How Many Repetitions Does It Take To Improve?



After the last article on how to measure improvements in your guitar practice a reader emailed with the following question on improving their practice:

Hi Sam ,I’m learning a fingerstyle piece called struttin rag by stefan grossman. I’m struggling to even slightly increase the tempo a few beats to get a tiny section at the same speed as the rest of the piece which i can play no bother.It needs this tempo to bring about a lively performance. I’ve tried umpteen fingerings, positions, rhythms but nothings working. Can I safely say sometimes it may just happen to take thousands of reps to increase even just a touch when your limits are even just a few beats away. Cheers NAME

Improving His Fingerstyle Practice

Something I used to say to students was “there’s no problem that 1000 repetitions can’t solve”. This was used alongside “Have you practiced that 1000 times yet?”.

Often students mistake not be able to do something with not doing it enough, or to put it another way, we often vastly underestimate how many repetitions it takes to learn something.

I’ve been working on a piece of music this year, and learning a single bar has sometimes taken three weeks.

You mentioned that you’ve tried different rhythms - surely the rhythm for the music shouldn’t change?

As for fingerings and positions - figure out what you think is the best for these and give it a few weeks of an hour a day with a metronome (you are using a metronome, right?), and you should find improvements.

For particularly challenging pieces, I often find serious improvements only come after two weeks of daily practice at the earliest, more often three weeks is the “magic” number.

When practising, everything - rhythm, position, fingering etc must be exactly the same. If you are constantly changing things, you are not practising.

Practice Routine Recomendations

I also recommended the following practice routines:

Application to Teaching Students

If you have guitar students, this is especially important. You have to help them get used to the idea that:

  1. They have to do a lot more repetitions than they intially realise
  2. They can achieve much more than they realise by practising effectively
  3. They have to think carefully about their practice effectively

A big part of teaching guitar is helping students learn how to practice effectively. 99% of people learning guitar can google a song or a chord, but learning how to practice efectively and set the appropriate expectations of yourself and your guitar practice is a much harder task, and one of the big benefits to a student having a guitar teacher is that they have someone to help them with those aspects of learning guitar.

Learning how to teach guitar can be a challenge, but this book on how to teach guitar has 455 pages of advice and hard-learned lessons on becoming and effective guitar teacher.

Conclusion

To wrap up, give yourself much, more more time to repeat an exercise than you think. The vast majority of guitar practice problems can be solved with repetition, but the key idea is: Repetition.

You have to do exactly the same thing when you repeat something - if you’re changing the fingers, the placement, arrangement, rhythm etc; then you are not repeating something - you are trying to learn 50 different versions all at once.

Exact repetition. 1000 times.

Give it a go - see where it takes you.

Readers Comments

After publishing this post, a couple of readers had some thoughtful ideas, published below with their permission:

Anonymous

I’m way too beginner to have two cents on any guitar topic - but here’s my penny thought. I sometimes find when there’s just one specific section that’s a problem, it’s because it’s not clear in my head where I’m going - the signals from brain to fingers is muddy. If I just close my eyes (not touching guitar) and try to visualize going through the section, I will find I’m not clearly visualizing right in that area. If I get my brain clear, it sometimes cleans up the small section. Which is not to say that it won’t still need 1,000 repetitions. But I always check my brain first.

I love this comment. I’ve always found that if my mind isn’t clear about what I want to play, my fingers don’t have a chance.

Colin

First time I saw Status Quo live, more than 30 years ago, I remember Francis Rossi complaining “oh why do I have to play something 700 times before I can do it properly?” So I have used 700 as a minimum. If it’s good enough for Frame, it’s works for me. Well, there are some occasions when 1,000 is nearer the mark.

Colin then sent a follow up email:

Watch the movie Safe House. There’s a scene where the young novice CIA operative says to the veteran CIA operative “so how come you’re so good at this?” And the veteran CIA man(Denzel Washington) says “well, if you practice anything often enough, you will get good at it.” Sound(sic) advice?

Great advice!