Practising properly: less struggle, more music

“He just does not practise.” That is the sentence I hear most often from parents, usually with a guilty look, as if they had done something wrong. And there often is quite a lot amiss with practice — but rarely where most people suspect it. Practising is a skill of its own. Nobody is born with it, and very few are taught it cleanly. So let us take it apart: first how good practice actually works, and then what you as a parent can do when your child has hit a wall.

Better a little every day than a lot once

The classic mistake is the Friday-evening cram: the instrument stands untouched all week, and on the evening before the lesson an hour is hastily made up. But the brain works the other way round. Movements and knowledge settle when they are repeated across several days, with breaks in between during which what has been learned sorts itself out. Learning psychology calls this the spacing effect, and it is among the best-evidenced findings in the entire field. An analysis of hundreds of experiments shows that distributed learning is clearly superior to the same time spent in one block, especially when it comes to retaining something long term.¹ Translated: five times ten minutes achieves more than one lot of fifty. With children certainly, but with adults just the same.

Not from the top, but in sections

The second big misunderstanding: that practising means playing the piece from top to bottom, and starting again from the beginning at every mistake. That feels diligent, but it hardly is. You play the easy opening bars flawlessly for the twentieth time, and the difficult passage in the middle stays difficult. Good practice is less comfortable. It seeks out precisely the bars that are not yet sitting right, takes them out individually, plays them slowly and in small sections, and repeats exactly those. The psychologist Anders Ericsson spent years researching what separates strong musicians from average ones, and it was not the sheer quantity of practice time but this kind of targeted work at the edge of one's own ability.² That is more strenuous than comfortable run-throughs and less fun in the moment. The progress afterwards, though, is incomparably greater.

Do not practise until you can play it right once. Practise until you cannot play it wrong.

A little system helps enormously here. Before a practice session, briefly decide what you are working on today rather than simply launching in. Getting two or three bars clean is a better daily goal than “practise the whole piece”. And at the end, play it through in context once, so the parts find their way back to each other. It sounds like very little, but it changes everything.

When a child is not practising

Now to the part that troubles parents most. When a child has not practised for a week, laziness is almost never behind it. Usually it is the piece: something a child genuinely wants to play rarely has to be carried to the practice stool. When motivation is missing, it is often worth simply asking whether the current piece speaks to them at all. Just as frequently it is quite simply time. A school child today sometimes has a fuller calendar than many adults; between all-day school, sport and friendships there is little air left in the evening, and the instrument is the first thing to fall by the wayside.

And then there is something larger that affects all of us. We are, to some extent, unlearning calm, patient absorption. Everything around us is built on the quick stimulus, on the next video after fifteen seconds. Sitting down and refining four bars for twenty minutes runs rather against that. I do not believe children today are less capable than they used to be. But they are growing up in a world that trains the opposite of practising, and that should be counted in their favour rather than held against them.

Motivating without forcing

Many parents' first reflex is pressure: fixed practice times, reward systems, and if need be an argument at the piano. In the short term that even works. In the long term it is the most reliable way to put a child off music. Motivation research is fairly clear here: children and adults who practise out of their own drive, because they want to rather than because they must, not only practise more but to a higher standard, with a clear preference for more demanding material.³ That inner drive can be nurtured. Through a genuine say in choosing pieces. Through interest rather than control — “play me what you learned this week” rather than “have you practised today?”. And by making progress visible and audible, because nothing motivates like the feeling of genuinely getting better.

You can see this well by comparison with very strict practice cultures, such as exist in parts of Asia. Technical training there is at an impressively high level and the diligence is enormous. But the price is often high: many stop as soon as the external pressure falls away, because they never found their own why. I much prefer a child who goes to the piano voluntarily at thirteen to one who plays perfectly at ten and never touches a key again at sixteen. A degree of commitment still belongs to it, particularly at the beginning when the first successes are still small. The art is in the dose: enough structure that sticking with it comes more easily, but not so much pressure that the joy is smothered.

What nobody can take from you

And since we are on the subject of why, here is mine. A car can break down. An expensive watch can be stolen. Money may be worth less tomorrow. But being able to play an instrument is an ability that belongs to you and that nobody can take away. It sits in your hands and in your head, and over the years it does not diminish — it grows.

On top of that comes something hard to weigh in money. Music is one of the most direct languages for everything we otherwise lack the words for. Anyone who commands an instrument has an outlet for joy, for frustration, for grief, for everything in between. And you get to know yourself a little in the process, because you hear how you sound when you play honestly. In the end that is what I really want to give my students, behind all the scales and practice techniques. Not the perfect recital, but something that carries you for a lifetime.

And the practising? That is only the route there. Once you have grasped how it works, the tiresome obligation turns surprisingly quickly into the loveliest half hour of the day. That is exactly where we want to get to with every student at ARTIQ Music School in Mainz-Finthen, whatever their age.