How to improve at music: Moving Past “Mediocre”

How to Move the Needle: Moving Past “Mediocre”

A friend recently reached out to me with a goal for the next few years: they wanted to stop being “mediocre” at his music practice. They listed guitar, piano, drums, and singing. The realisation had hit them that music brought them such joy (I can relate!), and that they wanted to improve to explore that more.

I’d written out a longer, more generic reply, but I paused to ask them what they actually wanted to be able to do. Once we clarified that, I sent them the following advice.

In the same way, if you’re looking to improve meaningfully with your voice or an instrument, I would say the following three elements are critical to getting somewhere:

1. Manageable objectives
2. Time budget to achieve those objectives
3. Purposeful deliberate practice within the allocated time

1) Manageable objectives

Firstly, you’ll likely fail if you try to get better at MULTIPLE things all at once. For my friend, they’d listed four separate things. I’d suggest focusing on ideally one thing, or at most two. For example: singing and guitar, or singing and piano.

By pairing them, you can “kill two birds with one stone” when practicing. You can interleave working on both simultaneously. In turn, getting a song to a good standard gives you a “finished product” you can put in your back pocket and always pull out when you want.

A note on environment

In our chat, my friend mentioned his keyboard was “so rubbish it’s not inviting to play.” That can be a total deal-killer. You can have all the time and motivation in the world, but if you’ve got a rubbish instrument to practice on, you’re not going to WANT to practice.

In contrast, a real piano in the centre of a home naturally invites practice — it’s an immersive experience. A well set-up acoustic guitar can do similar things. But if your home practice setup is uninspiring, or requires effort to set it up every time, you won’t use it. I told him: stick to the acoustic guitar. Keep it out on a stand so you’ve got no excuse not to pick it up.

2) Time budget

People think they need TONNES of time, or deeply scheduled blocks. That can be helpful, but it really isn’t as critical as people think.

Learning to take advantage of 5–15 minute “bite-size” chunks of time to practice is far more helpful. It’s less punishing mentally than setting a goal of “hours” and then failing to meet it.

Even 2–5 minutes can be helpful if deployed well. I often only have little pockets of time between sessions or life admin, but I’ll just pick ONE thing to look at briefly and practice it a few times. That helps reinforce the neural pattern and muscle memory. Focused, intentional, deliberate practice is more important than volume.

3) Purposeful Practice Time

You need some kind of overriding system for what you want to achieve with each practice. That could be self-directed, a teacher, or a course—but you have to find a system that helps you move forward.

For the most part, I’ve always been self-taught. Many claim to be addicted to learning but most mistake novelty seeking behaviour for learning. We need constructive learning, where one thing leads to another, which leads to another, etc, stacking a basic skill into a complex compound capacity… but that doesn’t come naturally to most people.

Most get distracted and are constantly learning single isolated things, or factoids that impress at parties, but don’t make a dent in life or real skills. This is where a skilled teacher or coach can be immensely helpful.

In the absence of a teacher, written books and online systems can be excellent. You need to find something that fits you, e.g. Justin Sandercoe is an excellent online course provider, though I’ve not used him myself.

In relation to piano, I’ve never found a piano method that connected with me; a lot of teachers lean too heavily on old classical rote methodology that doesn’t actually help you play the stuff you WANT to play.

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Final Thoughts: The Repertoire Approach

Songs need to come first. I’d say that focusing on songs you want to be able to play rather than PURELY technique for the sake of technique. Even within vocal coaching, we use exercises to train the instrument so that the SONGS become incredibly easy – it’s all about the service of songs, not technique for technique’s sake.

• Start with a list of 5–10 songs and use them to structure your practice.
• The 80/20 Rule: You’ll find all 5–10 songs “mosey along” until you hit a wall. When you encounter a struggle, identify exactly what it is and search for a specific solution (like a YouTube breakdown) to bridge that gap.

Building the Toolkit

You’ll conquer 80% of each song, but encounter new challenges in the remaining 20%. Deploy that “problem-solving” approach, and you’ll start to build a repertoire and the technique to support it.

Eventually, your memory will be jogged by songs that function similarly, and you can start exploring those. That’s how you stop muddling along and start actually playing.

If this is something you’d like to explore in your own singing and musicality, please do book in via the ‘Work With Mark’ link below.