Practising Your Musical Instrument: An Evidence-Based Approach

"How much should they be practising?" is the question music teachers hear most from parents, and adult learners ask the same thing about themselves. The honest answer is that how you practise matters more than how long. Here's a guide to both.

How much practice is enough?

It depends on age and stage. These are sensible starting points, not rules.

• Young beginners (roughly 7 to 10): 10 to 15 minutes, most days.
• Older children and adults in their first year or two: 15 to 30 minutes, most days.
• Students working towards middle grades: 30 to 45 minutes, most days.
• Advanced students: an hour or more, usually split into shorter blocks.

"Most days" means five or six days out of seven. Everyone needs a day off, and a missed day isn't a disaster.

Little and often wins

One of the most reliable findings in research on learning is that practice spread out over time works better than the same amount crammed into one sitting. Psychologists call it the spacing effect. For a musician, it means that fifteen minutes a day will take you further than two hours on a Sunday.

There's a practical reason too. Physical skills settle in between sessions, and particularly overnight. That's why a passage that felt impossible on Tuesday often feels easier on Wednesday morning, even though you haven't touched the instrument in between. Daily practice gives you seven of those overnight gains a week instead of one.

Quality over quantity

In the early 1990s the psychologist Anders Ericsson studied violin students at a music academy in Berlin, looking for what separated the very best from the rest. The answer wasn't simply how many hours they played. It was how much time they spent on what he called deliberate practice: focused work on specific things they couldn't yet do, with their full attention.

Playing through pieces you already know is enjoyable, and worth doing, but it isn't what makes you better. Twenty minutes spent slowly fixing the four bars you always stumble over is worth more than an hour of playing everything from the top.

What a good practice session looks like

1. Warm up for a couple of minutes. A scale, some simple chords or a vocal exercise. Something easy that gets your hands or your voice moving.
2. Do the hard thing first. Find the bars that go wrong and work on those alone, while you're still fresh.
3. Slow down. Play the tricky part slowly enough to get it right, then speed up a little at a time. A metronome keeps you honest.
4. Put it back in context. Play the section around the bit you've fixed, so the joins work.
5. Finish with something you enjoy. End every session by simply playing. It's the reason you're doing all this.

For parents: helping without nagging

• Fix a time. Practice that happens at the same point every day, such as before tea or straight after school, stops being a negotiation.
• Keep the instrument out. A guitar on a stand gets picked up. A guitar in its case in a cupboard doesn't.
• Sit in with younger children. Under about ten, most children can't organise their own practice. You don't need to be musical. Just be in the room and ask what the teacher wanted them to work on.
• Praise the effort. "You kept going at that until you got it" does more good than "you're so talented".
• Ask for a performance. "Play me what you learned this week" turns practice into something worth showing off.

When practice isn't happening

Every student goes through spells of not wanting to practise. Before deciding that they've lost interest, talk to their tutor. Often the fix is simple: a different piece, music they've chosen themselves, a shorter target, or a goal such as playing for a relative. A good teacher would much rather change the plan than lose the student.

Balance matters as well. If school, sport and everything else are piling up, it's better to drop to ten minutes a day for a few weeks than to stop altogether.

In short

Practise a little on most days, spend that time on the things you can't yet do, and finish by playing something you love. That works at any age and on any instrument.

For more on getting started, read our tips for beginners and our guide to what age a child should start music lessons. Guitarists can go straight to our beginner guitar techniques. If you'd like a tutor to build a practice plan around you or your child, request a call back.