The Central Strategy Expert Musicians Use to Practice Difficult Passages

The Central Strategy Expert Musicians Use to Practice Difficult Passages

From The Bulletproof Musician by Noa Kageyama

December 28, 2025 · 9 min · Episode 411

About this episode

This episode discusses effective strategies for practicing difficult musical passages to avoid reinforcing mistakes.

We all get stuck on problem passages from time to time. And it can be very natural to simply throw more repetitions at it, in hopes that this will eventually unlock something. But in doing so, we end up accumulating more and more incorrect repetitions and reinforcing mistakes. So what’s the alternative? A new study took a rare, close-up, repetition by repetition look at how artist-level musicians practice difficult passages. And it identified some key similarities in how they approach problem...

People in this episode

Host: Noa Kageyama

Topics covered

  • practice techniques
  • musical performance
  • problem passages
  • repetition
  • musician strategies

Keywords

  • practice
  • musicians
  • difficult passages
  • repetition
  • performance
  • mistakes
  • strategies

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