Exercises are everywhere in our practice, and not in a “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” kind of way. These musical morsels, deliberately designed activities of all lengths which isolate and develop a specific skill or help solve a musical problem, appear in warm-ups, technical studies, and during the learning and refinement of repertoire. We borrow them from method books, collect them from our teachers, invent them ourselves, and occasionally rip them straight from the headlines of our repertoire.
What Makes a Great Exercise?
Like most of you, I’ve invested a lot of time investigating which exercises to do and checking on whether the exercises I’ve chosen work. In fact, I concluded that exercises are so important that I wrote a whole book on how to find, develop, and design them!
But have you ever wondered, “What makes a great exercise? Am I using the exercises I’m using because I’m lazy, or because they work? And how do I even tell if they’re working?”
I have. After years of perusing method books and experimenting on myself and my students, I’ve identified some qualities of good/great exercises.
Short and Simple
Great exercises are easy to learn, easy to remember, and difficult to master.
Specific
Good exercises are focused enough to address a specific need.
Flexible
The best exercises grow with you, and are capable of being scaled to be more or less challenging, whether through speed, transposition, rhythm, or any other musical parameter.
Effective
Duh! Exercises should build mental models and address weaknesses, not simply accumulate repetitions. If the exercise helps you hear, feel, predict, and recognize a musical idea more clearly, it is probably doing useful work.
Relevant and Timely
Great exercises are directly related to your musical goals and delivered at the exact right time. The perfect exercise six months from now may be far less valuable than a good exercise that addresses tomorrow’s rehearsal.
Interesting
Attention is a finite resource. Interesting exercises encourage experimentation and invite curiosity-driven variation and invention.
Yours
Creating your own exercises inspires deeper and more consistent work, much like growing your own food can inspire thoughtful, seasonal cooking. When something is “yours,” you care more, pay more attention, and think more proactively about improving it.
The first six qualities describe a good exercise.
The seventh describes a good learner.
Growing your own vegetables changes the way you cook. You become more aware of seasons, ingredients, constraints, and possibilities. Designing your own exercises creates a similar shift. Instead of asking, “What should I practice?” you begin asking, “What problem am I trying to solve?” Creating your own exercises forces you to diagnose problems—another super-important practice skill—identify constraints, and design solutions. In doing so, you begin learning not only the skill itself, but how you learn to do anything.
Exercise Design
At some point, the interesting question stops being “What makes a great exercise?” and becomes “What skills allow us to design one?”
Here are two: diagnosing problems in our playing and inventing potential solutions to them. They are linked by the dynamic processes of Design Thinking and Deliberate Practice.
Useful exercises exist in dialogue with both these skills, helping us figure out what’s not working and helping fix those issues. Great exercises help you take mysterious problems and turn them into what I, in a previous post, called “Infomercial Problems”: an obvious problem with an obvious solution, and sometimes even a narrator to tell you what you’re doing wrong.
In reality, most musical problems are not simple to diagnose or quickly solved. Thus, problem-finding is just as important, if not more so, than problem-solving. That’s an issue we’ll tackle next time…
Exercises
Speaking of exercises, I just wrote an entire book, full of exercises and instructions/exhortations/encouragement to create your own. And while Unsnared Drum Lab is technically about the snare drum, the concepts transfer to every percussion instrument. Actually, to every instrument! It’s available at my website here, and shortly thereafter at Steve Weiss Music.
