
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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