woman playing flute - varied, distributed, and interleaved practice“To get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty and the inevitability of something.”
–Meredith Monk, singer & composer
The Musician’s Wayp. 19

Although we musicians practice in personalized ways, there are three fundamental practice strategies that I think every performer benefits from understanding: varied, distributed, and interleaved practice.

This article sums up features of all three.

By incorporating these and other deliberate practice techniques into our work, we deepen our learning and boost our ability to assimilate the bones of a composition.

Varied, Distributed, and Interleaved Music Practice

1. Varied Practice

Varied practice entails working on a musical passage from diverse angles.

We might practice hands alone and then together, vocalize a tricky rhythm, modify the rate of change, and so forth.

The key is to mix up our practice approaches so that we cultivate easeful control as well as broad awareness of the music and our execution.

Conversely, musicians who rely on uniform practice habits, especially mindless repetition, tend to embed a sort of flimsy muscle memory that readily breaks down in performance situations. Breakdown occurs because they lack robust mental pathways via which to direct their execution. Then, on stage, the adrenaline-fueled energy of performing shatters their fragile learning and undermines their control.

By comparison, with varied practice, we form a range of neural connections, which empower us to direct our execution securely, even if we’re nervous.

2. Distributed Practice

Instead of focusing on a single piece in one extended practice session (blocked practice), with distributed practice, we practice the same music in separate sessions, perhaps over the span of a day.

If we’re tackling an orchestra excerpt, let’s say, we might practice it slowly in the morning for 20 minutes using varied tactics, review at noon, and then work on increasing the tempo in the evening.

In that way, we reinforce our mental pathways, and they become more robust.

Conversely, if we wait too long before returning to previously learned material, the neural connections we formed tend to weaken, and then we may have to return to our initial learning strategies, which is both inefficient and tedious.The Musician's Way book cover

3. Interleaved Practice

When we interleave practice tasks, we intermix them during a single practice session, revisiting the same material relatively frequently.

Similar to distributed practice, this strategy makes our learning more secure by strengthening neural connections.

If we aim to memorize a solo in addition to mastering an orchestra excerpt, we might zero in on the excerpt for 20 minutes, review a portion of the solo for 10 minutes, go back to the excerpt for 10, and then take a break for 5 or 10 minutes.

Following that, we might memorize more of the solo before returning to the excerpt.

*  *  *

In sum, varied, distributed, and interleaved practice strategies deepen our learning because, for one, they require us to repeatedly reorient to the material we’re mastering.

When we interleave or distribute practice tasks, for example, and return to a passage we worked on earlier, our brains have to reconstruct our intentions for interpreting and executing the passage. That reconstruction reinforces the neural pathways in our brains, making our learning and execution more secure.

Later on, as our learning of a piece matures, we can test our security via practice performances.

*  *  *

Read more about interleaved practice and distributed practice via articles indexed on Google Scholar.

Note that some writers may use the terms “interleaved” and “distributed” interchangeably, but I recognize distinctions:

  • Interleaving, as I describe it here, takes place in a single practice session when we intermix tasks and frequently revisit the same material.
  • Distributing refers either to practicing the same material across separate practice sessions or, in long practice sessions, when substantial periods of time elapse between our encounters with the material.

For detailed practice guidelines suited to both individual and group music making, see Part I of The Musician’s Way.

Related posts
7 Deep Practice Strategies
A Different Kind of Slow Practice
Beautiful Repetition
Small Steps, Big Results

© 2017 Gerald Klickstein
Photo © Stokkete, licensed from Shutterstock