John EricsonWhen you are missing something in a passage that you want to play how many times should you play it in a practice session before you go on? I recently heard it seriously suggested by a well know musician in a master class setting that you should play something correctly one thousand times (!) in a row before you are “worthy” to perform it.
I don’t think this is very good advice at all; you will go crazy trying to do this. It sounds like something an orchestral player might say as a joke while warming up (“I’m working to play this right a thousand times, and I missed it once at home!”), not a serious pedagogical suggestion for students of the horn or any other instrument to emulate.
First, on the “worthy” part, none of us are worthy. Really, we are all failures, we are not perfect. Period. All we can do is try to do our best and to aim for our highest level. Even when that rare time comes when we perform something “perfectly,” that is a moment to cherish but on a deep inner level we also know, if we are honest, that there is always some little thing that could have been better.
Nobody likes to miss notes. I don’t! My suggestion is that if you are into shooting for a high level of performance, three times perfect in a row in a practice session really is enough. Don’t waste hours pushing for ten or more perfect in a row, spend your time cross training on other related materials instead. Don’t beat your head on the wall. If you miss it three times, practice it, buzz it on the mouthpiece, etc., but eventually leave it, move on, and come back to it another time. Incorporate related exercises into your warm-up and routine on a daily basis and work to cross train other materials to play the passage better. You will end up with the thousand times perfect someday but probably not in a row, and that is OK.
Look at the old classic accuracy exercise at the beginning of the Singer book (Embouchure Building, Belwin). He is certainly in this exercise looking for the perfect attack but he only asks for three of each note. Do this exercise every day and your first note accuracy will certainly improve. I love this exercise. I always play the exercise in “reverse,” playing the second half (the down part) before I play the first part of it (the part that goes up). It is a great exercise. But if you on the other hand alter the exercise and change it so that you have to play each pitch of the exercise 10 times perfectly in a row you quickly change it from a great exercise into one that is guaranteed to make you at the least depressed and more likely crazy! A professional can do it but it really takes time to build up to the “ten times” level. As a student especially do the exercise as written, cross train on other notes and exercises, move on, don’t make yourself crazy just because you can. It will get better over time. Don’t rush the process.
Another good example somewhat related is learning to double tongue. At Brevard in the summer I often hear high school trumpet students practicing double tonguing for hours on end, getting more and more frustrated minute by minute I am sure. As you learn to double tongue, you will only be able to do it in short spurts before the tongue gets sluggish and tired. An hour of double tonguing practice for a student is pointless, wasted effort, the tongue is sluggish and tired pretty quickly and working it too long just heaps on frustration. Even now as a professional I could certainly not double tongue for an hour, but I can do anything I need to in spurts. Work on double tonguing up to the point where your tongue begins to tire and move on. Come back to it again the next day. This is the road to real progress.
The moral of this story is give yourself a break! You should strive to play as close to perfection as you can but realize at the same time that you are not perfect and that is OK! Aim for groups of three times perfect, practice in focused spurts, build up over time, work problems into your daily routine. But a thousand times perfect in a row is really not a good goal, in my opinion.
This is a post from the original Horn Notes Blog, dated 1/20/05. The original post concluded with this UPDATE: “Just to be clear, I am in favor of working things out to as close to perfection as possible … but the 1000 time goal is really a bit extreme.”