I love a good shortcut!

If there’s a faster back road, I’m taking it. If there’s a walking path that cuts across the grass but gets me there in less time, I’m getting my shoes dirty. And perhaps my proudest high school accomplishment was managing to turn in the same ten-page paper for two different courses.

So, I empathize —profoundly!— with my students’ yearning for shortcuts. The idea of a shortcut (faster, less work!) is intuitively appealing, but perhaps even more so in a field like music which makes you work, hard and consistently, for any rewards.

But the thing is— not all shortcuts actually do get you there here faster. Others speed your progress at first, but over the long haul you end up paying a price. These are the two kinds of shortcuts that, however tempting, you’re better off if you don’t take.

Dissuading people (and myself!) from taking shortcuts is not my favorite part of being a teacher, but it is part of the job.

So here I go! Here are three common shortcuts I recommend you avoid:

Using Easier Fingerings

“Is there an easier fingering for that?” I could fill an ocean with the number of times I’ve heard this question. And the answer is….well, yes, often there is an alternative fingering that is, at least at this particular point in your musical development, easier. But there’s usually a reason why it isn’t the standard fingering, and that reason is tuning. Meaning if you take the easier route, your tuning will suffer. Now, you may or may not hear the difference yet, but you will begin to as your skills develop— and I can pick out an alternate alto “E” at fifty paces with my eyes closed.

In addition, you use up both brain power and practice time learning and remembering to use the “easier”fingering. Your cognitive resources are incredibly valuable, and so is your time! I strongly recommend that you take the time you would have spent learning alternative fingers and working them into your playing, and put it toward developing ease and automaticity with the original fingering. It may take a while, but I promise those difficult fingering transitions become more relaxed and synchronous with time. And any practice you put in with them is money in the bank: It pays off big in the long-term.

If you’re performing the piece in two days, that’s a different matter… but most of the time, you’re not.

Transposition “Tricks:”

Okay, so you want to learn to read bass clef. Easy! All you have to do is transpose what you see up a third, and you’re there. Or what about g alto- it’s just a step up, so you can transpose as you go.

DANGER! I speak from personal experience (ahem- g alto) when I say that ultimately, transposition is not your friend. Rather than attempting to use it to shortcut the process of learning to read in a new clef or on a new instrument, you are better off learning, from scratch and by rote, the new association between what you see on the page and where your fingers go. You did it the first time you learned to correlate the two, and I promise you can do it again.

Why? Cognitive resources again. Like other complex psycho-motor tasks (driving, sports), music-making requires us to maximize automaticity. Our brains are not powerful enough to hold all the pieces of what we need to do consciously in mind unless we automate, or place below the threshold of conscious thought, as many pieces of it as we can. Transposing adds an extra cognitive step (“let’s see, that’s an a; I need to read that as if I were playing a g”), and we don't want extra steps. Plus transposing causes lots of confusion when you’re trying to talk to other musicians.

Memorize the new reading system from the beginning. It will take longer at first, but in the end, it will pay off.

Rest Skipping

Guess what skill never improves if you don’t actually practice it?

That’s right, counting rests.

This one is personal for me. I spent far too many years suffering the consequences of my “efficiency.” Practice resting. It will get you there faster in the end.

Yours on the long road,

Anne