre chords? I’m a beginner player and really struggling here

[@DiegoAlonsoMusic]

Hi! Thanks for commenting. I made a couple of barcode tutorials that may help. Here’s the first part: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hZPPqaWFareshtE Thanks again! 🙏🏽

[@floyddango]

Great videos! Im a new viewer and you helped raising my awareness in practise. However i think your comparison in the beginning with the typo in a longer text doesnt hold up on closer observation: it kind of implies a too strong focus on the isolated notes within the mistake. What im trying to say is: the notes we‘re playing before the mistake also influence the note within the actual mistake. When i isolate a mistake too much it doesnt really help practising those two notes. You can play them 100% perfect. But within the context of the whole phrase the mistake arises again. So technically you could say that i didnt isolate the whole positioning and so on when practising just the notes of the „mistake“. And thats what i find very hard: deconstructing the whole position etc and then recreating it when practising the isolated few notes… and i would go so far as to say that isolation is always an incomplete recreation of the performance playing.

[@DiegoAlonsoMusic]

Hi! Thank you so much for your comment. This is a wonderful point!! I'll definitely address this in a future video. What I find works best for me is to start with a very small isolation and then begin to extend my phrase in both directions gradually. For example, if my phrase is ABCDEFG and my error happend on D, I'll play C-D until I can play that are free, and then I'll begin to add notes to either side (BCD, BCDE, ABCDE, ABCDEF, etc.). It certainly doesn't have to be one note at a time, but I find that this general idea helps me a ton. Thank you again!

[@2000HoursofBanjo]

Actually, I have a question about the "stop and address the mistake" part. It makes sense to do this, but I have also heard there is merit to playing through your mistake without stopping. The idea being that if you get into the habit of stopping every time you make a mistake that when you perform and make a mistake, out of habit, you will stop rather than continuing to play on. Is this a legitimate concern?

[@DiegoAlonsoMusic]

Hi! Thanks so much for commenting! You are definitely correct. The best thing to do is to have two parts to our practice: one part where we focus on correcting mistakes and another part that’s dedicated to what’s called performance practice. That’s where we would play our music from the top without stopping, as if we were performing. Hope this helps!

[@2000HoursofBanjo]

@ This helps a lot. I’m a new banjo student. Kinda new…coming up on 2 years. I just discovered your channel. You provide a ton of great content. Subscribed. I have tons of questions, so you’ll be hearing from me again. Cheers, -Mark

[@345kobi]

7: 30

[@alexmiarik8742]

What if we create" shortcut "on step two for example if a position is very hard,to alter it to make it easier?(I feel a coward)😂 but yhe result won't be the same

[@DiegoAlonsoMusic]

Thanks for commenting! I definitely think that making a position position easier is the way to go if the original position doesn’t work very well for you and so long as the final result in terms of sound, is still good. There are many times I have changed my fingering on a piece of music because the original fingering was too difficult for me. This is definitely a good solution!

[@paolomasone3754]

Back before the computer days, when we still wrote college papers by hand in ink, I had a physics laboratory professor who would not allow more than 2 crossings out of incorrect words in our lab reports. After that, you had to start from the beginning and rewrite that page. Yes, it was ridiculous. I don't think it helped a whole lot to write a mistake-free paper.