I built a web app! It’s meant to help with music practice. Very useful for people like me who have a tendency to just play through the piece from A to Z because that seems the most fun thing to do. It’s not very efficient nor effective though.
The idea came from this video by dr. Molly Gebrian, about random practice. Molly is a professional violist with a background in neuroscience and she’s really good at explaining at how to practice music so that your brain learns most effectively. This is the second video in a series of 5, and all of them are highly recommended, but this one in particular stood out to me.
TL;DR: The idea is that practicing pieces of music in random order prepares you much better for a performance than practicing the same piece over and over, or just playing things in the same order each time. Random practice trains your brain to be able to play any (part of a) piece unprepared, which simulates a performance, where you have to play the piece correctly at once, out of nowhere, with no opportunity to go through it several times before playing it for the audience.
I tried to apply this and… it works! It really does.
There are many different ways you can implement this, as she explains in the video, but the method I’ve used most so far (and that inspired the app) is as follows:
- Pick some sections (about 6-10) of a piece you’re learning and number them (could be certain difficult passages or just line numbers on a single page for example). Just write the numbers in the sheet music (if you’re not a tablet user, write with a pencil so you can erase, or use small numbered sticky notes).
- Tell the app how many sections you have. After pressing start, the app will tell you which section to practice, and keep track of how long you’ve been practicing it.
- Keep playing the designated section until you feel you’ve made enough progress.
- Press “next” and the app will tell you which section is next, until you’ve cycled through all of them.
If you have time, you can ask the app to include each section multiple times. It’s intended for use on a phone or tablet and the screen should stay on while you’re in a practice session.
Of course this is not the only way you can use it. Use it in any way you like, whatever works for you.
I also added a metronome, mainly because studying with a metronome helps me slow down. Without a metronome I tend to play faster than I should. The beat keeps me in check. However, there are many other ways you can use a metronome. For inspiration, see Molly Gebrian’s third video in the series, or this video by Douglas Lora.
Anyway, try the app and let me know what you think! And please forgive me for my undoubtedly horrendous code, this is my first experiment in Javascript and it’s been a steep learning curve. I’ll probably update it regularly to add new features (and improve the code).