Dear Friends,
Last December I created a brief survey for first-time subscribers to my email list, as a way to get to know my audience better.
So far, more than 1600 people have responded. If you'd like to take the survey, you can fill it out here.​
One of the top struggles respondents shared was feeling frustrated that they are practicing a lot and not making progress, or not retaining what they worked on the previous day when they sit down to practice.
So today, I want to talk about “overlearning.”
Overlearning happens when you repeat something so many times that it becomes automatic, and you don’t really have to think about it anymore.
As an example of overlearning, consider your morning commute. The first time you go to a brand new job, you might have to use GPS to get there, to make sure you follow all the correct turns and arrive on time.
If it’s a complicated route, maybe you have to use GPS for the first several times you drive there.
But after you have driven that route hundreds of times, back and forth to work for years, you don’t even have to think about where to turn.
It no longer requires conscious thought. Maybe you even accidentally drive to work when you’re intending to go somewhere else, as has happened to me a few times!
Most people who struggle with retaining what they learn at the piano when they practice are not doing enough correct repetitions when they’re learning their music.
It’s easy to do something right a couple of times and then feel like we “got it” and move on.
But if you rewind what happens before you played it correctly a couple of times, usually you played it incorrectly even more times than that.
So for example, maybe you play a spot incorrectly six times, and then you play it correctly once, and then incorrectly once, and then correctly a second time, and then you move on.
The reason you move on is because you played it correctly twice, and overall you played it quite a few times (even though it wasn’t always 100% correct), and the errors you made might have felt minor, so it can feel like you “got it.”
But in this example, you played it incorrectly seven times.
Those two correct repetitions can lead to a false sense of confidence. We don’t want to waste our time at the piano playing something over and over that we can already play, so there can be a feeling of wanting to move on.
But here's the thing: playing a musical instrument is complicated! It requires very sophisticated hand-eye coordination and effortless coordination between the hands. It also requires the ability to listen and respond to what you are playing. In order to really retain the music you’re learning, you don't just need to learn; you need to “overlearn,” which takes many more repetitions.
In her excellent book Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician’s Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing, Molly Gebrian describes the concept of overlearning:
“According to research on overlearning, the minimum number of correct repetitions is half the number of tries it took before you got it right the first time (50% overlearning)… Even better than 50% overlearning is 100% overlearning: if it took you 10 tries to get it right, you’d want to do 10 more correct ones in a row to solidify it. This research on overlearning is also incentive to try to get it right as early as possible in the process, without too many incorrect repetitions first.”
So if you are struggling with making and retaining your progress at the piano, I recommend you think about overlearning.
Here are some tips to help you apply overlearning to your practice:
- Learn short segments of your music until you’ve truly mastered each one, and only then combine them.
- Keep a practice journal, where you can write down the bar numbers of what you're working on and track your repetitions.
- Do not play too fast: take a tempo where it is possible for you to achieve 100% accuracy.
- Count (and log) the correct/incorrect repetitions of each segment you are working on, and only move on after you can play it ten times in a row correctly.
- The next day, when you sit down again, start by reviewing the segments that you practiced the previous day and again do 10 repetitions in a row correctly of each of them. It will take you less time to do this with every subsequent day you review each segment, until you are eventually capable of playing it correctly and confidently the first time.
Implementing these steps will help you make faster progress. Try it this week and let me know how it goes for you!
đź‘‹ Happy practicing,
Kate