PracticeMind: The Complete Practice Model

Authors Hans Jørgen Jensen and Oleksander Mycyk

In one sense, we live in a golden age of practice.  On social media top soloists regularly share practice tips, or even just snippets of their practice, on a daily basis.  With a few taps on our phone, we can get a great tip on vibrato, bow control, or just about any other topic related to technique or practice from the best players in the world — that’s incredible!

While frequently inspiring, this piecemeal instruction can also be confusing: we can feast on this “tip buffet” as often as we want, but without an overarching framework to process and organize this information, these tips become discrete bits of random instruction with nothing pulling them together.  That’s in part because constructing a comprehensive structure for thinking about practice is HARD, requiring years of teaching experience, careful thought, research and a mind for organization.  

PracticeMind, by Hans Jørgen Jensen and Olexsander Mycyk, tackles this incredibly difficult task and succeeds admirably.  Jensen is a Professor of Cello at both Northwestern University and The Glenn Gould School, and Mycyk is a cellist in the Toronto Symphony who earned his doctorate under Jensen. Jensen has taught scores of cellists competing in top international competitions and high-level orchestral auditions, and has decades of experience in the studio to backup his observations on practice.

While only around 200 pages, the book is DENSE! There is useful information spanning all topics on practice, from large scale strategies on preparing for competitions or auditions, to advice on practice planning at both large and small scales, tips for how to break down passagework, and just about everything in between. 

Indeed, shortly after I started reading PracticeMind, I realized this was not a book I was going to speed through, but one I needed to take in slowly so I could digest and process everything fully. I stopped frequently to take notes, and by the end I had a Google Doc that ran about 32 pages long (yes, I’m a nerd for this stuff!).

There are excellent books dissecting every technical problem under the sun, and great books on the mental skills necessary for performance, but there are few that approach a comprehensive framework for practice. Burton Kaplan’s seminal “Practicing for Artistic Success,” (PAS) is the closest book I can compare to PracticeMind.

Kaplan's book also reflects decades of work with musicians, and is a well-organized approach to practice with intuitive and clear solutions to most practice challenges. More importantly, PAS is a framework for HOW TO THINK about practice, a philosophy of practice that can be applied globally and locally over a lifetime.

PracticeMind represents another complete philosophy of practice, but what sets PracticeMind apart is Jensen and Mycyk's thorough incorporation of research on deliberate practice into their framework.  The research on deliberate practice, and its application to musical practice, has come a long way since PAS, and as such PracticeMind represents a great leap forward in high-level thinking about what makes for effective musical practice.

The book is divided into 4 large sections: The Practice Mind, The Plan, Implement and Evaluate.   I'll sketch out the individual sections below and highlight my favorite chapters along the way.

Part 1: The Practice Mind

This is the densest section, going deep into the mental and psychological challenges of practice. It explores various theories of learning, and how understanding these models can help us learn faster and more effectively.

Chapters in this section explore how to develop and maintain motivation in ourselves and our students, how to deal with the various challenges of practice (impatience, anyone?) and explore the joys of practice (wait, practicing can be joyful??).

I particularly enjoyed Chapter 5: The Musician's Mindset. In this chapter the authors describe five specific mindsets: Practice, Competition, Orchestra Audition, Performer and Musical Artist.

The Competition and Orchestra Audition mindsets offer honest advice about the stark and often demoralizing realities of these environments, with good suggestions for how to deal with their challenges.  For the Competition mindset, rather than focus on winning (which statistically is unlikely!), the authors recommend focusing on progress that can be made by preparing a large amount of repertoire to a high level. They also advise sticking around after you have finished playing (or been eliminated) to listen as objectively as possible to the other competitors to see what you can learn from their playing.  For the Orchestra Audition mindset, suffice it to say the authors don't pull any punches about the realities of the orchestra audition landscape, and give useful advice, like finding a group of supportive musicians, for staying motivated over what can be a long and ardous process.

I also appreciated the comparison of the 50/50 Practice Mind to the 90/10 Performer’s Mind.  In this model, the first number in the fraction represents the amount of self-awareness, or analysis of what’s happening in the moment, that the player should have, and the second number represents how much they should “let go,” or play by instinct.  The authors recommend gradually reducing this self-awareness as we learn a piece, making the performance increasingly automatic over time.   

As someone who has struggled with trusting myself in performance, I loved the idea of letting go gradually! The usual advice I’ve received in this department was essentially “just let go!,” as if this were a switch I could toggle on and off. But that advice has rarely worked for me outside of a lesson/masterclass; letting go by degrees seems a more practical long term strategy for building trust in your own playing!

Part 2: The Plan

This is the strategies section, exploring topics like goal-setting on different scales and longer term practice planning.

Chapter 11 - Bringing Novelty into Your Practice has a number of creative ways to approach passagework. I particularly enjoyed the ideas in "A Creative Way to Deal with a Lot of Repertory."

Using some of the advice in this section, I digitally clipped the hardest spots in the first two pages of the Paganini Sonata, then cut and pasted all of those spots into one document. For the next two weeks I dedicated 30 minutes of my daily practice sessions to this hit list, covering three or four of the spots per day. Not only did this ensure focus on the most challenging parts of the piece, but by cycling through them over a longer time period it ensured I approached them with a fresh perspective in each session.

Part 3: Implement

This is the skills section, with chapters on everything from score study to mental practice and visualization to how to practice with a metronome.  It is the most string-specific section of the book, with chapters on Octaves and Sound Production.

I particularly enjoyed Chapter 15: Going Outside Your Comfort Zone.  The authors suggestions in this vein include varying the material that you practice (don't just practice what you like to do!) and being mindful about the intensity of your practice.

This second suggestion I found especially helpful. Figuring out how much to push outside of your warm and fuzzy comfort zone is key, as constant and unrelenting stretching of our limits is a sure recipe for burnout!  Musicians as a group tend towards the uber intense, so I was happy to read this advice!  It’s also in line with slow productivity, an idea espoused by Cal Newport and others, which increasingly I believe is the recipe for a healthy career over the long term.  

The authors recommend what Newport calls a seasonal approach to work.  Just as a serious runner wouldn’t schedule a long run each day of the week, but instead mixes in speed work, tempo runs and long runs, the authors recommend a measured and thoughtful approach to how much you push yourself in the practice room.  Pick a couple days in the week when you will push yourself harder, and interleave those with lighter recovery days when you stay more in your comfort zone.  

Similarly, if you have a period of weeks of intense work, be sure to balance that with a longer recovery period! As musicians we don't always have complete control over our schedules, but to the extent that we are able to control our time, it is crucial to look at the big picture of our season and plan in recovery time. This is crucial to our longevity as musicians!

Chapter 15: Going Outside Your Comfort Zone pairs well with Chapter 21: “Setting the Parameters.” This chapter focuses on clearly defining your limits.  If playing fast, what’s the fastest tempo you can play a piece without breaking down?  If playing an expressive melodic passage, what’s the loudest you can play without the sound cracking?  The authors call each of these limits "the red line."

Expanding your comfort zone in any of these domains will make your musical box larger! The authors also stress that approaching the red line, without crossing it, adds excitement to a performance. You can't approach that line, however, unless you've clarified it in your practice!

Part 4: Evaluate

This is the shortest section in the book, with chapters on Feedback, Listening and Recording.

Chapter 25: Record Early and Record Often has practical advice on the equipment needed for recording. It has great suggestions for targeted listening — listening back for specific things in your recordings, like intonation, sound, expression etc. It also stresses the benefits of watching videos to visually examine your performance — how is your stage presence? Do you have any unusual habits you were unaware of? Are there technical issues you can diagnose visually?

Should you buy it?

Is PracticeMind worth the rather hefty $65 price tag? Definitely!

Not only is $65 much less than you would pay for a lesson with either of these teachers, but this book covers much more information than could possibly be contained in a single lesson (see aforementioned Google Doc!). Instead, the book is more like an overview of what you could learn after working with these teachers for years.

The book comes with a number of online resources. There are video demonstrations of many of the exercises that come in the latter parts of the book, additional practice tips, and viola and bass versions of excerpts in the book (most of the excerpts are for violin or cello). While a few sections of the book are string-specific, as a whole the book is instrument agnostic, and most musicians would benefit from the kind of intelligent practicing outlined in PracticeMind.

PracticeMind is simultaneously realistic and highly optimistic. It is never naive about the dedication and hard work required to master an instrument, but the book is infused with a boundless enthusiasm for our potential to improve with a combination of discipline and smart practice tools. This enthusiasm left this reader feeling energetic to practice, empowered with more tools to make progress towards my playing goals.  And that feeling, perhaps more than anything else, is PracticeMind’s greatest power.

Click here to purchase PracticeMind through their website.

Have an idea for something I should review? Send me an email at travis@travis-maril.com