How to get to Carnegie Hall

I once had a conversation with my guitar teacher about practicing. It went something like this:

Teacher: “How much do you practice?”

Me: “About 45 minutes a day.”

Teacher: “Tell me what you do on a typical day.”

Me: “I warm-up by playing some songs that I know well. Then I work on the ones I’m learning, slow at first, then faster as I learn them. Then I play songs for 20 minutes or so.”

Teacher: “Do you play scales?”

Me: “No, I hate to play scales.”

Teacher: “Do you use a metronome, especially when you’re slowing down the songs?”

Me: “No, I hate that.”

Teacher: “Do you find the parts that are difficult for you, and work on them in isolation?”

Me: “Not very often.”

Teacher: “For the most part, you’re not practicing. You’re just noodling.”

Since then, I’ve read about a technique called deliberate practice. You can find out more about it here. If you are interested in the psychological underpinnings of this concept, you can find a seminal paper here.

One of the keys is what the author of the first-linked web site calls the problem-solving model. I’ll quote the key elements from the web site, but I suggest you read all the material if you’re serious about this.

1. Define the problem. (What result did I just get? What do I want this note/phrase to sound like instead?)
2. Analyze the problem. (What is causing it to sound like this?)
3. Identify potential solutions. (What can I tweak to make it sound more like I want?)
4. Test the potential solutions and select the most effective one. (What tweaks seem to work best?)
5. Implement the best solution. (Reinforce these tweaks to make the changes permanent.)
6. Monitor implementation. (Do these changes continue to produce the results I’m looking for?

The author is talking about music performance, but there are lessons here for photographers.

I never did practice the guitar that way, preferring to noodle my way along and attaining a skill level distantly approaching mediocre before stopping altogether because of arthritis. But I realize that this is an approximation to the process that I arrived at independently and follow when making art. I hated doing it while playing music, but I love doing it while doing photography. Funny how that works.