Comments on: Mental Music Practice

By: Artem

Artem — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:15:50 +0000

The best book that I found on this is by Malva Freymuth – “Mental Practice and Imagery for Musicians”.
It’s short, concise, right to the point and contains many good and useful techniques: from memorizing A440 to performance practice on a particular stage.
She cites numerous other books, so if you ever get a hold of the book check the reference section: there are a lot of other books and articles mentioned there (Sporting Bodymind, Seeing with the Mind’s Eye, etc.) that are great resources as well.

I keep the book next to my practice folders just to keep track of all the visualization techniques I can do.

By: Aleksandar

Aleksandar — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:25:21 +0000

I’d like to look at the topic from diferent angle:
There is an saying: “practice makes perfect”.
And of course every skilled musician (or athlete or actor…) knows it’s not quite true,what is true is actually :”PERFECT practice makes perfect”.
That means in simple words,playing a piece two times perfectly is much,much more benefitial than playing the same piece 2o times with mistakes.
here is where comes “mental practice” for me.You can imagine whatever you want right? Than imagine playing a piece PERFECTLY!!
Imagine playing with perfect tone,with perfect confidence,with smooth moves.
Imagine that it’s IMPOSSIBLE to make a single mistake .
Maybe you can’t play perfectly but you can imagine that!
(little example to ilustrate: you can’t jump 4 meters high,But can you imagine that? Of course you can!Try it and feel it!)
Also as author already said,it is a great way for memorization (which in return gives you greater confidence that you can play well)
Another aproach for vizualization (involving real playing) is playing with eyes closed.
At first it is dificult but with time you improve quickly,and playing with eyes closed you are forced to visualize what you play (frets,strings, chord shapes etc…)

By: Mike Saville

Mike Saville — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:53:30 +0000

You are right that not much research has been done into music practice. The best I have found is:

H. Jorgensen and A. C. Lehmann, Eds., Does Practice Make Perfect?: Current Theory and Research on Instrument Music Practice. (89-107) Oslo, Norway: NMH-Publikasjoner. 1997

Which is a series of research papers on the subject.

I’m trying to construct a bibliography of books & journal articles on practice at my blog (howtopractise.com/biblio). I do have a long list of things offline which I need to update this list with. I’m going to try and do this over the next couple of days – if you’ve any resources I don’t have I’d love to know what they are.