No, You Aren't Going Backwards

Have you ever felt like, in spite of all the effort you’ve expended on a musical task, your performance has actually deteriorated?

I know my students have felt this way, because they tell me so. “I feel like I’m going backward,” a student will say, after experiencing some musical frustration. “Am I getting worse?”

The answer is, in almost every case, no.

It’s not that I’ve never seen a student get worse, but the few times I have there’s almost always some kind of otherwise obvious physical or neurological degenerative process at play.

The reassuring truth is that, If you invest practice time in something, especially in partnership with someone offering quality guidance and feedback, you are pretty much guaranteed to get better at that thing.

So why on earth can it seem like you’re backsliding?

There are many reasons! Let’s take a closer look.

1) Sampling Rate. If you practice regularly, you hear yourself on such a regular basis that you may not notice many of the positive changes that are taking place in your playing. This is because your sampling rate (how often you assess yourself) is so frequent that the amount of change between any two specific samples is so small it’s difficult to perceive. On the other hand, I, as your teacher, hear you every couple of weeks–a lower sampling rate that means the gap between any two data points will be larger, and the gains more perceptible.

What can you do about it?: Try out a longer sampling interval by going back to things you played a year ago. Or try recording yourself every couple of weeks

2) Task Difficulty. A related issue is difficulty of your task. As you grow as a musician and a player, the difficulty of the material you are trying to master will (or at least should!) increase alongside your skills. And while you may have been able to play Hot Cross Buns with ease and panache, you’re probably going to struggle a bit more with the Handel Sonata movement in front of you now. Please don’t worry! Increasing the difficulty of what you attempt is a necessary part of skill-building.

What can you do about it? Maintain awareness of increasing task difficulty and reward yourself with periodic returns to material you’ve already mastered.

3) You Know More. This is a big one. Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? Basically, people with lower ability on any particular skill tend to overestimate their competence at that skill. Whereas people with greater ability tend to do so less. I find this to be especially true of musicians– because, as you develop your playing ability, you’re also developing your awareness of the many and varied dimensions that make up quality music-making. And you may start to be able to perceive– and fret over– some of the distance you have yet to travel.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you tend to play sharp. When you first start playing, you can’t hear that you’re consistently sharp, and everything seems great! (Well, at least to you.) But then your ear develops a bit, and you begin to sense a difference between your tone and your neighbor’s. And the difference doesn’t sound good! What is happening? Are you getting worse???

No. But your ear has gotten better, which means the accuracy and scope of your assessment has increased.

What can you do about it? Recognize that your ear and your awareness grow alongside your physical skills. And embrace your increasing motivation to improve!

4) Skill is a Range. OMG! You just played your exercise perfectly and now it’s falling apart! What the heck is wrong?? Are you getting worse??

No. You’re just exploring a lower portion of your ability range on that particular exercise. Think about your abilities as a box. Next time you might perform higher within your box, or lower, or the same. But your box itself hasn't dropped, and experiencing the range of your performance within it shouldn’t disturb you overmuch. Think about if you played baseball. Sure, you could get hung up on how many runs you scored in any individual game. But a more meaningful distinction is whether you’re playing in Little League or the Majors

What can you do about it? Concentrate on moving your whole box up, as opposed to dwelling on where any specific run-through falls within it.

5) Progress is Not Linear. Hey, nobody said we were guaranteed to progress in a nice, linear fashion straight up the diagonal at a constant rate of change. Sometimes it’s two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes we zoom ahead and sometimes we crawl. Sometimes our progress stair steps; sometimes it gently climbs; sometimes it plateaus. And musical ability is not unitary- it’s vast constellation of intertwined skills. Sometimes we’re so busy developing one skill that others have to take a back seat for a while.

And there are also times when things really do need to get worse before they can get better. Say you’re trying to move to a second octave technique where you bend your thumb instead of toggle your wrist. At first, as you learn your brand new way of playing, your high notes are going to be worse than they were before. But persevere, because the change will make your high notes better long-term.

What can you do about it? Accept progress as complex and multi-faceted; just keep moving forward.

6) Unrealistic Expectations. You understand exactly what you need to do to make your tone smooth and beautiful– so why can’t you just DO it? What is wrong with you?

Making unrealistic demands of yourself is common, and leads to a whole lot of frustration. I have noticed that this tendency is especially common among highly skilled musicians who are taking up the recorder, and among people who are high-achieving experts in other fields. Musicians get frustrated because of the mismatch between their extensive musical awareness and what they are able, physically in the moment, to achieve. Experts in other fields have often forgotten what it was like to feel incompetent. Music encompasses many complex psycho-motor skills that take time– lots of time, distributed over a long period– to acquire. And every instrument has its own, individual set of these skills. These are not quick and easy acquisitions.

What can you do about it? Give yourself grace– and time.

All of that to say– no, you’re not going backwards. It’s a (very) long game.