Woodshedding: How Did You Spend Your 10,000 Hours?

[JeffD]

Re.the OP - 10,000 hours is such an arbitrary figure & i'll still put my argument forth,that 10,000 hours won't make someone,who, without having a basic ability, into a good player,or even a mediocre one.
Those of us who have the ability are fortunate, & hopefully we realise it. As long as my rear end points South,i'll never be a John Reischman, Herschel Sizemore or Alan Bibey,but it won't stop me trying - only 3,500 hours to go, & i'll be breathing down their necks - from a distance !!, :

But thats not the assertion. Its the other way round, not that 10,000 hours will guarantee anything, but that nobody "makes it" without 10,000. Necessary, but not sufficient.

[swinginmandolins]

I think it boils down to how much you love to play. It's not a matter of putting in the hours. If it's something you enjoy and want to do you will put in the hours and they will be easy to do. Hendrix was great, but didn't he sleep with his guitar from falling asleep playing? I would guess that Thile still spends most of his day with instrument in hand, even though he is already at a level most of us only dream of reaching.

[swampy]

I second the comment on quality over quantity. I probably have more than 10,000 hours in. What does that make me... someone extremely proficient (maybe even at an elite level) at noodling in G or A. I mean I can noodle with the best of them. Seriously, I lot of time has been spent on this aspect of my playing, and the only real benefit seems to be finger dexterity. I should have focused more!

[Mike Romkey]

Good old Malcolm sure knows how to sell books! I've read them all. He's a genius at seeing how things work. If you like him, check out Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan."

I agree with the notions above that it really is more than just time. Gladwell's common-sense observation is both right and wrong. Putting in the time does matter, but if you don't have the talent (I won't even try to define what that is) you're not going to get the optimal result. Practicing 8 hours a day until you rack up 10,000 will not turn you into Chris Thile.

I also agree that putting in too much practice can be physically dangerous. I never believed this until in middle aged I developed a case of golfer's elbow(s) practicing closed-position scales too aggressively. The practice time needs to be there, but it is possible to overdo it.

Seems the central question, which you've re-asked, is how best to practice. I agree that is critical if you want improve and not just learn to play "Fisher's Hornpipe" or Bach like a demon. I'm curious what Maestro McGann has to say about this. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with what an individual is trying to accomplish, and whether one has one, two, three or more hours a day to devote to study. I know, through personal experience, it is possible to spend lots of time practicing and get little return, and shorter structured ways to study and make obvious progress.

[Mike Romkey]

Oh ... the other thing I wanted to comment on was the hockey analogy. My kid played a lot of club soccer as a youth. He was on a good traveling team, and I'm sure that experience made it a lot easier to make the high school team. Went it came time to go to college, he thought a lot about finding a school where he could keep playing soccer. One of the things he discovered, here in the Midwest, is that he and his high school teammates were at something of a disadvantage compared to kids from the Chicago suburbs. The Chicago kids had longer seasons, played indoors all winter, went to more tournaments -- they just had so many more "touches on the ball" by the time they graduated from high school that it was tough to compete with them. The kids who were really gifted athletes of course (the Thile analogy) played on. The rest had put in lots of practice and playing time, but weren't at the same level.

What does this have to do with mandolin playing? Well, if you live somewhere that doesn't have many or any bluegrass bands and never even see a mandolin till you go away to college, you're not going to be starting at the same place as a guy who grew up in Lexington. If you want to play Irish and you live in Boston, you're going to be ahead of the game compared with somebody who lives in Des Moines. Beyond practicing, being exposed (and seeking out exposure) to the music, and playing it with other musicians, matters along with practicing. If you play bluegrass and live in Sweden, this will no doubt prove to be more of a challenge than if you live in Tennessee. (g) That's why, if your kid takes violin lessons, the teacher tries to get them to participate in the school orchestra, and to play recitals. Spending 45 minutes a night with the metronome is not an end in itself.

[mandroid]

Aging

[Jim Bevan]

Yes, the snowball effect certainly exists: better players get better gigs, which motivates them to practise more ('cuz "tonight's gig is gonna be great, and if I practise a lot today, it'll be lots of fun too!"), which gets them even better gigs, which gives them more motivation...

I hire the musicians for my gig, and I love it when I hear that "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me now! It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how!" (Dr. Seuss) confidence that comes from serious woodshedding. There's a real snowball effect going on -- they love to play, so they love to practise, so they love to play...

[SincereCorgi]

Sorry folks- I think I might have derailed this one early, because John's question is more to do with practice schedule than philosophy.

The most I've ever done was five hours a day on clarinet (I don't know if I ever got to 10,000). It worked out to an hour and a half on general technique (i.e. scales, finger exercises) and the rest split between material I needed to have ready for symphony or chamber music or work toward concerto competition stuff. I find it surprising that people can do eight hours of personal practice a day. Brass instruments are simply too taxing to play for that long (my trombonist friend Henry used to schedule two brief sessions in the middle of his sleep schedule at night to get around this) and I think that most people who try to play mandolin for 8 hours a day to become Chris Thile are going to blow up their left hand.

[JonZ]

A lot of people bring up Chris Thiele as an example of a great player who has an enormous amount of practice under his belt. I know that he was home-schooled, and thus better positioned to explore his passion. Gabe Witcher, the fiddle player with Thiele, in the Punch Brothers, grew up as a member of The Witcher Brothers, so he got a lot of professional experience early on. I don’t know about his schooling.

I happened to grow up in a town that had a great band program. There was a great feeder system from grade school through high school. We were close enough to LA that the most motivated kids could get lessons from professional musicians. The best of the high school students played in various honor bands, got accepted to music schools, etc. I know of two who put in their 10,000 while they had gigs on cruise ships. One went on to play saxophone in Prince’s band. The other was a drummer and things never really took off. Even if you are playing at an elite level, many factors come into play to make it a career--including luck.

In regard to my own kids, I wanted them to be musical, but not necessarily musicians. They had fiddle lessons from early on, but have never had to practice more than a half an hour a day. Interestingly, the oldest (12) has decided to start playing mandolin as well, and it is the first thing that he has really latched onto as his own. It will be interesting to see how many hours he decides to put in. I am a little jealous of how quickly he is picking it up.

[M.Marmot]

This is a subject that i have found myself thinking about more than once...

I think it was Mr Jethro Burns, though i may be wrong in this, who said that theres nothing worse than playing after a child prodigy, that nothing you do will really cut the mustard after (though, i like Ricky Skaggs anecdote of Bill Monroe inviting him up to play as a youngster, giving him his turn, and then promptly blowing him out of the water with a blistering rendition of one of Monroe's standards).

On that note, i was thinking of certain child prodigies and how folks always bring their age into the discussion when lauding their playing. Granted, that it is unusual for a young person to display virtuous skill at a craft and as such it is a wonder, but, i always keep it in mind that though young some of these kids have been playing their chosen instruments for ten years-ish and a lot of the time have been practicing like the divil for hours a day... frankly i figured that after ten years of playing and practice if you could not, at least, rattle out a tune at speed, if thats your thing, then you may as well give up.

The wonder for me was not how good they were, but, more so, how these kids had the concentration and determination to keep their practice regimes going despite the allure and distractions that the world offers children. I only hope that in the most cases the reason they could, as was given testament above, was because it was fun... because we all know if a child, or an adult for that matter, is enjoying themselves they will gladly play all day.

I do hold the opinion though, and its only an opinion, that a young player can be a virtuous talent technically but its very seldom coupled with an understanding of the emotional possibility of the material they are charged with playing. For this i believe that older players, even those with less skill, bring something to the table, something that cannot be imitated...

As for the how is the practice structured question...

Well, i have a very disorganised structure, an un-structure, which basically revolves around whatever project is currently taking my fancy. In the past this had a lot to do with learning to play the mandolin and sing at the same time... so practice moved through different songsa and materials. The reason for this is that i had a bi-weekly session and i loved the challenge of finding new material to work on. Now i am bereft of session i find that i have more time to adress all the bad techniques that i have been fostering over the years, this involves playing more tunes than previously i would have been used to.

In general, i think this is how most people approach their practice... simply, they organise themselves to meet their current challenges. Maybe there is someone out there who has taken the figure of 10,000 hours (not to be flogging that number but it is a handy gambit) and has distinctly organised this or other immense timescales into blocks and sequences, but i figure most will be content to work through the basics, scales, arpeggios, practice a tune or song and then some involved noodling as the concentration wanes.

I'd have to add as well, in tandem with a previous post about thinking about playing, that i find that actively listening to music also is a form of practice as it must keep the brain jumping through musical hoops and giving further inspiration...

and i must say that this is a very enjoyabl thread to read through, thanks to all the contributers

[Pete Martin]

Reading through Johns post, my experience was similar to his.

I used to work the graveyard shift in a self serve gas station so I could practice all night and still survive. A friend and I also rented a practice room in a YMCA. I would practice in the morning and he would practice at night. After getting off work, I would go there and practice until I fell asleep. I would then go home, sleep, get up and usually go to band practice or jam with friends until I had to go to work. I used to keep track of how much I practiced and considered it a bad week when I got under 70 hours. Many weeks it was upwards of 90.

My routine as I remember:

1st hour, right hand practice with a metronome, mostly a string crossing exercise where I would play 2 notes on a lower string and one note on a higher one. Start very slow, eventually getting 16th notes up to around 168 bpm.

2nd hour, left hand major and minor scales and arpeggios, all keys in positions 1 through 6.

Next couple of hours play along with recordings, starting with the album Sam Bush Alan Munde Together Again. I had transcribed and learned all Sam’s fiddle and mandolin breaks and much of his comping. I would play the solos with him. After that it was what ever tapes I had brought along. Lots of Newgrass Revival, Hot Rise, Tony Rice.

The rest of the time was learning new pieces, practicing band material, general improvising, etc. I did all my transcribing at home where I had access to a two speed recorder in case I needed to slow something down. Most of my transcribing was from Sam (my big hero for years), Benny Thomasson and Mark O’Connor for the Texas fiddle tunes and Kenny Baker. In those years I learned several hundred Bush solos, a couple hundred from Benny and lots of Mark and Baker.

It is amazing how much you can learn in two or three years of this kind of work, especially all that transcribing. I did this for about 5 years.

[Ken_P]

I think there are a few other aspects that tend to get overlooked with the whole "10,000 hours" question. First, I suspect that age is very much a factor. Time spent learning and practicing as a young child or teenager is likely to be much more productive than similar time spent later in life. Learning a new skill, in general, is much easier for a younger person, so I have to assume music is similar. Secondly, I think the overall time span is important as well. I may well accumulate 10,000+ hours of playing over the next 30 years (roughly an hour a day), but that won't all of a sudden make me an elite player at the end of it. Someone who accumulates all that time over 10 years probably stands a much better chance of reaching that level than I do. This also ties into the notion that in order to reach that level you basically have to devote your life to it early on. If you love playing so much that you can't help but spend 8 hours a day with an instrument in hand, there's a good chance you're on your way to becoming an exceptional player.

[lonestar_shawn]

Hi, I've been reading this board for a while but this is my first post. Virtuoso rock guitarist Steve Vai is famous for practicing a ton, and back in the 90s he wrote an article for Guitar World magazine about how he practiced (practised?) 10 hours a day. The article broke this down into a bunch of different exercises, which you can find the tab for with a Google search. This blog entry gives an overview of the 10 hours:

10 hour guitar workout

Hour 1: Finger exercises
Hour 2: Scales
Hour 3: Chords
Hour 4: Ear Training
Hour 5: Reading Music
Hour 6: Writing Music
Hour 7: Music Theory
Hours 8-10: Jamming

[John McGann]

John McGann--

Thank you for your reply.

Did you try to structure your days, or did you just work on whatever came to mind?

Jon, thanks for asking. I guess I would have the goal that everyone has, "getting better" in mind. At different times, that would mean different things, but one constant would be working with the metronome, at a variety of speeds. My first really rude awakening was discovering that just because I could play along with records and jam with people didn't mean I had good time.

As far as structure, I guess in many ways I'm less of a Type A personality and more Type Bb That said, I am of Irish and Italian heritage, which means that I'm stubborn, and I'm stubborn


When I played in a bluegrass band for the first time, I really focused on getting the tunes we played in the group together...but the next day I might sideline to learn a Django solo or something. In the early days I thought nothing of taking WEEKS to learn a solo, before the days of slow downers and such. I'm a bit all over the map, and tend to go with it, but I do tend to focus hard on whatever it is I'm doing at that moment.

The main thing I can say is that I never really felt I was "practicing" in a formal way, involving things like watching the clock and doling out "12 minutes to this and 8 minutes to that"... to me it's "playing", and I'd work on something until I got it where I wanted it...I mean, we don't call it 'working music', even when we are working hard at it. Even playing scales and arpeggios and technical stuff can (and should) be done in the most musical, soulful way possible (and it IS possible). So...

Was it always enjoyable?

(sigh) Dealing with the inevitable frustration and plateaus is not always enjoyable, exactly; but you know, in order to get better at stuff, you have to put up with being less than good at it for a little bit, and keep a sense of humor about it (actually, the sense of humor is of massive importance always, for me). I do a little vicarious living through my students- when they talk about these frustrations, they are talkin' my language

When you develop a certain amount of reasonably good tone/technique/musicality, it really does become a lot more fun to practice/play. I still get a little impatient when things don't come as quickly as I want them to, but there is a certain amount of "earning it" you just have to do- something that connects us to hundreds of years of musicianship, pre-consumer culture.

And you can't get the tabs for it!

Working at getting better results in getting better, and when you can see/feel/hear progress, that's very enjoyable.

[JonZ]

Thanks again.

By the way, my son read your article describing how your picking hand should move like the arm on a record player... He wants to know what a record player looks like.

[barney 59]

Practicing countless hours of course makes us better and can result in being a competent player but it doesn't necessarily mean that you will be talented. I heard Kathrine Hepburn state--" I don't know what I have, but I have it! When I was a kid every house in the neighborhood had a least one kid ( some had 12) and I was lucky in that around me kids were playing music. We started forming little bands when I was maybe 11 or 12, which maybe my Mom would think was late as she was performing on stage with her sister by the time she was 10. There was a kid down the street, our drummer, who was maybe a little a year younger than me that was already being dragged to jazz clubs as a guest performer and had appeared on Mr. Rogers playing with Joe Negre and Johnny Costas. He had it but I knew his Mom and I'd bet he had his 10,000 hours by the time he was 5 . As I got older I found myself playing with bands outside the neighborhood,this was 1960's rock and roll and I was also venturing into some solo folk stuff at coffee houses. I have always had a hard time being on stage and am somewhat envious of those that don't. In the time I was doing that there were always certain people that regardless of how much work they had done they just could do it. Kids that would morph from just being a dumb kid like the rest of us,in the very beginning of their learning experience, and just by the fact that they walked onto a stage had everyone's attention.The rest of us were suddenly " the guys in the band". They had an obvious born talent,great ideas came to them very easily and they had an innate ability to convey those ideas both to the other players and then to an audience. We were very young and most of us hadn't put much work into this but from time to time you would stumble onto some kid that could just do that. I don't know what they had,but they had it. I've known people that worked really hard and learned how to do this. There was a really shy kid that was a keyboardist in a band I was in that just hid in the corner and played--- pretty well, actually,but he obviously was uncomfortable performing. He went on and studied and was at Berklee for a time. Some years later I saw him fronting a band, singing and now playing guitar --woman were throwing underwear onto the stage! Talent can be obviously learned but maybe not by all of us no matter how hard we work. The idea that the older kid gets ahead would work if we were all born equal but some kids can just run faster and jump higher. When it comes to music some people have better ears, better hands or sharper minds, some have all three and stage presence as well.

[Pete Hicks]

Practice makes perfect. Imperfect practice makes perfect imperfection. I believe that short but frequent practice sessions work the best. Practice for 5-10 minutes, take a break, and come back to it. I try to pay attention to the ergonomics of my playing, staying relaxed and comfortable. There is always one hard passage in any new tune I learn, so I isolate the difficult part and practice it alone. Then I attempt to insert it into the tune at tempo.
Make sure that the basics are there, pick grip, tempo, striking string pairs as if they were one string and right arm position. I've been playing for 35 years and gig all the time, but I still need to practice to keep my chops up. I don't think there is a magic number of hours.

[JeffD]

Timing is important for another reason. In the discussion on the Sierra Hull DVD they talk about putting in the hours while you are young and your left hand is still growing. It grows into the work it is being made to do, and the result is that it gets easier and easier, and after one is grown the hand is optimized for duty. Seems that anyone who starts onthe instrument after they are more or less fully grown has a much harder time getting the hand to be automatic at its tasks, and therefore a harder time becoming a virtuoso.

[JonZ]

Yeah, I sure noticed the pinky thing when my son picked up the mandolin. Since he had been working it on the violin since he was three, it was automatically part of the mix in his mandolin playing.

[catmandu2]

In regard to my own kids, I wanted them to be musical, but not necessarily musicians. They had fiddle lessons from early on, but have never had to practice more than a half an hour a day. Interestingly, the oldest (12) has decided to start playing mandolin as well, and it is the first thing that he has really latched onto as his own. It will be interesting to see how many hours he decides to put in. I am a little jealous of how quickly he is picking it up.

Right--lucky kids. IMO, start a kid early on violin, particularly. In addition to enabling an easier time adpating to its unique ergonomic and technical challenges, its "intimate" nature is wonderful for inducing ear playing and ear training, which to me is as important as the instrument. I didn't come to fiddle playing myself until I was an adult. Still, once one makes peace with the bow, it's still a "little guitar" . IME, starting early on guitar enabled some degree of facility and comfort on all the strings.

[JonZ]

I agree. The intonation challenges of learning fiddle develop a good ear for singing, and the bowing challenges a general sensitivity to good tone. Basically starting on fiddle makes playing other stringed instruments seem easy.

Plus they make those cute little 1/16 size instruments.

[catmandu2]

Right...once a person learns how to make "music" (as opposed to fire, say) by rubbing a stick in perpendicular fashion, the playing mechanics of other instruments can seem a relief (one reason I think mandolin is often popular with fiddlers and guitarists...was for me anyway).

And there's something about holding such a vivacious instrument under your chin that is conducive to an intimacy with music, which I think has other general benefits. (Verily, it may take 10,000 hours just to develop enough technique to be able to stand yourself.) But the fiddle is addicting, I've found, like no other. Like staring at your navel--it's captivating enough to occupy one for some 10,000 hours..