How to correctly practice something

Originally published in April 2020. Updated 2025

Given we are all doing our part and social distancing right now, many of us are finding ourselves practicing more than we did before COVID-19 and social distancing became everyday words in our vocabulary. For anyone over a certain age, who ever took private lessons with a good teacher, or studied music at university, what I’m going to write about today it not new. That said, it might still be a good review. 

Today’s article would be especially helpful for students who are currently in school—if schools were not cancelled worldwide—and who have band teachers who are so overwhelmed by the size of classrooms that they no longer have the ability to teach students the correct way to practice difficult passages. 

When faced with a difficult passage or piece of music, what do you personally do?

1. Try playing it at full speed 50 or more times until you give up.
2. Trying playing it at full speed 50 or more times and say: Who cares, it’s good enough.
3. Slow it down until you get most of it, and then practice up to speed again not caring if it’s 100% right.
4. Play it note by note first, get those under your fingers first, then start at getting the speed up to where it should be by using a metronome. 

Be honest now. I would say >90% of players are going to answer A, B, or C. 

The correct answer is D. You should play a passage note by note first; and get all the fingerings under control. Then you turn on a metronome and play it really, really slowly and accurately. Once you can play it at that speed with 100% accuracy and precision, then you move the metronome up by 1 speed. 

Now you go through the same process again. Work on your speed and accuracy. Once you’ve got it 100% perfect, bump up the speed on your metronome one more. And so on, and so on, and so on… 

This will take time. It is quite likely that you will not be able to play something you are trying to play for the first time, at full tempo, perfectly in the first day. It is likely something you will have to work on. This is what practice is. 

To help with this I have developed a practice schedule template that you can download. It is in Excel, and is fully editable. If you want to print it, it prints perfectly on a 8½ x 11 piece of paper. Just change the date of the starting week, and rest of the dates change as well. 😉 

Break things down into smaller and smaller pieces

The trick is always to break things down into smaller, manageable bits. For example, if confronted with the following duet from Paul Deville’s, Universal Method For The Saxophone, regardless if you are playing the top or bottom line, it may likely be quite challenging at first glance. Many players are unlikely to be able to play this perfectly when they sight-read it. 

If I was working with a student on this, I would play it with them bar by bar, line by line. I would go over bar 1 with them and help them work out the counting and notes—if those were problematic—then move on to bar 2.

I wouldn’t move onto the next bar until they played the one before it perfectly (or near perfectly in a lesson setting). 

Once the student had the notes and timing under their fingers, and could play it perfectly, then I would increase tempo a bit, and start the line over again. 

How to practice technical stuff at home

1. Set the metronome tempo at about half speed. (The actual speed you set is dependant on how challenging the music is for you. The harder the music, the slower the speed.) 😉 
2. Work on each bar that gives you trouble until you have the notes, fingerings, and counting worked out perfectly. If you make a mistake, STOP, figure out the problem, and start the bar again. 
3. Move onto the next bar. Again get the notes, fingerings, and counting worked out perfectly. If you make a mistake, STOP, figure out the problem, and start the bar again. 
4. Once you’ve reached the end of the musical phrase, go back to the beginning of the phrase, and increase the metronome tempo by 1. 
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you can play that phrase 100% correctly, 100% of the time, at full tempo (or pretty close to it). Then, and only then, move onto the next musical phrase. 
6. Keep practicing all the phrases you have mastered, and make sure they all flow seamlessly from one to another. 
7. Besides being technically correct, the bars that make up the phrases have to be musically correct. Pay attention to articulation, attacks and releases, dynamics, and so on, and so forth.

*** I usually find it helpful to start at the end of the phrase and work backwards instead of the way we normally play the phrase. Try it. See if that works for you.***