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Comment by reikonomusha | Hacker News Reader

All of this advice is equally true with practicing a musical instrument. You will not get better if you just play songs/pieces fully over and over. You can, and often do, get worse. And it’s hard, because making music is what it’s all about.

I don’t know who said this quote originally, but in the piano world, one says “practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.”

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In middle school, my orchestra teacher taught “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice, makes perfect.” It’s a lot easier to perfect atomic-level techniques than an entire composition.

She also taught us not to “stop and start over” when we made mistakes. I think that is sort of like “don’t try to optimize early, get the code working then refactor later.”

>“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice, makes perfect.”

That's word-for-word what my sensei says about karate.

Four years ago my sensei invited another sensei for a seminar and the other sensei said nearly exactly the same thing, but I never heard my sensei say it. Is your sensei Fujishima?[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/themitak/status/838896881866588161?s=20

Is the world this small?

Nope.

It's an extremely common quote, often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the football coach. Nobody's sensei made it up.

> She also taught us not to “stop and start over” when we made mistakes.

This is so true. I learn piano myself and I'm a trackmania gamer for years. Learning a piano piece (some bars or full length for easy pieces) is quite the same as learning a track layout in trackmania. You have to go through the whole, regardless of the speed to see at least where it leads you. And if you just restart after the slightest error, you will perfect just the begin of the track yet you will struggle every time once you reach the unknown parts.

Another important reason to not start over is to make it a habit to continue playing even when you make a mistake. If you are performing and you make a mistake, then you don't want to just keep on playing.

My piano teacher used to say "It's not a video-game, you don't go back to the beginning of the level every time you lose."

I think playing songs / pieces does have value, especially if you're starting out, in that it trains your motor skills - finding the keys on a piano, strings on a guitar, etc. It won't make you a musician, but it'll get you up to party trick level. Anyway here's wonderwall.

"Practice makes permanent" is a perfectly reasonable goal for someone who needs to perform the same set of songs many nights out of the year.

Musicians don't always "make" music - that's not what it's all about. Musicians may only need to "play" music.

Easier said than done: my son is learning guitar but it's the holidays. Not easy to make him practice during the holidays given that I'm not a musician..

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