There's a lot of ways to get it wrong.

We've all heard "practice makes perfect".  The phrase is drilled in your head as a young student by teachers attempting to instill in you the importance of practice.  While this is a good concept at its core, what happens if you're not practicing right.  In my studio, I added onto that phrase and would say to the students "Perfect practice makes perfect."  But how does one get to perfect in order to practice at that level.  In an ideal world, we'd all get it right and then practice that.  But we all know that rarely happens.

Another oft repeated instruction is "amateurs practice till they get it right. Musicians practice till they can't get it wrong."  I've even used this one with my students to illustrate the point that work begins, not ends,  when you get it right.  In the Suzuki community, we often repeat Dr. Suzuki's famous quote, "Knowledge plus 10,000 times equals ability."  The implied concept is that something has to be known to be practiced or immersed so well in memory that it can't be forgotten.

On the road to finding the right pattern, students and professionals play through a lot of wrong ways.  Frustration enters the young student and the desire to practice or play plummets.  Professionals have developed a system of analysis in order to figure out what needs to be done and when.  They arrive quicker at the correct phrase or fingering or melody and so get to the work of muscle memory faster and more efficiently.  This encourages practice and playing because a greater amount of success is achieved in a smaller amount of time.

I've had the privilege of observing and/or studying with some great master teachers and players and somewhere along the way discovered that if we know what needs to happen, we can arrive to the work place with less frustration and discouragement.  I decided to try with my playing and my students the conversation of which hand is responsible for what and when.  I immediately saw a reduction in the time it took students to discover or play the right pattern and get down to the business of working/practicing.

I then adopted the phrase "Talk to the hand, tell it what to do".  This instruction would always elicit a laugh from the parents and a giggle from the kids. The former because they caught the not-so-subtle reference to valley-girl lingo, the latter because they found the idea of talking to their hands funny.

But, it worked.  If they couldn't tell their hands what to do, then the pattern wasn't imbedded in their hearing or they hadn't grasped a concept of music writing. So, we would backtrack, sing the song, or encourage extra listening at home, or review basic rules of music and staff notation.   Then we'd revisit the pattern, either at that lesson or the next one.  Without fail, when the student had gained ability to say what needed to happen and when, the correct pattern was established and practice or work could begin towards long-term memory or reaching the level where it could not be forgotten.

As an illustration, student A comes in and is asked to play Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.  The bow arm is playing beautifully and the left hand is finding the correct places for resonant tone, until the 4th note needs to be played (for the violin 3rd finger a or 4th line D) and then a train wreck happens. The student pulls a sad face and says "I can't ever get that right!"  I ask, "What has to happen first?"  If the student can say, "finger then bow" then we proceed by practicing one of the twinkle rhythms and place the finger before the bow crosses.  IF the student can't give that information, then we review and then practice using the twinkle variation.  Usually after 5 times, the student is feeling confident and then we start the work of repetitions or not forgetting.

Another student comes in and opens the reading book and plays the passage incorrectly, the melody is going up and the student is playing notes going lower.  This is common when the reading process first begins.  The impulse to say "wrong, try it again!" is strong, but if we ask the student to say the direction of the notes while we point to the staff and then re-iterate that up is to the right (on the keyboard) and down is to the left, then we give them the right information and they can proceed with confidence and knowledge.

These are very elementary anecdotes, however the process works for high level playing and I use it often when I'm learning or working on a song, to achieve the place where I can work on correct or accurate interpretation.  There's a million and one ways to get it wrong, one way to get it right!  Happy practicing :-)