08/08/2026
Blog Post # 10 -- The Habitual Musician by Dr. Amber Den Exter
The virtuoso performer is able to play extremely difficult pieces of music with apparent ease. No doubt this is because of years of practice, but it's not just any kind of practice that leads to this level of easy virtuosity. Let's break down the art of practicing a little to understand this better.
Essentially, when we practice, we are looking to achieve certain goals. These goals might be big or small, long-term or short-term. We might be looking to play a certain note in tune, learn a new fi*****ng, master a new bow stroke, or work on our phrasing and musicality. Whatever it is, we repeat the new behavior/skill until, ideally, it can be effortlessly reproduced in the future. In other words, we are looking to form a new habit. And new habits are formed by repeating an action frequently enough and in such a way as to create neural pathways in the brain that make that action reproducible without conscious thought (I won't go into the finer details of the science behind it, but suffice to say, it is fascinating!) So, in this way, practice is as much about training our brains as it is about training our bodies. And, in the case of a virtuoso performer, much of the effortless brilliance that we see when they play is because of the intricate web of neural pathways that they have created while practicing that means their movements can be easy and fluid in performance.
So what does this have to do with you and me? Well, we can use the knowledge that practicing is all about forming new habits to our advantage. For example, science tells us that there are certain things we can do to make habit forming easier. For instance, we can trigger the brain's neuroplasticity by making use of the âhabit loopâ, popularized by Charles Duhigg in his book âThe Power of Habitâ. The habit loop has three parts:
1) the cue: a trigger for a behavior to start
2) the routine: the actual behavior or action you wish to make habitual
3) the reward: the benefit our brain perceives we get from the behavior
Examples of this method applied to practicing could be 1) taking the instrument out of the case 2) playing scales for five minutes 3) listening to your favorite song/artist. Or 1) taking three deep breaths 2) practicing a difficult passage for 10 minutes 3) taking a coffee break. This method is adaptable and can be adjusted to suit you and your goals.
Other tips for forming helpful habits are: anchoring the habit by tying it to an already existing habit. For example, you might habitually leave your music open on the music stand. In the evening, you can leave your music open to the page or passage you wish to work on the next day to help with setting a new practice habit in motion. This is also called "reducing frictionâ, or optimizing our environment to best support our practice routine. Another idea might be turning on the metronome each time you sit down to practice. This can serve as a cue to bring your brain into focus mode for your practice session.
Another important point when forming new habits is taking care that the thing we are repeating is truly what we mean to make a habit of. In fact, it is easy enough to subconsciously form an unhelpful habit rather than a helpful one. For example, when playing our pieces through, it may seem like a good idea to stop and correct mistakes when we make them, but, really, we have now created a new habit of stopping at certain points in the music. Though it may seem counterintuitive, it would be a better idea to play through our pieces without stopping, regardless of any mistakes made, and to go back later to analyze those mistakes and figure out the best way to tackle them in future practice sessions.
Other examples of accidentally forming unhelpful habits may be less obvious to us in the moment, but point to the importance of using good technique when we play. How many times does it happen that something works really well in the practice room but falls apart in the lesson studio or on the concert stage? The reason for this, I think, is unintentionally factoring variables into our habit forming that cannot be reproduced in other situations. For example, maybe we manage to play that pesky passage in tune in the practice room and we diligently practice it over and over so that the good intonation sticks. But, unfortunately, we were using arm tension to play the notes in tune, and muscle tension is an inherently undependable factor. So, when we got into the lesson studio, our body tension levels were all different and that great intonation that we practiced all went out the window. Darn it!
But don't despair, because your private teacher is there to help you find the best ways to achieve your goals with good technique, and, even if you end up forming an unhelpful habit, remember, it can always be replaced with a helpful one! We can achieve more than we realize just by staying observant, asking for help when we need it, and thinking of music as a journey and not a destination. Happy practicing! đ¶
