Question: will practising enable me to play difficult songs and improvise?

Originally posted on Quora

The short answer is no, just forcing yourself to practice is not a fail-proof solution.

Now for the "why":

- practice can mean many different things;
- different types of practice prepare you for different skills and challenges of music.

The ideal music training regimen includes the following:

1) Ear training. This is essential for obvious reasons. Advanced ear training also builds up reflexes in detecting non-standard intervals, chords and enharmonic sounds. This enables you to understand pieces with complicated scoring (such as Scriabin preludes, Liszt etudes etc.) quicker and is a fundamental preparation for sight-reading.

2) Sight reading. Done on a regular basis, this exercises your ability to look ahead of where you are playing in the score. This is an indispensable skill for orchestra musicians.
As a general rule, when studying you should try to do at least 2h of sight reading per week, combining pieces that you are familiar with (by ear) and pieces that are entirely unknown to you.

Which brings me to...

3) Active listening. This is the kind of research that should be done when picking up a new piece to play. Collect as many different recordings of the piece as possible and listen to them until you can analyse and describe them precisely in terms of tempo, dynamics, character, etc. 

But don't limit active listening to your répertoire. Ideally seek to be exposed and get acquainted with musical literature the same way - the more varied your musical library, the richer your auditory experience.

4) Technical instrument practice (the voice is an instrument as well!). This includes scales etc., but also reflex training exercises such as Hanon's "Le Pianiste Virtuose". I used to hate Hanon's guts up till the age of 12, and then, after changing teachers and starting work with a Hanon appreciator, I came to realize how priceless those exercices really were.
The great value of separate technique training is that you will find (and gradually hone) movement patterns that may not be covered in any etude, but that improve all of your hand muscles all at once. Much like a full-body workout for your hands!

The superior technical capabilities diminish the gap between what you can play (before learning a particular piece) and what the end result of that piece needs to be, in terms of speed, dynamics and interpretation.

5) Répertoire technique - this is the act of parsing the passages in your pieces that are the most difficult technically, and practicing each of them before practice proper.

6) Répertoire practice - the act of trudging through passage after passage until you've refined it enough to see it as fit to present to an audience (which is never, lol).

7) Improvise on your own.

For those who want to bootstrap themselves to improvisation, it's indispensable to "just do it" from time to time.

Of course it might sound doofy and dorky at first (my first improvisations sounded like bad Mozart meets bad Chopin - how odious!). The key here is to persevere. Rome wasn't built in a day and similarly, you will not become the next Liszt by tomorrow.

A common misconception is that improvisation is some kind of mythical, God-given gift. That is far from being the case. The improvisation comes from inspiration and abstract thoughts at times, but without a strong technical base and a lifetime of literature behind you, it's like a writer trying to write a book in German when they don't know any German words! 

Technique practice is like a toolbox: the more tools you have (both simple and more complex/specialized) the more versatile you are in tackling anything that comes your way. Choosing to learn the technique on the répertoire is forcing yourself to repeatedly reinvent the tools you need to do the job.

If you'd like to improvise, listening to Golden Era jazz recordings (from the 30's to the 50's) is an incredible demonstration of what complex tonal harmony enables you to do when you've mastered it on a technical level.

Oh yes, the best part about being in shape technically? Things just feel so EASY to play, it's crazy.

What to expect

Hello, world! I am an IT administrator and polyvalent musician, and this is my blog, which is dedicated to no topic in particular. You can expect posts about the following wonderful things:

• IT and various technical how-tos for Powershell, Windows in general, and virtualization
• gaming, game reviews and internet subculture
• table-top gaming such as Dungeons & Dragons
• music, particularly jazz and metal
• civil law, human rights and multiculturalism issues in Quebec
• philosophy, classical and continental
• occasionally, cooking and other random subjects.

Why do people start blogs? I think it's a combination of literary inclinations (I can write!), self-importance (my opinions matter!) and a need for a public forum to express oneself in more than 140 characters (I am not a birdbrain!). I myself genuinely enjoy being of assistance to those who need to know something I already know.

Why Epistemocrash? It's a wordplay between:

• epistemocracy, which is a theoretical political system where the most knowledgeable and learned are the rulers of the land (composed of epistêmê which means "knowledge" in Greek, and kratos, also in Greek, which translates to "rule, authority" or "strength")
• finally, I added "crash" to represent all of the various things that will be thrown together in here.

That makes Epistemocrash the place of a collision of different knowledge that rules! ;)

I mean, don't most people wish the modern world was ruled by the most learned and intelligent of us? A lofty, but distant ideal.

Happy reading, and see you later!