Are You Making Too Many Mistakes in Your Practice?

When I work with students, I notice that sometimes they make the same mistake over and over. It is easy to fall into that pattern: to practice and assume that mistakes are exceptions and that they therefore don’t warrant close examination. It’s also easy to become used to making mistakes to the point where you don’t even notice them any more.

One of the most dramatic ways to bring your practicing to the next level is to train yourself to be alert to mistakes and focus on how to fix them.

Practicing and Mistakes, a Metaphor: Walking down the street

Consider this well-known story:

On Monday, you are walking down a street and you fall into a hole.
On Tuesday, you are walking down the same street and you fall into the same hole!
On Wednesday, you are walking down the same street and you think to yourself, “I know there was a hole around here someplace…” but before you can get any further with that thought, you fall into it!
On Thursday, you are walking down the same street and you remember there was a hole. And as you approach the hole you slow waaaaay down and inch around the edge of it so you don’t fall into it.
On Friday, you are walking down the same street and you confidently walk around the hole.

Success! You have learned how to navigate and avoid the hole, and now you’re ready to walk down a new metaphorical street!

Here is an alternate version of that story, with a less happy outcome.

On Monday, you are walking down a street and you fall into a hole.
On Tuesday, you are walking down the same street and you fall into the same hole!
On Wednesday, you are mad. You walk down that street as fast as possible, on a mission to show that hole who’s who… and you fall right into it.
On Thursday, you think, “This doesn’t apply to me – I am not the type of person who falls into holes,” and stride confidently down the street. Then… you fall into the hole.
On Friday, you think, “This is a stupid street. I hate it. If I go down it I will just fall into a stupid hole. What’s the point?” And so you don’t even try to walk down the street.

This is what the process of practicing is like. In this analogy, the hole represents a challenge you encounter when you practice. Your attempts to avoid falling into the hole represent the strategies we try when we are in the practice room.

In the first version of the story, you are learning from your mistakes and mastering the experience (walking down the street and avoiding the hole). In the second, you are fighting the learning experience to the point where you just get discouraged and don’t even bother trying any more.

Categories of mistakes

I have found that most mistakes when practicing fall into one of four different categories. Being aware of this will help you understand the cause of your mistake and correct it more easily.

Notes

You are playing otherwise correct rhythms, but consistently missing notes in certain places. This causes long-term issues with accuracy. And later on you have to go back and “fix” notes that your hands are automatically wanting to go to.

A preponderance of note-mistakes often results in a “stammering” kind of practice. This is where you play until you miss a note or chord, and then stop and quickly play that same note or chord several times until it’s correct. Then you continue on until you make the next mistake.

Rhythm

You are playing the correct notes, but hesitate or stop as you play, in order to look carefully at the notes and figure what is about to come and move your fingers into place.

At first, this could seem like an effective way to practice. You are playing the right notes, after all!

But, from the very beginning of learning a piece, it is essential to play with rhythm and pulse. Even when you are sightreading, the notes must work in tandem with the rhythm.

Playing without rhythm, or making a lot of rhythmic mistakes, is a sign that you are practicing too fast because you keep having to stop to find notes.

Articulation

You are playing the correct rhythm and the correct notes. BUT… you have ignored markings like slurs, staccato, tenuto, and other articulation indications.

Articulation is the “punctuation” of music; it’s important to notice these and learn them from the outset. Playing music with no articulation is like writing a long paragraph with no punctuation and then going back later to and add periods, commas, quotation marks and other characters.

In writing, we would never think of writing the words first and then adding in all the punctuation later. Just like in writing, if you ignore articulation when first learning a piece, it becomes more difficult to add it in and make meaning out of the phrases.

Dynamics

You have learned a new piece. BUT… you ignored all of the dynamic markings that the composer wrote in the score to tell you how loud or soft to play. The dynamics in a piece are inextricably tied to the character, or mood; it helps show the composer’s intention.

Not playing dynamics can lead to mechanical playing that becomes difficult to override later.

Why avoiding mistakes is important

Mistakes are hard to unlearn.

Have you ever had the experience of learning a piece and just having that ONE spot that you can never seem to get right? It seems to take much longer to unlearn a mistake than it does to learn it correctly initially.

In order to retain what you are learning, you need to repeat something CORRECTLY many times. You might not know that you’re not doing enough repetitions, because it can often FEEL like you’re repeating it a bunch of times.

A typical pattern in unskillful practice happens like this: when you make a mistake and go back to fix it, you play it wrong again several times in a row, and then when you finally get it right, you move on. If you analyze that pattern, you can see that you played it incorrectly five times, but correctly only once: the final time.

The reason you move on is because you feel satisfied that it’s “fixed.” After all, you just played it right, so what’s the point in reviewing something that you now know how to do? This phenomenon, called “recency bias,” is our tendency to remember the most recent result most vividly. It’s tempting to think it accurately represents the level of everything else we are doing.

Making mistakes turns off your ears.

Making mistakes over and over while practicing causes us to “turn off” our ears. We stop listening to what sounds we are producing, and instead tune in to how it “feels” and looks like on the page.

In fact, when practicing, it is easy to zone out and get into a kind of robotic mode of practicing. Has that ever happened to you? Where you practice and the next thing you know it’s 20 minutes later and you have played through one of your pieces over and over but you can’t really remember anything you did? This happens when we stop listening and go onto autopilot. You can interrupt this cycle by asking good questions. (More on this below!)

Avoiding mistakes will make your performance stronger.

When you start becoming more aware of your mistakes and proactively practice to prevent them from happening in the first place, it will make your performances stronger, because the fingers aren’t used to going to wrong notes.

What we can learn from mistakes

Throughout this post, I have been referring to “mistakes” with the implication that they are bad and have no place in practicing. Nothing could be further from the truth! With awareness, every mistake provides an opportunity to learn.

Mistakes can show us:

What to change technically

A mistake can help you learn what technical adjustments you need to make in your approach. Do you need to raise your wrist as you pass the thumb under? Do you need to make a larger or smaller motion with your arm? Do you need to get to the note sooner from the previous note? If you make a note error, spend some time choreographing your motions to figure out what happened to cause it.

What to change musically

A mistake can help you understand what to change musically in your approach. If you are ignoring a dynamic marking, take a moment to ask yourself what the expressive meaning of that marking is. What was the composer trying to say with that dynamic marking? If you are missing articulation marks, ask yourself what would change in the character or mood of the music if you were to observe the articulation markings the composer wrote.

How to ask better questions

Really, mistakes can teach us how to ask better questions. And the path to being your own best teacher is to ask questions, the same way your teacher would in a lesson. What character is the composer trying to express with this music? What kind of music is it? What did the composer mean by writing this particular rhythm or dynamic marking? Why do I keep missing this note and what can I do differently?

Practice technique:

This week, try recording yourself practicing for about 10 minutes, and then listen back to the recording to identify some habits you may have around note-learning. Unless you are already in the habit of doing this exercise regularly, I guarantee you will gain valuable insights!

In conclusion…

It’s tempting to see mistakes in your practicing as frustrating occurrences that happen without rhyme or reason. But in fact, noticing the habits and patterns that surround errors in practicing, and working with awareness to correct them, can help bring your practice to a whole new level.

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