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Double Bass Introducing variety in your practice routine

Andy Mopley

Andy Mopley

Sep 24, 2011
1,335
318
#1
I think it is a generally accepted notion that the brain grows more when you learn something new, and less when you practice things you already know. In light of this, should a practice routine be made up of (arbitrarily) 50% of NEW things and 50% of repeating known things? Clearly it depends on player ability, technical needs and what have you, but a % of NEW should be incorporated, nevertheless? Where NEW may be reading a new piece, practicing a different bow pattern, different tempo / dynamics and so on.

Regards to all
 
#2
50% of NEW things and 50% of repeating known things seems pretty aggressive.

Perhaps it depends upon why you are practicing. For example if I am learning new performance material, I will usually read through everything to identify problem areas, and then start to focus repeatedly on the challenging passages. I tend to rotate through them instead of slogging on the same passage over and over until it's right. I feel that if I stay on the some passage, I tend to develop mental blocks that restricts progress. If I play a passage until I start to get a little frustrated and then set it aside to work on something new, I seem to be able to get through a lot more material without getting locked up. Later when I come back to a passage, I often find that I am able to play it a bit faster than when I put it down. Over a few rotations, hopefully I can get it up to speed.
 
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#6
Clark Dark said:
are you saying that alexa is recording my family's conversations and storing them? How do I access them?
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The recordings should be in your Amazon account. "Your Amazon Drive" or something of the kind - I forget where, sorry, because it was a couple of months ago, and I don't use Amazon much myself. Even the office manager found them by accident while looking for something else in the account.

The problem she found was that, while it's easy for the device to pick out somebody saying "Alexa!" it's less easy for it to figure out when the person calling it has stopped speaking when there are several conversations going on at once, so it tends to record a lot more than you might expect or intend.
When some of those recordings are made on a Friday night while people are unwinding after work with alcohol, those recordings can get progressively less civilised. She refused to elaborate, but we got the idea.

There are rumours of worse from those devices, as there will be, but that's what I actually have evidence for.

Also, the only practical way for the device to perform that kind of voice recognition is to listen continually, store the last n seconds in memory, and every second or so try to recognise a key phrase. That's just on the purely technical basis of how, ignoring any ethical considerations - those come in when you decide what to do with the stream of audio you're recording into memory.

Now, to to look at it from the perspective of the NSA/GCHQ/AIVD/SIS/whoever - why on Earth would you not be all over this, and doing whatever you can with this wonderful network of eavesdroppers? With the best of intentions, I'm sure, and this part is pure speculation, but something something paving stones...
IT security has been part of my professional life for a couple of decades now. I can't not seek out how things could go wrong and be misused, so please excuse any overtones of paranoia.
 
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#7
equill said:
...please excuse any overtones of paranoia.
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I am totally paranoid about this stuff. My only social media presence is Talkbass and I don't carry a Smartphone. I am sure "they" still know a lot about me due to cookies on my computer and what I watch on YouTube. Personally I think it's huge invasion of privacy and extremely unethical that people can monetize my personal information and use the data to perform a shockingly accurate psychological profile.

The only way to avoid what I consider "this abuse" is to stop using and turn off your cell phones, computers, and other networked devices. Actually I don't think that totally stops it, but it does mitigate some of the most egregious offenses. Unfortunately once your junk is in the Ether, there is no pulling it back.

I understand that big data drives prices down, but there really doesn't seem to be much if any controls on how data is collected, used, or abused. It's supposed to be anonymous and harmless, but let's be honest, if you give the fox a key to the hen house, he/she will have a nice feast. It makes me fearful for the future.
 
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#8
Back on topic, I think the most important aspect of practice is that it be mindful and focused. If the goal is to build new or better insulated neural pathways, then the state of mind when practicing is really important. One of the reasons that learning something "new" or reading something for the first time seems to stand apart from practicing something we have practiced before is that when approaching material for the first time we tend to give it our full attention; we do this because we have to in order to have any chance of executing it correctly. We don't multitask or get distracted, we just focus our entire mind on the new bits of information we are trying to process.

But material that we are trying to work up and polish to a higher level of technical or expressive proficiency can also be practiced in the same state of mind, and I would argue that it should be practiced this way if we want to make the best use of our time and mental resources. I've been working on daily calibration exercises 6 days a week for a little over 2 years now, and have radically changed the way the process flows over the past 6 months with the above in mind. The shift has been to taking on less new material in each session, but polishing it to a higher level; so rather than playing 3 minutes per key for 36 minutes (12 keys), it has now become 6 minutes per key for 24 minutes per day, then cycling through next four keys the next day. The 12 minute reduction in time per day is because the practice is much more focused and intense with specific goals, and a small break is needed after this "warmup".

In general, the most efficient practice routine of late has been:
Calibration warmup - 24 minutes
(short mental break, maybe 5 minutes)

New rep for upcoming performances - 30-60 minutes
(usually spot work at slow tempos leading to integration of these spots into the greater whole and gradually increasing the tempo)

If time, then add sight reading or 15 minutes of electric bass practice.

But for me, the important thing for growth is not the amount of time, but the state of mind during the time spent.
 
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#10
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#11
Fredrik E. Nilsen said:
Science says repetition, but always with variation.

Why You're Not Making Progress On Your Instrument... and How To Fix It
Click to expand...

I definitely use interleaved practice when I am learning new repertoire. This is basically what I described in post #2.

If I just work on one passage for an extended time I tend to plateau, and I may even lose speed and facility as I begin to get frustrated.

If I put all of the passages I need to work on in a rotation, my facility will ebb and flow. Each time a passage comes up on the rotation I have to slow down and work it back up, but by the time I am ready to move on it is typically a bit faster and more fluid than the previous time through the rotation.

Any passage I have truly mastered can be taken out of the rotation. So I might start a session cycling through 10-12 passages and end with only 3-4.
 

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