The process of practising

Focusing

Are you engaging all your senses? Our minds usually wander away from what are at our hands when we do something too repetitively. Reading, listening, and talking all need keen attention or focusing power. Average people who live in this world has not fully engaged their senses when they are doing something at their hands. In other words, they depend on their subconscious to do something when the task is too repetitive.

The power of subconscious mind

For example, everyday, you wake up in the morning from bed, walk to the bathroom, pick up your tooth brush, squeeze out your toothpaste, start brushing your teeth, and while doing so, maybe only your conscious mind kicks in to think about “what is the plan of my day”. Every move before your planning thought of the day are automated by your subconscious mind.

Why could you achieve this kind of smoothness without even lifting a muscle of your conscious mind? Because you have repeated it everyday. You don’t fall down to the floor, while waking up, you don’t walk wrongly into kitchen while you subconsciously aim at entering bathroom, you don’t pick up the hair shampoo while reaching for toothpaste, you don’t make a mess all over the sink while you squeeze your toothpaste onto your tiny little toothbrush, and you won’t put your toothbrush to you eye and start brushing. These are quite perfect isn’t it? Well, if at the very beginning of your life, you always make a mess while squeezing your toothpaste, then you will be making a perfect mess before your conscious mind kicks in. The point is, repetition makes a movement perfect and smooth.

"Crafting" = practising

But, you have to engage your sense and your thinking mind in order to achieve your ideal. That is where your attention comes in. So, you started to read through your music score. You have a picture, a very general aural image. You will decide the detailed crafting while you break the sections down. The trick here is, human beings have very limited attention span. Average people can focus intensely for only 20~30 minutes. And after that, everything is just automation. So, every time when you start practicing, you want to spend the first 20~30 minutes on deciding how much you can focus and how you want that much section to sound like. It is like crafting at the first 20~30 minutes, then you repeats your “choreography” that matches your ideal aural image so that it is engraved into your subconscious mind. It is a boring job when you do the repetition. But the "crafting" part is where your creativity comes in. And when you connect all your some little parts that you had "crafted", you will get an exciting synergy of performance.

When all the hard work pays off, you will be a great pianist and never be afraid to be left alone with piano and a new music score. Because you will be able to bring the notes lying on the score to live with confidence.