How to Practice When Away From Your Instrument 

So much to practice, so little time...

It seems we are always running out of time. As budding musicians we can be so busy making ends meet and handling the challenges and necessities of daily life that it can be difficult to commit time in the shed to practice at all. We spend most of our time putting out fires so to speak, dealing with the things in life that are urgent and important and the things that are urgent but not necessarily important. When then do we find the time to work on what we know is important but not immediately urgent? I know for me, in the past my practice time has been the first casualty of the stressed and ‘busy’ life.

What can we do about those days where you literally don’t even have time to sit and be with your instrument?

Could there be a way to effectively work on something we want to develop whilst away from our instrument?

The answer is yes. Lucky for us, we are born with a fabulous ability to visualise in our minds. We can fully recreate experiences of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and feeling and manipulate it at will. We hear all the time that athletes use these kinds of visualisation techniques to aid in their performance, and we can too. Legendary bassist Jaco Pastorius used to practice mentally, working through arrangements and lines on his bass. He would spend time recreating the musical experience in his mind.

Obviously there is no substitute for practicing with your instrument, but this mental practice can be equally useful if executed in the right way. You will still be developing connections in the brain re- lated to your musicality and creativity.

There was a study I read a good while ago that compared the muscle gains from three groups. A workout group (A) , an imagining workout group (B) and a control group (C) that did nothing. When given strength workouts to do over a specific period of time group A obviously and predictably gained the most muscle mass. What was interesting and suggestive though, was that even though group B did no physical exercise and only imagined exercising; they still ended up with a not-too-shabby increase in muscle mass compared to the control group. Mental practice is already prevalent within the field of sports science, but not so much within music education.

It’s useful though, to go into this kind of practice armed with the right know-how. Just like we can practice for real ineffectively, we can also waste our time with this kind of practice if we don’t do it correctly or with the right intention.

For the sake of a little fun visual experiment try out the following:

You might want to read this section first and then try it after, as you may want to close your eyes.

Sit or lie comfortably and close your eyes. Take a few slow deep breaths to relax yourself and use the moment to notice any tension in your body and let it go with an exhalation.

Imaging in your minds eye that you are in a large room. The floor, walls and ceiling are bight white so much that you cannot see where the floor ends and the walls begin.

Looking down you see a sphere in your hands, about the size of a tennis ball. Take a some time to examine it. Whats the texture like? How deep or bright is the colour? Is it soft? Is it solid? Does it smell of anything? Describe it in as much detail as you can. Remember there is no right or wrong answers here. It can be anything you like!

Now we are fully acquainted with this mysterious object of your creation, choose one attribute about it. In this example we’ll use it’s shape, but it could be any detail you used to create it. Consciously and deliberately begin to alter and manipulate it in whichever way you chose.

For example, if you chose to play with the shape, you might decide and watch the sphere slowly start to morph into a cube at your will, then a pyramid and then a cylinder, or whatever. Have fun with this, let your creativity go wild. Let that sphere turn into a giant pyramid that you can climb all the way to the top of; or split it into multiple bits and use them to build something else entirely. Really, as they say, the only limit is your imagination, just think of all the things you can do with only changing the shape!

This is not only a fun and creative way to pass the time during those dull moments stuck on the train or waiting for the bass player to finish soloing, but also you are flexing a few very specific mental muscles: your visualisation skills, your short-term memory and recall, your creativity and focus and your ability to be comfortable and at ease in a truly creative state- which for some people is actually quite difficult to do without our all too prevalent dissentious gremlin of self-deprecating judgement. The little wee devil…

If you have trouble with this at first that’s ok. Some people, like myself, are not particularly visual people and can find it difficult to visualise clearly. I lose focus and struggle to experience a particular element ALL the time doing this exercise. Just pick up where you left off, and be kind to yourself. If you’ve ever done mindfulness meditation, it is a similar process.

This is something you can practice and develop yourself. It’s a very useful skill that you can also apply to other areas of your life so it’s worth in- vesting a little bit of effort into. Got that big audition coming up? How about using your visualisation prowess to practice how you’re going to ace that situation.

So that is all well and good, but…

How does this apply to practicing our instrument?

We can use the same visual prowess we used with the sphere to imagine ourselves playing our instrument (or singing) and manipulate that also and actually turn it into a learning experience.

Our minds aren’t all that good at telling the difference between something that’s happening in reality and what’s imagined. Which is partly why such phenomena as anxiety is so absorbing. Most of the anxiety we feel is over some situation we have created in our noggins.

Your critical-faculty (the self-talk) has the ability to rationalise what you are experiencing and know that it is real but your unconscious mind doesn’t. Here are the steps for a productive visualisation practice: What some hacks might call a hack…

• Set your Intention. Have a clear and specific idea of what you want to practice. Say it out loud like a statement or declaration: “I am now practicing X”.
• Mentally put yourself in your favourite space to practice, if it’s one you already know or if you want to create the ultimate practice space you can do that too.
•  Do the practice. Be sure to experience every movement and sound produces for what it would be like in real life. Hear it, and feel it for real. The key to this becoming a worthwhile endeavour and not a lovely day-dreaming waste of time is the focus on the detail.
• Be with whatever comes up. Enjoy the experience. If you get distracted thats ok too, just re-focus and re-centre without judgement.
• Add repetition, only use this time to focus on one specific thing. Go through it over and over, you are literally reinforcing the neural pathways to doing that action for real.

Don’t just see yourself blasting through a load of fast, nondescript changes. Be very specific, focus and fully experience the detail. Say, for example, “I am practicing this one phrase over a major 7 chord”, and experience yourself doing this slowly and feeling the change of every muscle, thought, sound, and moment. Imagine you are learning, because you are! This is where you get the fruit of the practice. Don’t rush it. And don’t indulge your inner shred-god fantasy, you can do that later!

This practice session is no different to a real one because if you spend all of the time hurrying through material like you might do in your regular practice (which if you do you and I need to have a talk) then it’s likely this effort will get you nowhere fast, perhaps like the results you might be getting in your real practice. That said, you can also allow yourself the joy and fulfilment you get from a satisfying practice.

This is a type of practice in itself and to be able to practice effectively just in your mind also takes dedication and practice. There are other ways of using visualisation techniques to develop yourself such as dealing with performance anxiety and setting up career goals, but the focus for these techniques will be slightly different. But as with all of them it takes practice to be able to practice from that space! If you are really struggling with visualisation then practice the first exercise with the sphere and build up complexity slowly from there. I can’t stress enough the importance of developing this as a skill. You’ll realise the profound difference it can make in your life, and you can notice that you do this all the time anyway when you’re not trying! That’s what your dreams, memories and thoughts about the future are- unconscious and conscious visualisations, you just don't normally do it so formally and with the intent to develop something specific.

To review and a few tips:

• Be very goal specific, and keep it simple
• Create a suitable place/environment for you to be in inside your minds eye
• Focus on the change in movement and sound, use the musical knowledge you need to apply
• If you get distracted by random thoughts or side tracked, when you realise just bring yourself back to what you were doing, without judgement.
• Be consistent. Like regular practice, this practice works cumulatively.
• If you have difficulty visualising the thing you want to practice then simplify it (view it statically first, then build it up) or practice something simpler until you build up the visual skills to work on more complex material.
• If it is a song/piece you are learning, listen to it repeatedly during, see yourself playing/singing along
• You can revisit your regular real practice routine to help solidify it for bonus xp!
• Keep it light, positive and fun! It’s not the time nor place to give yourself a hard time. It should be a pleasurable experience
• This is a cumulative practice. Don’t expect massive results with only trying it a few times. It needs developing.
• I hope I do not need to say this…It is not an excuse to not actually pick up your instrument!

Have you tried it? How did you get on? What did you experience? I would love to hear your thoughts. Drop me a line.

Posted In: Reflections on Practice

Tagged: instrument, practice, visualisation

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