Practise the hard bits
Playing through what you already know feels good but builds little. Real progress comes from isolating the specific passage or skill you cannot yet do and drilling that, slowly and deliberately.
Slow and clean first
Speed is a by-product of accuracy. Play a difficult part slowly enough to get it perfect, then raise the tempo gradually, ideally with a metronome. Practising mistakes fast just makes the mistakes permanent.
How long a focused block actually lasts
The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Music Learning publishes a short, specific guide to this rather than leaving it to guesswork. Bob Duke and Amy Simmons’ Tips for Effective Practice recommends breaking practice into shorter blocks rather than one continuous hour — “three 20-minute sessions or two 30-minute sessions” instead, with each stretch capped well under an hour.
The reasoning tracks with the rest of the guide’s advice: slow, deliberate repetition only works while attention stays sharp, and attention is a limited resource across any single sitting. Cutting a practice hour into pieces protects the quality of focus inside each piece, rather than letting the back half of a long session run on autopilot.
Splitting attention across goals
The same guide advises against giving each goal one long uninterrupted block — spending, say, 15 minutes on each of three separate goals in sequence. Instead it suggests rotating through goals in much shorter turns, on the order of 5 minutes each, cycling back rather than finishing one before starting the next, with small deliberate variation inside each turn (a different tempo, a different starting point) to help the material stick.
Combine the two figures and a single 20-minute block built this way carries roughly four rotations of about 5 minutes apiece — enough to touch three or four different goals inside one short session rather than exhausting attention on a single one.
A 20-minute block, rotated: roughly 5 minutes on the hardest passage at a slow, clean tempo; 5 on the same passage one notch faster; 5 on a different rough spot; 5 tying sections together — four short turns inside the 20-minute cap the guide recommends, rather than one long grind on a single bar.
Little and often
- Short daily sessions beat rare long ones.
- Warm up, then target one or two specific goals.
- Use a metronome and increase tempo in small steps.
- Record yourself to hear what really needs work.
Plan a session against those figures
Enter how much time you have and how many goals you are working on, and this applies the session-length cap and rotation length above. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
Built from the Center for Music Learning’s 20–30 minute block cap and roughly-5-minutes-per-goal rotation — a starting split, not a rule with no exceptions.
Where this comes from
Bob Duke and Amy Simmons, Tips for Effective Practice, Center for Music Learning, University of Texas at Austin (2015): the three-20-minute/two-30-minute session split, the roughly-5-minutes-per-goal rotation instead of long single-goal blocks, and the advice to vary tempo and starting point inside a rotation. cml.music.utexas.edu · accessed 4 August 2026.
This is one program’s published guidance, not a universal law of practice — instrument, level and the specific thing you are working on all reasonably change how a session should be split.
Common questions
How long should I practise?
Short, focused sessions most days beat occasional marathons. Even 20 focused minutes daily adds up fast.
Why use a metronome?
It builds solid timing and lets you raise speed in controlled steps without sloppiness.
Why am I not improving?
Often from playing what you already know. Target the specific things you cannot do yet, slowly.