Repetition Done Properly | Cello Practice Tips!

Practice is the art of self-teaching and self-learning. I theorize that we are at least 80% self-taught when it comes to the cello. As I tell my students, “you need some 'figure-out-ness' about ya” if you want to get better. To learn something is to make a physical change in the brain that results in an observable change in behavior—in this case, an improvement in playing. In other words, for something to be learned, it needs to make it into your long-term memory, a relatively permanent change in your brain. When it comes to playing the cello, the only person who can make that change in your brain is you. The teacher can show you the how of playing and practicing, and there may be an immediate observable improvement, but for there to be a change in the brain such that you can execute these techniques automatically (so-called “muscle memory”), there needs to be a significant amount of repetition. We’ve become the “instant download generation”. But unfortunately, there is no instant download in Google Play or the App Store on your iPhone for cello technique! There are no shortcuts. But that’s okay because you really don’t want this to be easy—you actually enjoy the challenge, which is why it is worth doing.

However, we have to be careful how we execute these repetitions so that we can maximize our practice time and avoid injury. We have to be smart about it. Several years ago, the idea of “interleaving” as a practice technique hit the music world. It seems to me that psychologist Noa Kageyama of bulletproofmusician.com gets the credit for introducing this idea to musicians. Literally, to interleave is to insert a blank page in a book. As I understand it, interleaving is a type of interruption to your learning. It was first studied in sports, and researchers found that “block practice” was not as effective as “interleaving.” As an example, block practice would be to do 30 minutes of free throws, followed by 30 minutes of layups, followed by 30 minutes of three-pointers. You get the idea. To interleave would be to do something like this: 10 minutes of free throws followed by 10 minutes of three-pointers, followed by 10 minutes of layups, followed by 10 minutes of three-pointers, followed by 10 minutes of free throws, followed by 10 minutes of layups, and so on. When you interrupt your learning and have to come back to the same skill multiple times, your brain practices retrieving—this is what is so very helpful. In a sense, your brain has to ask, “now where was I again, and how do I do this?” In real life, we have to jump from skill to skill, whether it’s sports or music, and this has to be done quickly. Real life does not involve 30 minutes of the exact same skill repeated over and over again. Your brain has to be able to go from one skill to another and retrieve the necessary information at lightning speed. Interleaving practices that. This is why it is so helpful.

So this brings me to my first practice tip: have a plan. Time is short, and efficiency is of the essence. I like to scan over the music I’m working on and identify the difficult spots I want to practice. This may be, let’s say, five difficult passages on the first page. I might put a little star by each one of them. I then proceed to apply the principles of interleaving to these passages, whereby I utilize repetition, attempting to achieve consistency in each one of them. However, instead of block practice I alternate between the passages, returning to the most difficult ones more frequently. This is sort of the big picture of how I recommend practicing, but let’s look into more details.

In each of these problem passages, it is imperative to identify exactly what is causing the trouble. Perhaps it is a shift, string crossings, intonation problems within a position, beautiful vibrato, consistent tone, dynamics, or musicality. It could be any number of things, but you need to know precisely what you need to practice. So part of practicing requires you to be able to self-evaluate, to use the words of Dr. Summit, a music education professor where I teach at Central Michigan University. You have to be able to identify your problems before you know what to focus on. And, of course, this is where a teacher can be of huge help. Your teacher hears things that you probably do not notice. This is all part of the training. But I also recommend recording yourself to be able to self-evaluate more effectively. Even advanced players don’t always realize problems in their playing until they hear themselves on a recording. It provides a certain amount of objectivity. I also think there’s great value in listening to multiple recordings of your piece. I know this gets controversial, but students need to be doing listening. It’s part of your ear training. Once you become more advanced, so as not to be overly influenced by a particular interpretation, you can forgo the listening at least until you have arrived at your own interpretation, but for less advanced students, I believe listening is utterly important.

So you need to be able to self-evaluate with the help of your teacher. But you also need to know how to practice. This is an extremely complicated and multifaceted issue. There are so many ways to practice, but let me start off by saying, if it is unclear how to practice a particular passage, ask your teacher how to do it. I wish my students would ask this more. If you ask this question, don’t be surprised if your teacher faints right in front of you! So ask with care! But seriously, it’s a really important question because if you are a student, you may need guidance on this issue. This brings me back to my first point: the teacher can only show you how to teach yourself. Teachers cannot learn the material for you. That will be totally on you.

So this article doesn’t get too long, I’m going to save more specific practice techniques for other articles because it is such a huge question. But I want to bring this back to interleaving. After you have identified your problem passages, have self-evaluated and know what the problems are, and you have strategies for fixing the problems, you can begin your repetitions. The goal is for each passage to develop consistency, meaning you are more apt to play it correctly than not. So ultimately, we are aiming for the ability to be able to repeat the passage many times over, playing it consistently well. Now, in the beginning, you may be able to only get the passage correct one time out of 10. If this is the case, slow it down so that you can increase the number of times per 10 that you play it correctly. I also recommend, before you jump to one of your other problem passages (remember we are avoiding block practicing and going for interleaving), you end with the passage played correctly. In the early stages, just stop when you get it, and sit there for a second and let your brain process. This is also an idea from psychologist Noa Kageyama. There is evidence that the brain continues to learn even when you are not practicing. So he recommends just sitting there for a moment to allow your brain to process.

One last tip; it's better to have more numerous but shorter practice sessions within a week than fewer but longer practice sessions. In other words, it's preferable to practice 45 minutes per day than four hours twice a week. Spreading out your practice time versus more cram-like sessions is far better

So repetition is vital, but we need to be smart about it and execute it in such a way that it is conducive to the way our brain learns and healthy for the body. Not only is interleaving better for the brain, but for the prevention of overuse injuries. We don’t want to be like the factory worker that does the same motion over and over for hours on end only to develop overuse injuries. Bouncing around between passages gives our muscles and tendons a break from the same motion.

S.D.G.

Authored by Jamie Fiste, Cello Professor at Central Michigan University.