What's the key to effective music practice? If someone could solve that problem there'd be a lot of thankful students, teachers and parents out there.
For some students it's the bane of their lives. They love music, they love playing their instruments, but practice just seems like drudgery. There's panic practice (cramming in five minutes before the lesson), guilty practice (because you're scared of getting told off) and laborious practice (where you plug away for ages and don't feel like it's going anywhere).
One of our Music Manifesto signatories, Caryn Moberly, has been turning her mind to this very problem, but with a new slant. Caryn is studying for an MA in furniture design, and has been looking at practical ways of increasing a child's enjoyment in music at home. We'd love to hear your views and ideas on the subject, and you can click here to read Caryn's research summary and respond with your answers on our forum.
To get the conversation going, we spoke to Nick Keyworth, senior examiner at Trinity Guildhall, to find out his top practice tips and ask what we could be doing better.
"First of all there's a question I'd pose which is slightly provocative," says Nick. "Is practice any use? Is practice really necessary?
"I think so often people go through the motions of practising, the motions of playing through pieces without actually learning how to play them any better. Just mechanically going over and over the same thing doesn't necessarily mean you can play it any better at the end of it. And it can be intensely boring."
Provocative indeed, but Nick points out that there needs to be a sense of purpose: what do you want to achieve through practice? To be a better technician you need to do exercises but that's not very appealing to a lot of pupils.
Nick's best recommendation is for students to start playing with other people. "It's the solitude of practice that can be soul destroying," he says. "As soon as I started messing about with others, whether that was more formally playing in an orchestra, or getting together with friends and jamming and exploring what I could do with an instrument, then I started to become really engaged with playing it."
In other words, guilt isn't a good enough motivator. You have to do it because you want to. But there are ways of making practice more appealing. "I really like the suggestion of having the instrument open and set up and ready to play," says Nick. "Just pick it up and go. I learnt violin and piano and I practised the piano much more because all I had to do was sit down and play."
Having a dedicated place to practise and to keep your instrument is a good idea, as long as it's safe from the prying fingers of siblings. And there are all sorts of gadgets on the market to help out with things like tuning.
"There's a new violin tuning peg with a gearing mechanism built in, so you turn it lots and lots to make a slight change, that's brilliant. I think that teachers can be a bit precious about tuning string instruments, we don't let them tune the instruments for years sometimes - I don't know why we do that. So any mechanical aids to make that simpler are good."
Using a backing track is one way of livening up practice for solo instruments but it provokes mixed feelings among the music fraternity, especially recordings that slow down the music to help you learn it. "There are two ways of learning a piece," says Nick. "One is that you need to slow it down to learn the notes and get the accuracy of pitch, but the other way is to capture the spirit of the music, from the moment you start to play it. It's very difficult to add on the musicality at the last minute."
Other aspects to note are good posture - "a lot of kids practice in their bedrooms, with the music on the bed, and there's all sorts of postural problems and therefore technical problems that arise" - and parental involvement.
"I'm not sure all children want their parents to sit with them when they're practising. I just wanted to do it by myself and then show it to my parents. It would be useful if parents had some guidelines from teachers about how they can interact in a positive way, and not try to be the teacher, not try to spot mistakes, but be supportive. Sometimes the parents have more to learn than the students!"
What do you think? Any great tips to pass on? Click here to download Caryn Moberly's research summary and give us your thoughts in the forum.