10-Minute Music Practice

by Leah R. Garnett on March 12, 2010 · 17 comments

in Recording & Mastering

One person may practice an instrument for an hour a day, another for only 10 minutes a day. And yet the person who practices for 10 minutes may make more progress than the one who practices for an hour. Why? Because the person who plays for only 10 minutes may spend that time in focused practice, working on developing new skills.

The person who practices for an hour may spend that time playing songs, pieces, or scales that he or she already knows. Music practice is tackling something you don’t know; can’t play; or don’t yet understand; or, it’s working on a technique that feels unfamiliar or difficult.

Practicing music correctly is a lot like getting in shape. If you walk on a treadmill an hour a day while reading a magazine, and you set the speed and incline to the same comfortable level each day, your fitness level will remain largely the same at the end of six months.

If, however, you devote only 20 minutes to the treadmill just three days a week, but put all of your physical and mental energy (no magazines) into the task at hand, you will likely be stronger and better toned at the end of six months than the person who walked for an hour without breaking a sweat.

During that 20 minutes, you may have challenged yourself by slowly increasing the treadmill incline and/or raising your walking speed. The concept of challenging yourself for short periods of time translates perfectly to music practice.

So, start out by practicing for 10 minutes a day. If you want to increase it to 15 minutes, and later to 20 or 30 minutes, that’s great. If not, that’s fine, too. You will make significant progress practicing 10 minutes a day if you challenge yourself during those 10 minutes. There are many accomplished, professional musicians who never practiced for hours a day!

They likely spent countless hours playing music in band or orchestra settings, but practicing may only have been done to review the most challenging or difficult parts of the music.

If you follow the 10 principles in this book, you will learn your instrument more quickly and more thoroughly over the course of one year than if you practice a full hour a day – the wrong way ‐ for 5 years! These principles will be particularly useful for people who have been stuck at the same level for years; people who are returning to music after a long time away from it; or for beginners.

The 10 Principles of 10-Minute Music Practice
1. Establish a long‐term musical goal, and keep it in mind at each practice session.
2. Focus on your strengths, not on your weaknesses. Work only on the weaknesses that are relevant to your long‐term musical goal (Principle No. 1).
3. Set a short‐term goal before each practice session so you know how the 10 minutes will be used before you start.
4. Practice what you don’t know, not what you do know.
5. If it sounds good, it’s not practice, and it doesn’t count toward your practice session.
6. Don’t practice anything wrong; not one note or one beat. When in doubt, triple check the note or beat, and then check it again.
7. Don’t play pieces or songs through from beginning until end; work on parts or pieces of songs.
8. Leave your instrument out, or, if you’re a singer, leave your music out on a music stand, in a place where you will see it every day.
9. Practice for at least 10 minutes every day. If you miss days, don’t give up. Just get back on schedule.
10. Don’t practice the same thing, in the same order, that you did the day before.

There’s a lot more! Click here to buy Leah R. Garnett’s book, Ten‐Minute Music Practice – How to Do It and Why It Works.

Leah R. Garnett has a blog dedicated to musicians over 50 called “Music After 50.”

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Tagged as: inspiration, Music After 50, music rehearsal, practice, recording

  • http://willstern.com Will Stern

    Great blog, and completely true!
    Some people I know play constantly and never get better cause they don’t do what’s in this blog!

  • http://www.ryanchilcote.com Ryan Chilcote

    I strongly agree with MOST of what he is saying, but unfortunately he is forgetting that playing an instrument is NOT like riding a bike. Yes, 10 minutes of focused practice is often worth more than an hour of unfocused practice. I tell my students this all the time. But if you only practice the new stuff, you will indeed loose what you were able to play well before. The familiar songs can always be played better, so you are always trying to improve what you have already been doing.

    BOTTOM LINE: Yes, practice brand new stuff everyday for a short amount of time. But also ROTATE your old material so it stays fresh and also improves with time. I teach music full time at a college & privately, and I found that ROTATING the old stuff along with the above methods work best. WE MUST ALSO MAINTAIN!!!

    Ryan Chilcote
    ryanchilcote.com
    forevermourning.com
    webstudio247.com

    • Virgil Mandanici

      I fully agree Ryan; If my students do not “rotate” the old goods, then it eventually becomes lost, so I have them divide their practices up.

  • http://www.adriennewoods.com Adrienne

    While this is a good thought, I think it’s better to practice as much as you can per day with focus. If you feel yourself drifting away, take a break or switch to a new technique or goal. I was classically trained by my parents as a cellist, then branched out by learning about jazz, rock, pop, and indie music. Now I play in top LA gigs, like American Idol and on the Grammys with artists like Kanye West, Adele, Pink, etc. If I has only practiced 10 minutes a day there is no way I’d be doing what I am now. Plus I taught myself to sing and came out with an album by pushing myself as much as I could on several instruments at once. If you have the desire, do the practice. The desire to practice should drive you to play your instrument(s) all the time. Otherwise, maybe you’re passion lies somewhere else!

  • HowardO

    There will always be people who practice and never make much progress regardless of how much time they spent so I beg to differ on the author premise. I definitely agree that you have to practice new and old material and I add the spending on with free form improvision is also necessary to come up new ideas. I practice for at least an hour a day and I’m confident that I wouldn’t have the progress that I’ve made over the years of playing if I only played for 10 minutes.

  • http://www.car-los.com car

    music is so much fun have fun with it!!

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  • http://tone-doctor.com the tone doctor

    i just write 10 minutes of new material a day. new drum tracks. new protool mixes.
    new guitar riffs or progressions. short practice periods make for more intense creations. a bit more tension and anxiety are present if you only have such a short time to accomplish something in.

    most pop or radio freindly music is less than 4 minutes long.
    i think of a good live set as not so much an performance lasting so many hours. but as 2-3 dozen short focused performances

    also i think the players who sound great only practicing 10 minutes a day — probably spent a few years practicing hours a day in the beginning

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  • http://www.myspace.com/hopefulmonstermusic JBall

    I strongly disagree with Ms. Garnett. Focus is crucial, but there is too much to cover in 10 minutes. Always practise the full song, even the full set if possible. This allows the basics of your performance (ie playing the right notes with steady and natural tempo) to become more-or-less automatic, so you can let your mind become filled with higher level nuances, like dynamics and expression. If you are a singer, you need to free your consciousness of the mechanics of musicianship so your singing can embody the meaning of the lyrics. The only way to do this is to delegate some “consciousness” to your fingers — I guess you call this “muscle memory.”

    BTW Good music is nothing like a treadmill.

  • http://delcasher.com del casher

    I toitally agree with this 10 Minute practice is what I have always taught for the beginning student.
    I see so many who think they are practicing but are only practicing their mistakes and never get any better.

    And yes performaing is a physical as well as mental excercise. Once the student understands the discipline of practice then they can review things they learned in the past and enjoy their efforts.

    When conducting recording sessions, the finest musicians need to be guided to the difficult passages first carefully and slowly. Then everything else is easy and I can record very quickly and get through the session with no mistakes.

    Great article!
    Del Casher

  • http://www.facebook.com/whipplemorales Kirk Whipple & Marilyn Morales

    10 minutes of practice a day might be fine if you are not a serious musician – at any age. A 10-minute daily session might work in the short term for those who have invested years of training and have practiced hours a day during their formative years – AND ONLY as a stopgap measure during busy performance or project cycles. However, as a rule, if you are only practicing 10 minutes a day, you are kidding yourself about making any real gains in your skills, and/or you need to decisively raise the bar on your goals.

    The danger in this “10-minute abs” style philosophy is that it gives those with less experience, imagination and/or resources an excuse to be lazy about their practice plan. It might sell books, but this egregious approach would better be titled “Music For Dummies.”

    Get real serious musicians! If you want to insure your long-term development and growth as an artist, the first ten minutes should be considered a fine warm-up for the real work of your practice session. If you can’t devote more than ten minutes on the average every day to improve your art, the world would be better served if you flipped burgers faster at McDonald’s.

    Don’t buy ideas just because they are sold on the cheap and promise to give you more time to flip channels! Invest in yourself and the world culture!

    Dear readers, we invite you to visit our websites to confirm that we practice what we preach.

    Musically yours,

    Kirk Whipple & Marilyn Morales, Duo Pianists & Composers
    http://www.facebook.com/whipplemorales

    Directors, The Unconservatory
    http://www.unconservatory.org

    Directors, Cranberry Coast Concerts
    http://www.CranberryCoastConcerts.com

    The United Nations Piano Quartet
    http://www.myspace.com/unpq

    The Unconservatory Festival Orchestra
    http://www.myspace.com/uforiginal

  • http://www.rickstone.com Rick Stone

    Focus IS crucial, but 10 minutes? Most great jazz musicians practiced upwards of 6 hours a day when they were learning (and often a lot more). MANY great musicians that I’ve spoken with feel that it takes about 2 hours to get “in the zone.” There’s a physical aspect to practicing that just doesn’t even start to happen until you’re REALLY warmed up. I notice a tremendous difference in how I relate to my instrument after the first few hours, and it’s something that I need to do daily. If I’m playing 4-hour gigs EVERY night, I don’t feel like I need quite as much practice for the physical aspect, but still want to put in a LOT more time on learning NEW material.

    Sorry, but 10 minutes isn’t even scratching the surface.

  • http://www.rickstone.com Rick Stone

    Although I SHOULD point out that I agree with the idea that 10 Minutes of REALLY PRACTICING is infinitely better than an hour of just “playing.” BIG DIFFERENCE. I’ve certainly noticed this when I had tons of gigs, 4 hours a night, 6 nights a week, but NO time to practice. My playing would be in steady decline during these periods, even though I was playing a lot. To really get the most of of your playing AND your practice, you’ve got to strike a balance. Playing is largely about just “getting through” the material. Practice is about “fixing the mistakes.” Don’t you wish you had a time machine when you just screwed up a difficult passage? When you practice, you DO! You can go back to the mistake, figure out what you SHOULD have done, and work on it until you can execute it flawlessly. For a jazz musician, this is a CONSTANT process, even on the material we know, because we DON’T play the same solos night after night. They evolve and change (and hopefully keep improving!)

  • http://www.myspace.com/alexbrubakerguitar Alex Brubaker

    I don’t do much of anything that I consider “practice.” Instead, I’m constantly writing new material that utilizes the techniques that I most want to improve upon. Yes, this results in a countless number of potential songs that are “thrown away,” but through that entire time I am both creating and working on things that I would like to get better at. Ultimately it still takes me a few weeks to come up with something that I want to start working into my sets, but the process, I believe, accomplishes more than what “practice” can by continuously holding my attention and allowing me to create while improving.

    When I was younger, I took 4 years of lessons. At the beginning of that time I was an eager young student wanting to learn to play the guitar. As time progressed, however, I was no longer interested in learning some Pink Floyd lick or Dave Matthews song. Instead, I wanted to start expressing all of the musical ideas that were going on in my head. This made practicing to prepare for lessons quite a drag and not nearly as rewarding. I believe taking structured lessons like this were important, but since I have stopped taking lessons, I have seen myself improve at a faster rate than I thought possible.

    I believe a lot of my philosophy on practice stems from my genre as well. Recently discovering percussive fingerstyle (Andy McKee, Antoine Dufour, etc.), I’ve pushed myself to start experimenting with everything from the percussive elements to things like prepared guitar. From what I have experienced so far, the only way to “practice” this sort of thing is by doing; by writing and experimenting; by playing what you hear in your head – not by structuring your time to work on individual techniques that have hardly been pioneered.

    Just my thoughts… Basically, figure out how you learn best and then play accordingly. If that’s by practicing, don’t limit yourself to 10 minutes a day, though.

  • http://inspiremusic.me Curt

    If this gets someone to practice.. it is a great thing. It may lead them to enjoying practice sessions. Now that is the magic dust! Reducing the stress level in a healthy way will always accelerate growth. Personally, I always practice with a timer set to 10 minutes. I try to alternate activities, avoiding two similar activities in a row. The goal is to keep my attention focused ie. digital pattern by a sound project etc. The average attention span wanes way before ten minutes of focus. This fatigue tends to deliver that numb/irritable sensation that seems to follow really intense practice. The timer really makes that much better and helps turn over material… not wasting time after your already burnt out on something. I can productively practice a couple hours at a stretch like this and still feel like playing after I finish… no more practice hang over. Have fun!

  • Rebecca Hopkins

    Maybe the next book for this author will cover do it yourself brain surgery. 10 minutes? Looking to make money selling a book that is a bunch of garbage. Hope no one buys it, both the book and the premise.

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