Practicing and attention span

Whistle
1

About how many times through do you play a tune you’re practicing? Or if you’re at the stage of learning a new tune, just getting the fingerings down, how long do you play that one tune before moving on to something else?

I strongly suspect that I’m spreading my attention over too many tunes, and not focusing enough on getting individual tunes just right. But OTOH I think it’s a way that I cope with my own low frustration tolerance – when I get fed up with one tune and its glitchy spots, I move on to the next. Also, I just get bored easily, and move restlessly from tune to tune.

Another influence is that I’m another apartment dweller, in a pretty flimsily built complex. Just practicing is kind of a public performance, and I tend to think that the neighbors are going to kill me if I keep playing the same thing over and over for too long a stretch of time (but then again, they might appreciate it more if I ironed out more of the spots where I glitch or lose the beat).

Anyway, I’m hoping that knowing how long other people work on a singe tune might help me amend my practice habits.

2

I usually practice the same tune until I can play it quite clean without hesitating at spots. Then I move on to the next new tune. In the meanwhile I also practice known tunes so I don’t get bored of the new one.

The time it takes to learn a tune varies a lot on the tune itself. I got the basics of the glasgow reel down in one day but I’m still struggling with parts of eddie kelly after over a week.

But then again, I’m just a newbie :slight_smile:

3

I also usually change around tunes pretty quickly, but when I first am learning them, I’ll play them for hours straight. I live in dorms, so I imagine me playing Si Beag Si Mhor for hours straight does drive the neighbors crazy.

4

I follow the advise giving in another thread and ranked my tunes (the little I know) into three groups : ok, soso and not yet. I start my practice with a bit of cuts, taps and rolls and then play a few of the Ok ones. After that I try the bits of the soso ones that I falter on untill it flows. Then I go for one or two of the not yets and plays these, bar per bar or even measure per measure to make sure I get it right…

All of this takes about a half hour which is my allotted practising time. If I have more time, I try variations on the Ok’s and Soso’s by listening to better players (www.whistlethis.com + www.tradlessons.com + snipsandclips) and by looking at different pages with dots (well, you probably know where to look) and trying to figure out what the differences are… Another half an hour of this…

If I have even more time, I’ll just noodle…

5

If it’s a new tune that I really like I’ll play it for an embarrassingly long time. And over the course of a few weeks I’ll be sure to play it any chance I get, in between the other tunes I already know. I get obsessed with the new tunes.

There are some tunes I never quite get, though, so I move on and come back to them again later. Maybe some day.

It seems that the ones I can learn pretty quickly are the ones I end up practicing a million times just because I’m so jazzed to have a new tune.

6

I’ve discovered this about myself: If I’m learning a tune and I go through it three or four or five times, that pretty much is my limit for accomplishing anything. After that I’m not really progressing and I often regress to the point where I don’t think I’ve made any gains at all that day. BUT…if I play it the next day, I’m better than I was at any point the previous day. It seems that my brain/muscles spend some of the down time reviewing the practice session and want to show me what they’ve learned. So I tailor my practicing accordingly. New tunes I play them 3-4 times, as slowly as I need to get them right every time. Reviewing old tunes I do them 3-4 times, starting slowly to reinforce accuracy, then I speed up each time through.

I’ve also discovered that I tend to forget tunes if I don’t play them for a couple of weeks so I try to go through my tunes every now and then to keep them fresh. Fortunately I only know 150 or so tunes so it’s not that hard.

7

I can’t to focus on the same thing for as long as it takes me to get a tune right. Switching around keeps me from throwing whistles. It’s the psychic equivalent of wiggling a new toy in front of a fretful toddler.

I admire your guts for playing in the dorms. I started playing whistle a little bit the year before college, but was too shy to play in my dorm. I was intimidated by all those people with years of cello or flute or oboe lessons.

I caught that thread, and found it interesting that I too divide my tunes into 3 groups by how well I know them.

I tend to get jazzed up over a handful of new tunes at a time – occasionally I’ll have a week when my brain feels especially absorbent and my fingers are unexpectedly coordinated, and I’ll be really into learning new tunes And then things calm down and I’ll just want to work on familiar stuff for a longer while, getting the glitches ironed out and weaning myself from the sheet music.

I find that learning music really tires me out in its own weird way, and I also have a limited quantity of good attention span time before I too start to regress – it can be anywhere between 2-5 times through, with pauses to repeat sticky sections until I can get them right a couple of times in a row.But I’m trying to see if I can extend that time a little bit, because I do enjoy it when I can get more immersed in what I’m doing.

Also, I’ve been kind of meditating on what happens when I start to regress like that, and what seems to happen is that I get either impatient (my sense of rhythm going faster than my fingers can keep up with) or fretful (upset about making mistakes, worried about bothering the neighbors, etc), and either of those stressful states seems to cause my finger coordination to go downhill fast.

I’ve started taking a time-out whenever I feel myself getting fretful or impatient, breaking up the negative feedback loop that I get into by consciously lowering the whistle and taking deep breaths until I feel calm and unkerfuffled again. It really seems to be working to get me back on track, and extend my attention span for the tune at hand.

It sounds kind of obvious when I write it out, but hey, it’s taken me years to figure out that I just need to make myself do it, and that yes, it actually works.

Noel

8

An interesting point I once heard a jazz pianist make about practicing is that alot of us sometimes spend a good deal of time going over and over a “trouble” spot in a tune until we get it right, and then move on. Practicing is a process of instilling finger/muscle memory, and by going over and over a bad spot we need to be carefull that we are not teaching our muscles how to do it wrong more than right. For example, if we go over a bad spot and flub it, try again and flub it, once again and flub it then finally get it right, what we’ve actually done is practice it wrong three times and correctly once, meaning our muscles are more likely to remember how to do it the wrong way! The answer to this conundrum is to always play a piece as slow as it takes to get it right more often than not, so that we are spending our valuable practice time getting it right! :slight_smile: I for one am very guilty of always trying to play a piece faster than I should. I’ve been trying to use a metronome lately but seem to be more in danger of throwing my metronome than my whistle. :smiley:

9

Haste makes waste…

10

I’m so glad you posted this! I suffer from the impatient/fretful syndrome too. I’m going to try your approach.