Practice makes...

Practice does not make perfect.

 

Practice makes permanent.

 

I was pretty much always a band geek.  In High School even more so.  Every year, the state or the region would put together an all-star band.  For this, we had to submit a tape of our performance.  Much of the structure was rigid, scales and such.  We also had to record an individual audition piece.

 

I went to my private instructor with this task in mind.  He was a judge of this contest for years and even though he would have to recuse himself when my tape was up, we could still work on it.

 

"It's easy." he said "Just play it perfectly."

 

Yeah.  Right.

 

Of course this cued our delving into one of our philosophy sessions.  This one was about practice.

 

"If you play something over and over and always screw up in the same place.  Then you will ALWAYS screw up in that place.  Practice does not make perfect.  Practice makes permanent."

 

With that, we talked about playing something so slow it was almost painful but play it perfectly note for note.   Then speed things up.  He pulled out a difficult piece that I hadn't seen before and had me attempt to play it at tempo.  I muddled through passably but there were noticeable mistakes.  He broke out the third movement and had me try again but this time S-L-O-W-L-Y.  Slowly it was simple.  Then he had me play it again, steadily ratcheting up the speed with each playing.  It wasn't perfect but it was pretty darn good.

 

His point was made.  About a week later I made my tape and submitted it.  A month later I received notification that I got into the orchestra!

 

His lesson about practice has always stuck with me (of course the side lesson on how to edit the tape didn't hurt much either)