Always Practice With a Pencil

[Todd Tipton]

Sometimes, the smallest statements have had the greatest impact on me. Many years ago, I was sitting in a master class with Stephen Robinson. He asked the student on stage about an inconsistent fingering and how she intended to play the passage because she had marked nothing in the problematic place. He looked out to the audience and with a louder voice he said, "Always practice with a pencil, because practice is about making decisions. If you don't have a pencil, you aren't really practicing."

This is one of those pieces of advice you might already know, but continues to have a deeper and deeper meaning as the years go by. Habitually, there are things I MUST have before I sit down to play a single tone. My guitar sock, my cut out pieces of shelf liner to keep my guitar firmly in place, my old tattered and coffee stained copy of Christopher Berg's Giuliani Revisited, of course my coffee, and a pencil. Always a pencil.

A pencil is one of the few sacred things in my studio that is not to be touched (unless it is a student: please use it!. It isn't something someone just grabs for a minute to make a grocery list. It is one of my most valuable tools and it always stays on my table along with metronomes, tuners, capos, etc.

To slightly shift gears, we are creatures of habit. I remind my students almost every single lesson of this, and I remind myself of the same thing too; it really matters. Practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent. For better or worse, when we repeat something, we WILL get very good at it. Good practice is about understanding this and learning how to take advantage of it: to use it for you and not against you.

Practice time is a chance to slowly build things in a very contrived way. It is a time to plan exactly what it is you want to happen in an ideal performance situation. It is about making decisions. We need to commit to our decisions and we do that by using a pencil.

For example, you must use the 2nd finger and not the 3rd on a particular note, or you will crash and burn on the next beat. Write it down. You must use "a" and not "m" on one particular note in a scale. If you don't, "p" ends up playing the last note of the scale, you have no finger to play the bass note, and then the excess tension in your hand causes the ugliest of sounds on that beautiful chord chord that follows. Write it down. You go to a lot of trouble to find the solutions that give the results you want. Write them down.

Commit to the solution and incorporate it in your practice. Isolate the passage. Play it as slowly as needed keeping the mind ahead of the fingers. Practice that passage with the definite aim of using the finger you have chosen. Don't try to speed it up. Just repeat it. If this is not an easy task, then your passage is too big and you are trying to play it too fast. This is the time where you are supposed to be building the habits you want to perform.

I take this further, and I teach my students to do the same thing. Anytime I have hesitation, I use my pencil. It doesn't even have to be a mistake, but it could have been a mistake. For a split second, was that an F or and F#? Habitually, I write something in the score that prevents hesitation again. That very quiet passage almost started off a little too loud. Or maybe my right hand quickly jumped away from the saddle for that warm tone coming up. I almost forgot. At that point, I stop what I am doing, and I fix the problem. I use the pencil. I build into my practice anticipating that quiet passage, or the right hand gracefully prepares as it anticipates the warm passage. I do this because I wrote something in the score to make that happen.

The practice chair is the place where I get to slowly build in a very contrived way exactly what I want to happen in performance. It is the place that solve problems. Decisions are solutions to problems. I commit to those decisions with a pencil. Sometimes I change my mind. Pencils have erasers.

I take frequent breaks in my practice. I might be reading something, posting in a forum, getting coffee, or just chilling. Sometimes my wife comes home while I am taking a break. She always knows when I am working because I always have that pencil behind my ear.

[rick-slo]

Or with a keystroke.

[amyFB]

I love and much prefer pencils over pens.

Give me a .05mm lead mechanical pencil and a good eraser and I'm a happy writer with a lot less scrap paper in the trash.

Also easier on the hands; no pressure needed to make words on paper, compared to ink.

[Todd Tipton]

Originally Posted by rick-slo

Or with a keystroke.

touché! ;-)

[reeve21]

Very good stuff, Todd. Practice without purpose may be ok for maintaining dexterity, but I find I rarely learn anything without a real focus.

My teacher writes out exercises for me on staff paper during the lesson. He is actually able to fingerpick the guitar with a pencil in his picking hand. Drives me nuts to watch it!

[Todd Tipton]

Originally Posted by reeve21

Very good stuff, Todd. Practice without purpose may be ok for maintaining dexterity, but I find I rarely learn anything without a real focus.

My teacher writes out exercises for me on staff paper during the lesson. He is actually able to fingerpick the guitar with a pencil in his picking hand. Drives me nuts to watch it!

I am left handed, and do that all the time...LOL

[stanron]

I do like pencils. My particular preference is for mechanical pencils. I have a lot of them and I use them for all sorts of things. One thing I don't use them for is practice. I prefer to use memory. If you are going to play a piece well you have to remember it, so why not remember it from the start.

Admittedly I rarely learn from paper and maybe that colours my approach but eventually you will want to commit a piece to memory and writing stuff down can be seen as a way of avoiding memorising.

[vindibona1]

A good musician always marks his music. I know guys that use red pens because it draws attention. I'm not one to make lists, but I do draw asterisks in the areas of the music that need practice or make marks to delineate sections. Many times my eyes will skip over a key change and I'll miss an accidental. Got to mark it. You should never make a reading mistake twice (sometime I'll reveal the moment I started wearing glasses full time ).

A lot of time I'll do a gig when music is thrown at me and I have just a few minutes to learn it. Often times I'll bring colored highlighters just so my eyes can quickly move to spots that need attention, particularly if the music isn't clear.

[fnesnor]

Originally Posted by stanron

I do like pencils. My particular preference is for mechanical pencils. I have a lot of them and I use them for all sorts of things. One thing I don't use them for is practice. I prefer to use memory. If you are going to play a piece well you have to remember it, so why not remember it from the start.

Admittedly I rarely learn from paper and maybe that colours my approach but eventually you will want to commit a piece to memory and writing stuff down can be seen as a way of avoiding memorising.

I like my yellow No 2 Dixon’s. Having been a draftsman, I have a drawer full of various mechanical pencils. They’re nice, but I like sharpening pencils. �� I also like writing things down to help reinforce my memorization of a piece or method of play as Todd eloquently noted.

[TBman]

Make sure it's sharpened too.

About 30 years ago during my first week as a junior accountant a senior accountant went to show me a journal entry. He grabbed one of the pencils I had stocked my pen holder with, as I was so proud to set up my desk at my new job with all the accounting supplies I thought I might need from the stock closet.

He went to write with it and stopped, throwing the pencil on the desk. It seems that in my excitement I forgot to sharpen all the pencils.

He looked at me and simply said "an unsharpened pencil is a useless piece of wood" (with an expletive here and there).

I never forgot that. Now any unsharpened pencil in my sight is an aberration of nature, lol.