Practising the ocarina effectively

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Perhaps the best place to start answering the question of practising the ocarina effectively is to ask 'Why do you need to practise playing the ocarina at all?'

When an experienced musician plays an instrument, they do not consciously think about the mechanics of interacting with the instrument. They instead think about what they want to play, and it 'just happens'. A newcomer's experience is entirely different, though. Everything feels arduous, and you have to think about every little detail.

That arises because the mind has two parts: conscious and subconscious.

Many things that you do day to day, such as talking to a friend while walking, are handled by your subconscious mind. You only need to think about your conversation, and walking just happens.

Practice is a way to make things automatic in this way, and it works something like this:

Repetition: The human mind has evolved to be lazy, and your subconscious loves to automate the things that you do frequently. We can deliberately exploit that by repeating the same task over and over.
Consolidation: When you sleep, your mind sorts through everything you've been doing. If it notices something that you've been doing a lot, it starts to automate it.

This is often called 'muscle memory', but that term can be misleading. You can train your subconscious to hear sheet music in your head, for example. The process is similar, yet the result does not involve one's muscles.

The goal of practice is to develop this 'muscle memory', or subconscious automation, that allows you to interact with your instrument effortlessly, understand music you hear, and such. It can be approached as follows:

1: Choose ONE ocarina and stick with it

A complexity of practising the ocarina is that instruments from different makers differ hugely in their playing characteristics and ergonomics. Using multiple ocarinas complicates learning because you are not feeding your subconscious consistent information.

It's much easier to learn to play well if you choose one good quality ocarina and stick with it. Your practice can then create muscle memory for the breath curve, finger hole locations, and unique ergonomics of supporting the instrument on the high and low notes.

2: Know the things that go into exceptional playing

In my time performing, I've often encountered people who express admiration for others that can play instruments. But they never stop to question why the people they are admiring can do that.

The thing is, playing the ocarina is ultimately a collection of learned mechanical skills. In fact, if it were possible to exactly copy the actions of another player using the same instrument, you would sound identical!

Information isn't magic. Humans are animals that have evolved to obtain information from their environment through their senses. It makes sense that if you haven't taken the time to learn how to do something, you won't be able to do it.

That's why a critical part of effective ocarina practice is an awareness of the skills you need to learn to be able to play well, including:

I'd recommend learning all of these right from the start because they take time to master. By starting with a basic awareness of everything, your skill in everything will naturally grow over time.

3: Breaking things down

Humans have two kinds of memory:

Short-term, or 'working memory', which stores the things that you are thinking about right now.
Long-term memory, that stores the things that you have been doing for years and instinctively know.

When you first learn something new, it must pass through your short-term memory. That's problematic, as short-term memory can only store a very limited amount of information, typically between two and eight things.

Have you been practising a song from beginning to end, but keep making the same mistakes over and over? There's a good chance that this is because your short-term memory is being overwhelmed.

Breaking complex tasks into smaller chunks brings the task within the limits of your short-term memory. For example, if you want to learn to play a song, you may do something like this, as discussed in Playing your first music on the ocarina:

Break the melody into chunks comprising a small number of notes.
Practise the rhythm of each chunk separately by clapping it.
Then learn how to finger the notes.
Finally, you bring everything together.

By splitting up something into smaller elements, each element is brought within the limits of your short-term memory. With practice, these will enter your long-term memory, and your subconscious mind will combine the pieces for you. Doing them at the same time becomes easy.

And here are a few more ideas:

Practise breath control in isolation by playing long tones.
Practise fingering a sequence of notes without blowing. You can even do this without an instrument!
Learn a rhythm by listening to a recording and clapping when each note starts.
Practise listening to music without playing, noticing how the melody moves, and how ornamentation is being used.
Train your ear by learning to differentiate short sequences of notes.

4: The need for regular practice

It is important to practise regularly, preferably every day, because skills will only be remembered if they are actively being used.

A simple and useful model of memory relation is the forgetting curve. Things that are newly learned will be rapidly forgotten. For instance, if you learn a new song today, you may be able to remember most of it tomorrow. If left until two or three days later, however, it will be as if you were starting over.

If you practise something the following day when the retention is still high, you'll build on this and be able to remember it for longer before you need to practise it again.

An adequate approach is to aim to practise for at least five minutes every day. It can actually be more effective to practise in multiple short sessions, vs. one long one, a phenomenon called the spacing effect.

5: Finding fun in the process

Of course, practising regularly will be easy if you find the process fun, but learning to play instruments is not something that happens quickly. Nor is it like mainstream entertainment, designed to drip-feed constant dopamine hits. It is a journey of small gains and gradual refinement. You need to find your own enjoyment in the process.

Initially, this will be easy with the excitement of doing something new, but the human mind is a fickle beast. To stick to it long term, it is important to have something to keep you on track.

Getting involved with groups can be a good option, like open mics, music clubs, and similar. By playing regularly at them, people will start to get to know you, and expect to see you there. Such events can also be a great way of meeting like-minded people.

Another option is to involve other people in your music practice. If you can find someone who is at a similar learning stage, things can be practised together. You can share encouragement, and point out each other's mistakes.

They don't have to be ocarina players. Working with people who have different skills is also great, such as a guitarist or pianist, who could add accompaniment to your playing, and you could add melodic embellishments to theirs.

6: Internalising the possibility space of the ocarina

Imagine you come across a field of tall grass that you need to cross. The first time would be a challenge, but if you repeatedly take the same path, over time the grass would be trampled down, and taking this path would be easy.

By analogy, if you practise the same song on the ocarina over and over, initially it may be difficult, requiring you to think about each finger movement and breath change. But over time, these things become automatic, and playing this one melody, taking this one path through the field, becomes easy.

But what if you wanted to take a different path through the field? Some parts that intersect with your previous path would be easy, but you would mostly be faced with tall grass again, and a difficult job.

This is how playing the ocarina will feel if you learn one song as a whole, and then another as a whole. The parts that are similar to the things you have played before will be easy, but those that are different will feel far more difficult, almost like your practice hadn't gained you anything.

But what about if you instead got a lawn mower and mowed the whole field flat? As there would be no more tall grass to trample down, you could go wherever you wanted.

The ocarina has a limited possibility space. On a single alto C ocarina, if you finger a low C, the following note has to be one of the notes within the instrument's range. If you practice every possible note transition until the fingerings and breath pressures become muscle memory, playing new music is dramatically easier.

This approach can be applied to many aspects of music, from rhythm to sight-reading and playing by ear. It may seem like a lot of work, but it doesn't take as long as it may seem, and will produce results much faster in the long term.

7: Focus on accuracy

When you start, it can be tempting to play everything as fast as possible. However, this won't help you learn. Remember, the goal of practice is not to be able to do something right now, but to train your subconscious mind to do it for you.

The subconscious mind is not smart: it will automate anything that you practise repeatedly:

Practising slowly and as accurately as possible gives your subconscious mind a clear signal to learn. This approach will therefore lead to rapid progress.
Fast, sloppy practice by comparison means that your subconscious mind will learn a lot of mistakes, which you'll then need to unlearn.

Note that sometimes you may not be able to do something flawlessly at first. Sometimes you need to build a foundation before you can access more advanced skills. Just do the best you can.

In practice, some skills take longer to develop than others. It's important to stick with it and try to disconnect from outcomes. Focus on enjoying what's happening right now, and the results will come.

8: Developing fundamental connections

A great deal of what one is doing while learning to play music is developing connections between different ways of expressing the same information.

If you consider pitch, for example, you encounter it expressed:

Literally, in the pitches of sounds you hear.
Visually, in sheet music and other graphical notations.
Mechanically, through the fingerings of an instrument.
Textually, through note names, 'A, B, C' or numbers like '1, 2, 3'.
Intrinsically, by singing.
Touch, by feeling vibrations.

In most cases, a 'can't do' is the result of a missing connection. For instance, if you can't play a melody that you heard on your instrument, it is probably because you have not yet developed a connection from pitches as sound, to the fingerings on your instrument.

One of the challenges of playing music is that it depends on things that people do not naturally do in other areas of life. It may therefore be necessary to spend some time developing the most basic skills before more difficult concepts can be approached. Some of these skills include:

Knowing what it sounds like when a note is played early or late in relation to another.
The ability to match the pitch of one's voice to a pitch they are hearing.
Ability to hear the intonation of other intervals, like octaves or fifths.

For some people, these skills will develop through passive exposure to music, but if they do not for you, they can be learned deliberately. Different people's brains are wired differently and perceive the world in different ways.

Unfortunately, it is easy for the author of a learning resource to entirely omit an aspect of playing an instrument that happened naturally for them. Such resources can lead to a tremendous amount of frustration, as well as to a false belief that one is bad at music, when a change of approach would solve the issue.

It is also worth noting that it can be easier to remember things that relate to what we already know. Approaching the same thing from multiple points of view can help it to 'click', for example learning to sing something, play it on the ocarina, clap the rhythm, and write it out in sheet music.

The music educator Paul Harris calls this approach 'Simultaneous learning', and I'd recommend reading his work.

9: Learn kinaesthetic responses instead of conscious analysis

Humans have the capacity to form 'kinaesthetic responses', and you're probably making use of this right now. If you're fluent in English, you may notice as you're reading these words, you are not sounding them out one letter at a time, but that your mind is doing something magic: recognising the word as a whole, and pronouncing it to you.

Kinaesthetic responses can develop in many different aspects of music, like being able to glance at some sheet music, or hear a song, and instinctively know how to perform that on an instrument. Being able to look at some music and have it play back 'in your mind's ear', is also a kinaesthetic response.

This is what we are generally trying to achieve in music training, and such responses develop over time from exposure to two things in the same context, like hearing some sheet music while looking at it, the brain connects the visual of the notation with the sound.

I suspect that the approaches used historically in music education may work against the formation kinaesthetic responses due to an excessive focus on logical analysis. Sheet music for example has mostly been taught through logic, this position is called this name, this is how you break down and count rhythms, and so on.

One can explain notation like this in a few minutes, yet someone taught in this way won't be able to play much of anything. They will be left slowly logically analysing the music, decoding it into note names, remembering the fingering for that note, counting the rhythm, and then executing the fingering. It is slow and frustrating.

I believe that a better way of approaching this is to learn the muscle memory for how to perform something first through mimicry of physical demonstration, and then associate it with things like notation or ear training afterwards. By teaching like this, one is associating a visual or aural pattern directly to how it would be performed, eliminating the cumbersome logical analysis step.

By understanding the possibility space of kinaesthetic associations that we are trying to develop, we can apply this idea to efficiently learn many skills in music.

10: Be aware that your mind will lie to you

Learning is a chicken-and-egg problem, and because of this, you will only be able to hear the mistakes you have learned to hear. A new musician can play something which sounds fine to them, while an experienced musician will hear loads of mistakes.

Yet, being aware of mistakes is important so that you don't invest energy into practising bad habits. The longer you do something, the harder it will be to stop.

There are a few ways of solving this problem:

Learn to hear errors from the start. As discussed previously, starting your music journey by learning to hear if notes are played in time, or if one note is in tune with another, is very helpful because it allows you to rapidly self correct.
Record yourself. While you are playing, most of your mental processing power is being consumed on the task of playing music. There is little power left over for hearing mistakes. If you record your playing and listen back, you can give it your full attention, and things you had no awareness of come screaming out.
Ask a mentor to check your playing. Having an external perspective and more experience allows them to point out areas that can be improved. As ocarina teachers are hard to come by, enlisting the support of a player of another wind instrument is a practical option. You can also seek advice from players through the Internet by recording yourself.
Make use of practice tools. Tools like a mirror, chromatic tuner, metronome, and tuning drone can be exceptionally useful, revealing what you are doing.

Do note though that how you feel about your playing affects how you perceive it. If you feel happy that you've finally learned to play something, you will probably perceive it as sounding better than it actually is, and the opposite is also true.

11: Matching difficulty to your ability

When you learned to read as a child, did you start out with a huge saga like Terry Pratchett's Discworld? That would be crazy, wouldn't it?

Yet, people constantly make this same mistake when learning musical instruments. They try to do something too hard too soon, then assume that they can't do it at all.

There is a concept called 'flow', which states that if something is too easy, you will find it boring, vs. if something is too hard, it causes too much stress and you may give up. The trick is to keep the difficulty in the middle, the 'goldilocks zone'.

That can be achieved in a few ways:

As discussed above, it is possible to break complex music down and learn it a bit at a time. The downside is that everything you learn takes a lot of time.
The other option is to start out with simple music and work up the difficulty. Music curriculums do this, and are designed to teach a diverse set of skills, giving you the ability to learn new things more easily.

A general takeaway is that if you feel like giving up, you're probably doing something that is too difficult for you. That's why you should find some way of simplifying it, like breaking it down into smaller chunks, slowing it down, or spending more time working on simpler exercises. There is no shame in this.

A teacher or mentor can also do a great deal to help you structure your practice time and pace your learning.

12: Structuring your practice time

It is easy to find guidance online regarding how to organise a practice session, which generally resembles something like:

Warm-ups such as scales.
Learning new music.
Practising known music.
Other things like rhythm exercises or ear training.

This kind of advice isn't awful, but is problematic because it does not address long-term concerns. As noted earlier, the skills that we have learned in the past will only be remembered if they are actively being used.

A naive approach would be to practise everything every day. But it's easy to get into a state where you have vastly more things to practise than you have time for, even if you happen to be able to commit hours of daily time to practice.

Earlier, you learned about the forgetting curve:

If you learn something today, it can be assumed that you'll be able to do it the day after, but beyond that point it may be forgotten.
Practising something during that 'one day after' window means that it will be remembered for approximately two days.
Then, if something is practised two days after this, it will be remembered for about four days.

You can make use of this knowledge to organise your practice over time. This approach is called 'spaced repetition'. It can be applied like this:

Start by writing out everything that you want to practise in a list.
Try to work out what skills are foundational, and which skills depend on other skills. The ability to copy a rhythm by ear, for instance, depends on the ability to hear if you are playing in time.
Choose a few of the most fundamental skills and practise them.

We need to keep track of when we practised things, and approximately how long they will be remembered based on the forgetting curve. As it is the first time you've practised these things, that will be in one day.

Write out the things you practise, the current date and when you next need to practise them on paper or in a spreadsheet.
When you practise on the following day, if you found the task easy, double the interval before the next practice session, otherwise schedule it to be sooner.

By introducing new tasks on different days, you can keep the number of things to practise every day within reasonable bounds, and it ensures that you'll practise something again before it is forgotten.

Exactly what you practise is going to change over time, as a beginner may spend more time working on the fundamentals. With experience, that may shift more towards learning more songs, more complex rhythmic and melodic patterns, or developing playing style.

But whatever you do, don't avoid things you find difficult, as avoiding something is condemning yourself to be bad at it.

13: Correcting mistakes

Even with your best efforts to avoid doing so, you may end up developing techniques you later discover are a bad practice. This is not a problem, and everyone experiences it.

Subconscious training can be changed by consciously taking back control. You return to slow and deliberate practice, incorporating the new technique.

It may seem perverse, but as you do this, the mistake will feel natural, while your new approach will feel wrong and difficult. The new technique feels difficult for the same reason playing a new instrument for the first time feels difficult: it's just new to you.

After a while, the new technique will take over and it becomes automatic.

Further considerations

Nobody becomes an outstanding player straight away, and it is perfectly fine to work at whatever level you are at. Don't compare yourself to others. One day, you'll wake up, and it'll magically become easy.

Learning to play the ocarina does take time because of the conscious/subconscious split. You can understand the logic of what you should be doing in minutes to hours, but developing the muscle memory to actually do it will take far, far longer.

I'd recommend reading the book How We Learn by Benedict Carey, which is a great summary of research into learning and effective practice methods.