How Long Should My Child Practice an Instrument?

How Much Should a Music Student Practice Each Day?

The amount of practice I recommend increases as a student develops. These aren’t magic numbers, but they’re good general goals:

As students become more advanced, their music becomes longer and more difficult, their technical exercises become more involved, and there are simply more things that need attention.

With brand-new students, however, I actually don’t like starting with a practice timer at all.

Beginning Students Need to Learn the Habit of Practicing

When someone first begins an instrument, there may not even be fifteen minutes worth of material that they can productively practice. Telling a young beginner to practice for thirty minutes can result in them playing the same five-minute assignment over and over simply because they’re waiting for a timer to go off.

That’s not really the point.

For my newest students, I prefer something much simpler: practice the material I assigned three to five times each day. If that takes five minutes, that’s fine.

At this stage, we’re developing something just as important as their first notes and rhythms: the discipline of practice. The student needs to get used to getting the instrument out, opening the book, remembering what we worked on during the lesson, and carefully going through the assignment. Then they need to do it again tomorrow.

As that routine becomes normal and the student progresses to more difficult material, practice naturally becomes longer. Eventually we’re no longer trying to establish whether the student practices; we’re working on how they use that practice time effectively.

In other words, practice itself is something students have to learn how to do.

Practicing and Playing Are Not the Same Thing

This is probably one of the most important distinctions I try to teach students.

Playing your instrument is not necessarily practicing your instrument.

Imagine a student has a piece that’s forty measures long. They can play measures 1–32 perfectly well, but measures 33–36 fall apart every single time. They could spend thirty minutes playing the entire piece over and over and technically say they practiced for thirty minutes.

But most of those thirty minutes were spent playing something they could already play.

The actual problem may have received only a few minutes of attention.

I’d much rather have that student spend a significant portion of the practice session working specifically on measures 33–36. Maybe the problem is even smaller than that. If measure 34 is what’s causing everything to fall apart, then practice measure 34.

Good practice isn’t about covering the greatest possible amount of music. It’s about improving the things that actually need improvement.

Working on One Measure Can Be a Great Practice Session

Suppose there’s one difficult measure in a piece. Instead of repeatedly playing the entire piece and hoping that measure eventually gets better, stop and figure out exactly what’s causing the problem. It could be the rhythm, an awkward fingering, a difficult shift, a breath issue, or simply one note that consistently causes trouble. Whatever it is, that’s the thing that actually needs to be practiced.

Once you’ve identified the problem, slow the passage down to a tempo where you can play it correctly and work on it purposefully. Sometimes that means practicing only a single measure. As it becomes comfortable, add the measure before it and then the measure after it until you’ve gradually worked the difficult section back into the surrounding phrase.

A student could spend twenty minutes doing this and only work on a handful of measures. That might not feel like as much practice as playing three entire pieces several times, but it can be considerably more productive. If most of a piece already works, there’s little reason to spend the majority of your practice time repeatedly playing the parts you can already play.

Twenty minutes spent fixing the part you can’t play can be far more valuable than an hour spent playing the parts you already can.

Research on advanced pianists likewise found that the most effective practicers stopped after errors, identified what went wrong, and corrected problems before continuing—not simply putting in more time.

Why Should Musicians Practice Slowly?

“Slow it down” is probably one of the most common things a music teacher says, but the purpose isn’t simply to play the same thing at a slower tempo.

When a passage is too difficult at its current speed, slowing it down gives you enough time to process what’s happening and execute it correctly. That might mean getting the fingering right, understanding a difficult rhythm, coordinating two hands, producing the correct articulation, or simply giving your brain enough time to keep up with everything it’s being asked to do.

The important thing is to find a tempo where the passage actually works. Once you can play it correctly and consistently, increase the tempo a little and repeat the process. Eventually, you work your way back toward the performance tempo while trying to preserve the accuracy you developed at the slower speed.

The objective isn’t to become really good at playing the piece slowly. Slow practice is simply a tool for learning how to play it correctly.

Be Careful What You Repeat

Repetition is obviously an important part of learning an instrument, but repetition by itself isn’t necessarily productive. If you play the same rhythm incorrectly twenty times, you’ve also given yourself twenty repetitions of the wrong rhythm.

That doesn’t mean mistakes are bad. Mistakes are how we discover what needs work. The important part is what happens after the mistake. Instead of immediately starting over and hoping it goes better the next time, stop long enough to determine what went wrong. Fix the problem, slow it down if necessary, and then repeat the corrected version.

The goal isn’t simply to play something ten times. The goal is for those repetitions to accomplish something. For a closer look at how sustained musical training is associated with changes in the brain, read Music and the Developing Brain.

What Does a Good Music Practice Session Look Like?

There isn’t one practice routine that works for every student or every instrument. A drummer, vocalist, violinist, pianist, and trumpet player obviously have different technical needs. The material being prepared also changes what deserves attention on any particular day.

Still, a productive practice session usually includes some combination of fundamentals, current repertoire, and focused work on difficult material.

For an intermediate student practicing for thirty minutes, a session might look something like this:

That’s not intended to be a rigid formula. If one difficult passage needs twenty minutes that day, give it twenty minutes. If a performance is coming up, repertoire may need more attention. If a technical problem is holding everything else back, fundamentals may need more time.

Practice should respond to what the student actually needs rather than what a timer says they’re supposed to be doing.

Should My Child Practice Every Day?

For most students, consistency is more useful than occasionally having a marathon practice session.

Learning an instrument involves developing physical coordination, reading skills, listening skills, timing, and movements that gradually become more automatic. Those skills benefit from being revisited regularly.

Twenty focused minutes on several days throughout the week will generally accomplish considerably more than ignoring the instrument for six days and attempting one enormous practice session the night before the lesson.

And yes, teachers can usually tell.

Sometimes immediately.

Regular practice also makes learning an instrument substantially more enjoyable. When students practice consistently, material that was difficult during one lesson often becomes manageable by the next. That allows the teacher and student to move forward.

When a student rarely practices, they may spend lesson after lesson struggling with essentially the same material. Music can start feeling frustrating because they never get to experience one of the most rewarding parts of learning an instrument:

getting better.

What If My Child Doesn’t Want to Practice?

This is another common problem, particularly with younger students, and I don’t think the solution is necessarily turning practice into a nightly battle.

Part of the reason I use very small practice expectations with brand-new students is that I’m trying to establish a routine before asking for substantial amounts of time. Five productive minutes every day is much more useful than demanding thirty minutes, creating an argument about it, and eventually having the instrument sit untouched for a week.

A regular practice time can help. For one family that might mean practicing immediately after school. For another it might be after dinner. The particular time matters less than making practice a normal part of the day rather than something that has to be negotiated every evening.

Parents can certainly help establish that routine, especially with young children, but the long-term goal isn’t to have a parent standing over the student with a stopwatch.

Eventually, responsibility for practicing needs to move to the student.

How Can Parents Help With Music Practice?

Parents sometimes worry that they can’t help because they don’t know anything about music.

They don’t necessarily need to.

For a beginning student, simply helping create a consistent practice routine can be enormously useful. Make sure the instrument is accessible, help the student remember what the teacher assigned, and provide a time and place where they can concentrate.

If the assignment says to play a particular exercise five times, a parent doesn’t need to understand music theory to help a young student remember to do it.

What parents generally shouldn’t have to do is become the child’s second music teacher. If something consistently isn’t working, that’s useful information for the actual teacher. Bring it to the next lesson and we can figure out what’s happening.

As students become more independent, parents should gradually need to be involved less and less.

Good Musicians Learn How to Diagnose Problems

One of the biggest changes I see as students become more advanced is that their practice becomes increasingly independent.

A beginner encounters a difficult passage and thinks:

I can’t play this.

A more experienced musician starts asking:

Why can’t I play this?

That’s a very different question.

Maybe the rhythm is wrong. Maybe there’s one difficult interval. Maybe the fingering is inefficient. Maybe the tempo is simply too fast. Maybe the student doesn’t actually understand what they’re supposed to be hearing.

Once you identify the problem, you can figure out how to practice it.

This is why focused practice becomes increasingly important as a student advances. More difficult music eventually makes it impossible to simply play everything from beginning to end until it works. The musician has to learn how to break a complicated problem into smaller, manageable ones.

Eventually, advanced students become capable of doing something extremely important: they begin teaching themselves.

A teacher still provides instruction, introduces new concepts, catches problems the student doesn’t recognize, and provides direction. But between lessons, the student increasingly knows how to take something that doesn’t work and turn it into something that does.

That’s one of the real goals of music lessons.

Is More Practice Always Better?

Not necessarily.

There is obviously a point where more practice becomes necessary. Someone preparing for a college audition can’t realistically prepare advanced repertoire with the same practice schedule as a beginning elementary student.

But simply adding more time doesn’t automatically make practice more effective.

If concentration is gone and the student is repeatedly making careless mistakes, another thirty minutes may accomplish very little. Depending on the instrument, excessive practice without appropriate breaks can also create physical fatigue and unnecessary tension.

This becomes particularly important for advanced students practicing for longer periods. An hour of daily practice doesn’t necessarily have to mean sitting down and playing continuously for sixty minutes. Longer sessions can be divided into focused blocks with short breaks.

The objective is not endurance for its own sake.

The objective is improvement.

A keyboard-melody experiment also found that the placement of a brief rest during practice affected improvement after sleep, another reason to think about the structure of a session rather than the clock alone.

How Long Should a Beginner Practice an Instrument?

For a brand-new student, I prefer to start with repetitions rather than minutes. Practice the assigned material three to five times each day and establish the routine of daily practice.

Once there’s enough material to make a timed practice session useful, 15–20 minutes per day is a good target for a beginning student.

Intermediate students should generally work toward about 30 minutes per day, while advanced students should expect approximately 40–45 minutes of focused daily practice.

A student seriously considering studying music in college should expect to practice at least an hour per day. Depending on the instrument, repertoire, audition requirements, and the student’s goals, considerably more may eventually be necessary.

These numbers provide useful targets, but don’t become obsessed with the clock.

I’d rather see a student spend twenty focused minutes identifying and fixing problems than spend an hour mindlessly playing music from beginning to end.

Practice Takes Practice

The question at the end of a practice session shouldn’t simply be:

How long did I practice?

A much better question is:

What can I do now that I couldn’t do when I started?

Sometimes the answer will be an entire piece. Sometimes it will be four measures. Sometimes it will be one measure that finally works.

And that’s perfectly fine.

Learning to play an instrument means learning notes, rhythms, technique, tone, repertoire, and musicianship. But students are also learning something that eventually becomes much more important: they’re learning how to learn.

At first, a teacher tells a student what to practice and how to practice it. Over time, the student begins recognizing problems on their own. Eventually, they learn how to isolate those problems, develop solutions, evaluate the results, and move on to the next thing.

Practice takes practice.

And learning how to practice effectively is one of the most valuable skills a musician can develop.

If your child would benefit from help building those skills, learn more about private music lessons at PAC Music Academy.