Effective Practicing
You know the old joke right?
A tourist asks a busker in New York how to get to Carnegie Hall.? The busker replies: Practice, man.? Practice.
Everyone knows that to get better you need to practice more.? But what a lot of people think of as practice isn’t the most effective way to improve at the bass.? Since the early 90s there has been plenty of research into the acquisition of expertise.? (The ‘acquisition of expertise’ is geek speak for getting better 😉 )
This has led to the identification of the type of practice that’s needed for effective practice: that type of practice is called deliberate practice.? The concept of deliberate practice was popularized in a best selling book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers – if you’ve heard of the ‘10,000 Hour Rule’ (that states it takes 10,000 hours to get to mastery) then this meme was something that got a lot of mainstream attention due to this book.
But this 10,000 Hour rule is often misquoted – in the study that it came from the conclusion isn’t that it takes 10,000 Hours of practice to become world class but that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a virtuoso.
That’s a subtle but totally different proposition to most people’s interpretation.? And there aren’t many folks out there who understand this distinction and teach about it.
Here at How To Play Bass though we do – and we’ve got you covered!
Here’s links to some articles that will help you understand effective practice at a deeper level so you can maximise the effectiveness of your practicing:
How To Play Bass In 50 Songs (Rock)
How To Play Bass In 50 Songs (Soul And Funk)
How To Effectively Learn Songs And Riffs Using Slow Down Methods
Why Keyboard Players Have Got The Best Ears
How Bass Players Can Improve Their Hearing – By Modelling How Keyboard Players Learn
Why Learning Songs Makes More Sense Than Rote Practicing Of Scales
How To Avoid The Plateau And Continually Improve In Your Bass Playing
