JK Drum Solutions: Drum Set Instruction, Transcriptions and Educational Podcasts
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Practice Makes Proficient
"Perfect" Makes Neurotic!

     If a teacher ever tells you "practice makes perfect", at the next lesson bring them a cookie cutter and ask them to autograph it.   Practice makes perfect leads to unattainable expectations that will turn in to frustrated self-judgments and eventually unfound one's willpower to practice in the first place.  On the face, it seems well-intentioned and harmless but when I witness new students freeze up with fear every time they make a mistake, it's one of the first things I try to help them overcome.   Recoiling into guilt-ridden apoplexy when making a mere mistake will only lead one to avoid practice.  Imagine if Thomas Edison acted similarly with each mistake he made in the process of stealing Nikolai Tesla's inventions?  
practice makes perfect 2
     It is so unimportant how perfect you play something that you are learning but what is of the utmost importance is honing your approach to practicing.  It's not enough to be told to practice but perhaps more importanly how.  You employ practice methods to break down any material you are learning.  It's more than just slowing down or heavy repetition, although those are important, but for example, how to keep playing even while making mistakes by applied patience, compsure and day-to-day consistency.   In this way "perfection" is merely a natural result of consistent practice.  Yep.

   If you must be perfect please become a surgeon, a chef or even a mechanic - but egads...not a musician!

   
Thoughts? Comments? Criticisms? I'm open to read your thoughts!