Thomas J. West Music

With the holidays approaching, most of us get a few days off from busy jobs to spend time with family. Students are off duty from school for an extra weekend this year, most not going back until January 5th. During that break, only the most dedicated music students will even touch their instrument, let alone get some productive practice time in. What happens to your playing skills, if anything, when you take 12 days off?

Quite simply, when you don't practice, you lose your edge. Skills that you had perfected become a little less polished. A piece of music you were working on slips a little in proficiency. The concept of "use it or lose it" is what most of us are familiar yet.

Use It or Lose It? Not Really...

As with any activity involving complex patterns of fine motor skills, the body must go through a training process in order to be able to execute those patterns. Repetition of the same experience must occur hundreds of times, and the more complex the sequence the more repetition is required. The human brain literally "rewires" itself into new neural pathways to perform the task, and the more repetitions taken, the faster the brain can complete the sequence. Eventually, the sequence becomes so well entrained that the brain can perform the sequence "on auto-pilot" without conscious thought being required. For more on the intricacies of this process, see this article.

When that sequence of neurons is not reinforced, the neurons in that pattern remain connected until other activities require them to change connections. With repetition, those neurons form connections that lessen the effect of the original neural pathway. Most of us have heard the phrase, "It's like riding a bike," meaning that you can not ride a bike for years and then pick one up and regain your ability to ride with only a short amount of review. So it is with musical instruments. You never really "lose it" in normal terms, you merely have to reestablish the neural pathways and build them to their previous level.

Ending a Bad Habit

Anyone who has ever learned part of a song incorrectly and then has had to go back and "unlearn" the error can attest to how strongly neuronets are connected once they enter the subconscious "automatic pilot" stage. A simple error in counting a rhythm, when practiced thoroughly, becomes difficult to change because when you audiate it (i.e. hear the rhythm playing in your mind), you hear the practiced rhythm automatically before you hear the correct rhtyhm. It takes conscious focus on performing the correct rhythm before the neuronets supporting the incorrect rhythm atrophy and change.

Undoing any bad habit, musical or otherwise, requires first awareness of the habit, a desire to make a change, and then conscious focus on the opposite behavior in order to deprogram the bad habit. The other part of the process is that a person must stop performing the original bad habit. Some people have the force of will to go "cold turkey" and simply stop performing the bad habit, while most people have to ween themselves off of the habit gradually. Depending upon how strongly entrained the habit is, changing a bad habit can take anywhere between a few days to a month or more. In terms of life-long habits, like smoking, the quitting process really happens in the first thirty to sixty days, and then the person must resist the temptation to return to those old habits for a year or more.

In musical terms, most incorrect playing habits can be changed within a week of practice if that change is an area of focus. In terms of taking the holidays off, one or two practice sessions of focused intent should be sufficient to return a musician's skill to previous levels.

Getting Back Into Top Form

Fourteen time Olympic Gold Medalist swimmer Michael Phelps has been making rounds on the talk show circuit this month promoting his new book. Phelps has been taking time off from his daily training in the pool since Bejing to enjoy his success and deal with the onslaught of public attention his achievements have brought him.

When asked the question "When are you going to get back in the water to begin training again?" He states that he's currently doing about two days a week and that he certainly is out of shape (a statement that makes most people scoff because he still looks great). He stated that at his peak, he was training 365 days a year for 8-10 hours a day, and if he missed a day, it would take him two days to return to the performance level he had the day before the break.

When Phelps returns to full-time training, he will have had about a four month break. He stated that it will take him at least six months if not a year of daily work to even approach the abilities he demonstrated at the Olympics. Keep in mind, however, that Michael is working at a level that surpasses all humans that have come before him. His experiences with his training regimen are a fascinating look into how the human body works when asked to perform complex actions such as competitive swimming. His experience is directly comparable to the regimen followed by the world's top concert musicians.

The Good News

The good news is that it won't take much for music students to regain their level of proficiency that they had before the holiday break. Most public school districts have their winter concerts shortly before the holiday break so that they have finished a preparation period and do not start a new sequence of music learning and training until after the break. In the case of my school, we have our winter concert on January 15th, so I have encouraged my students to practice at least twice during the break so that the effect of skill atrophy has less of an impact when we return and put the finishing touches on our concert offerings.

Happy Holidays to everyone - may you receive a shiny new musical instrument as a gift!