Neuroscience-based efficient practice schedule

twocats · 2024-05-15T16:46:46+00:00

I had meant to share this on PW a long time ago but never got around to it! My friend shared these videos by Dr. Molly Gebrian, a neuroscientist who is also...

Animisha

I found Gebrian's complete list of practice strategies online:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/62d41f4e5352371c9d792542/t/66aa5bfa8bbdee7b22dd1dc4/1722440698583/Gebrian+Appendix+A.pdf

pseudonym58

I've never been able to work within any predefined practice "system" effectively. But there is definitely value in varying methods from day to day. Some days I start with piece A , then B, etc.; sometimes I play pieces out of order. Some days I have to play everything very slowly because otherwise nothing seems to work. Other days I can seemingly just sit down and play everything decently at first try. It's a mystery to me and I have a feeling it has something to do with my brain and coordination on a given day (sleep, or lack thereof?). I'm certainly not a reliable machine.😁
It's a given that if practicing seems too depressing, I'll allow myself to play slowly through whatever it is I'm working on and then call it a day.

Animisha

I am on board!
Yesterday I started with a new piece, an arioso from Bach that is a challenge piece for me. I play hands separately, and divided the piece into nine sections, so that is eleven sections in total, and I have made a schedule in a spreadsheet. It will be an interesting experience!

One of the things I wonder about is, Day 1 - session 1: how much time should I spend, or, which result should I get? I practised until I could play through RH with the metronome on 50, not without mistakes, but it took me a long time to get there. Should I have had a lower goal for day 1?

Animisha

Animisha I am on board!

So, what happened...

When I started practising this way, I had two weeks to my next lesson. I had practised the three pieces that my teacher and me had worked with for at least a month every single day, so I reckoned they were all in need of a break. I made a schedule for my new Bach piece according to Molly's instructions.

Then after one week of amusing myself with Bach, I returned to practise my lesson pieces again. One was still quite okay, even though I had lost speed; the other two pieces had deteriorated badly. I put my Bach on hold and panick-practised my lesson pieces, and just in time for my lesson, they were somewhat presentable.

Of course, that made me think.
First of all, I have never experienced this magical improvement after a night's sleep. Never! Instead, I always start the day a bit worse than I played the day before.
Maybe this is because I don't sleep all that well, and not that long. Most memory consolidation happens during the 7th and 8th hour of sleep, well, I usually sleep about 6,5 hours. And trust me, I have done everything I can to improve my sleep...
Second of all, I have never experienced a magical improvement after not having practised for a week or so, for instance, after a holiday. Instead, I need to work my way back to where I was.

Molly said: Experiment, and find out for yourself.
I am still interested in working with a schedule, but after practising a section on day 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 (as in Molly's schedule), I will not take a break for six days. Instead, I will take a break for two days, and see how that goes.

Animisha

Pallas, yes, you make perfect sense!

My next lesson will be in two weeks, not next week, so I have plenty of time to get started with the schedule without falling behind on my other pieces. Those pieces were very much in need of a couple of days' rest anyway!

Pallas I have to focus on limiting time over getting through any specific amount of material, to save my arms from getting trashed.

Off topic for this thread, but discuss this with your teacher. My guess is, there is tension in your arms, wrist or hands, and that is why your arms risk feeling trashed.

Animisha

keff Am not keen on Apple Calendar to track the schedule.

I made my schedule (just for one piece though) in a spreadsheet. The big advantage is that I can easily move parts of the schedule up or down. For instance, I thought I would be working with RH three days in a row before starting to work with LH, but yesterday I realised I that RH day 2 did not need as much time as RH day 1, and that I could start with LH already today.

twocats

Animisha oh that spreadsheet is fantastic and an amazing way to see it visually! Plus, as you'd mentioned, easy to modify 🙂

I don't expect to completely learn a piece after one cycle and think maybe I need to do multiple cycles. But if it can save me overall practice time, I'm for it!

keff

Animisha Many thanks for this tip.

Animisha

twocats and keff
You're welcome! It just seemed natural to me to make a spreadsheet. 😊

Day three. Third day with RH, second day with LH. I won't need as much time as yesterday and the day before to practise it, but I don't have enough time left to start with first day section 1.

It seems to me, working with this schedule, that it would be a good idea to have lots of practice-snippets lying around to work with once the scheduled work is done, and you have some practice time left. And maybe that is also a very good thing - for every piece to write down those small sections that are accident-prone, to work with in case there is time left.

Animisha

For those who did not read the questions and answers underneath the third video, this was a very interesting exchange!

"Thank you for these videos, Molly. I'm curious how you came to the pattern of the three consecutive practice days after the 1 and 2 week breaks, as it breaks with the typical ever expanding spaced repetition interval, and also what you would recommend past one month of practice."

Molly: " Great question! That is part of the "outtakes" from this video (originally I had that explanation in there, but I thought it made it too long and nobody would care!). 🙂 I started off with more ever-expanding spacing when I first started experimenting with this back in the spring. But on many occasions, I would come up with some great new fingering when I came back to it after a week or two weeks' break and then it seemed like it would be better to practice that passage again the next day to reinforce the new fingering (especially if it was a tricky passage) rather than not practice it again for a whole week. When I tried the schedule I talk about in the video, it seemed to work much better for me, and solved the issue of coming up with new ideas and wanting to reinforce them before taking a big break. But you should definitely experiment and figure out what works best for you! 🙂 To your second question of what do you do after the month is up, at that point (for me) the piece is learned and basically performance ready. Then I start doing a lot of random practice (discussed in one of my other videos, posted back in March) as well as much bigger sections to get it ready for performance. Often, the sections I practice in this spaced practice thing are VERY short (8-16 bars at the most, sometimes only a single bar!), so I have to start stitching it together (and sometimes that requires another round of spaced practice)."

twocats

Animisha "Often, the sections I practice in this spaced practice thing are VERY short (8-16 bars at the most, sometimes only a single bar!)"

I'm guessing Dr. Molly can sightread most of her stuff at performance level and only needs to do spaced practice for the trickier bits...

I don't have the luxury of doing that so I'm just going to work on entire movements on her schedule. I'll see how it goes!

Animisha

More answers from Molly. This was a question I was wondering about a lot!

"When I first start practicing a piece, the length of the sections I start with depend on what I feel I can reasonably work in during one practice session of 30 minutes. I don't work on just that one section for 30 minutes - I go back and forth between that section and other sections I'm working on (see my videos on spaced practice and random practice for more info on why I do this). Sometimes the section is easier than I think it will be, so I add more measures. Sometimes it's harder, so it becomes fewer measures than I had planned on. I never want it to feel like too much or too little, but it's a judgement call for sure."

Animisha

Pallas

How did it go? Did she answer your questions? Of course, many good piano teachers may, just as Molly before corona, never have tested spaced practice for themselves.

keystring

twocats 'm guessing Dr. Molly can sightread most of her stuff at performance level and only needs to do spaced practice for the trickier bits...

I had a broader thought that goes in this direction. Namely what she suggests must be personalized to where you are at yourself. Her own practising will be as a trained professional who has all the skills and is aiming at the piece(s) to be performed. If teaching at university level, the students probably have good foundations already. We may not be in that kind of position. You may be a beginner still learning basic things; or someone who learned on their own or was mistaught with problems to unravel. The goal may be to acquire skills, as well as learn to play a piece of music.

I looked at the Appendix A that is on-line which was linked. Mostly these are familiar things. I'm looking at chapter 1:

- Start with hard spots

figure out why you are having trouble as precisely as you can

Break the problem down into smaller, manageable parts.

Solidify the solution using one of the methods below:

Play it correctly at least fives times in a row.

Overlearning: If it took you 10 tries to get it right, to at least 5 correct repetitions......

Ask: "Which pathway am I reinforcing by how I'm practising?"
...........

Here's how that looked for me a couple of years ago. As a child I was self-taught and created habits. I have not worked with an in-person teacher, and my foot was not on-camera. My previous piano (DP) had a questionable pedal: you had to stomp all the way down for it to engage, and let it release almost to the top for it to disengage.

This created a host of habits that remained with a new, good piano, because I didn't know better. I put my body weight into the pedal foot, shifted something in the hips, and had no sensitivity to the pedal's response. I went to play a piece that needed pedal more than once per measure and I was in trouble. Fixing this was multistep. Being so uncoordinated, I started with Feldenkrais stand-sit from a chair in the room for balance: how to move the foot from the ankle. (2) Getting familiar with the pedal, at what point of descent does it engage - at what point does it disengage the sound. (3) Play two notes in a row legato using the pedal, with a minimum range of moving the pedal. There was no "at least 5 times in a row" - after 2, the old habit kicked in - until this solidified. There was "multiple sessions throughout the day" however.

I abandoned the piece during that period, and went back to it after the new habit was established. Everything I described goes within what Dr. G listed, but adjusted to where I was at personally.

As an idea of personalization of the ideas to where you're at.

twocats

I'm finally going to try being strict about trying out Dr. Molly's schedule! I am starting with the first movement of the piano quartet I'm working on, and once I get into the week-long break I plan to start on the third movement using her schedule. Since it's not a difficult piece and I just need to get it familiarized and into my brain, I'm excited to see how much progress I make over the five weeks and how close it'll be to performance-ready. I'll be taking a video at the end of each scheduled practice day over at my practice journal.

Animisha

When checking out some of the science that Molly refered to, I happened to find this article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00464-023-10522-y.
The title says it clearly: No difference between using short and long intervals for distributed proficiency-based laparoscopy simulator training.

The article makes it clear, as Molly also says, that it is not important exactly how many days you take a break from a section, and that it is good to experiment and find out for yourself which schedule works best for you.

ranjit

Animisha I'm a bit confused by what this means? If 1-2 day intervals are not worse than 6-8 day intervals, wouldn't the total number of days still be less if you had 1-2 day intervals?

For example, if you practice 3 hours:
1 hour on day 1
1 hour on day 2
1 hour on day 3

vs the same 3 hours:
1 hour on day 1
1 hour on day 8
1 hour on day 15

Isn't the study saying they observed the same performance from both groups?

Animisha

ranjit

Yes, this seems to be the case in this study. Shorter intervals were not more efficient than longer intervals. On the other hand, longer intervals were also not more efficient than shorter intervals.

JB_PT

Pallas I just finished reading the book, and it's 3 hours until my lesson. I looked at the workbook, and I'm finding it daunting, especially interleaved practice and bringing a fast piece up to speed.

My typical routine for books like these is to read all the way through once, then I go back for a second (quicker) pass and start marking pages/taking notes. I'm not planning to buy the workbook, but I just finished my first read-through of the book a few days ago and I'm also finding it a bit daunting! There's so many things I recognize I want to/should work on; it's a long list all jumbled in my head and I'm not sure where I should start. But that's what the next step is for...I can start writing things down and then hopefully it will be easier to prioritize what I want to focus on.

Pallas Hilariously, my original method is bullet pointed in MG's workbook, on Worksheet 2 as "the common unhelpful habits," circle the ones that apply. There are 11. I did all 11 every day.

I may resemble that remark. 😩

If anyone is curious about these topics and on the fence about buying the book, my recommendation would be to start with her videos on YouTube. They are pretty concise and much of the material in the book is presented there. I thought all of the studies she shared were really interesting, but I found them easier to digest when she was explaining...it's a bit dry to just read about them. I am very glad I did buy the book though - I'm really interested in trying out most of her suggestions and for me personally it's just better to have a physical copy on hand. I have a lot of saved YT videos with plans to follow up but then I just forget about them.

keystring

JB_PT My typical routine for books like these is to read all the way through once, then I go back for a second (quicker) pass and start marking pages/taking notes.

Just wanted to say that I can identify with this approach. It feels akin to flying over the terrain to get an idea of rivers, roads, cottages and hills. Then you go down to the ground, dig into the dirt and know how your spot relates to everything else. I need context and do very poorly without a big picture.

Animisha

Day 5! First day with section 2, which was exactly the right size for 3 x 10 minutes of practice today. This made me realise that section 1 is too big (too difficult).
My idea of dividing the piece into nine sections of 4-5 measures, before I started practising them, was not such a good idea. As Molly wrote in her comments below the video, the length of the sections should depend on what I can reasonably work with during 30 minutes.
I have now split section 1 into 1A and 1B, and from now on, they will get 3 x 10 minutes of practice each for as long as they need that amount of time.

Working with the schedule is quite a lot of trial and error at this stage! 😅

lilypad

Thought I'd share my schedule that I made with Google Sheets.

Practice Planner Demo

"Stompin' at the Savoy" is a piece I just started and is closest to the schedule from the video. The rest are close to finished so their schedules are more compressed. I'm either putting sections together ("Sound of Silence", "Beyond the Sea") or bringing up to tempo ("Ecossaise") or doing interleaved performance practice ("Manhattan 1928") for the upcoming recital. I'll be doing interleaved performance practice for "Beyond the Sea" later on also for a piano club meeting near the end of the month.

Animisha

Very interesting lilypad, to see how you have managed to make a schedule for several pieces.

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