Finding interest in technical exercises

English

Technical exercises can seem very boring, yet there's a very good chance you're already using them without realising it. Have you ever taken a difficult section out of the song to practice by itself? If so, you just made an exercise!

The reason why this exercise isn't a drudge to practice is that it's clear the value it is providing to you. It is related to something that you're already interested in learning, and practising it will quickly show results and make that difficult section easy for you to play.

And that's the key to finding interest in technical exercises, understanding how they are helping you to make progress.

The types of exercises

While often lumped together, I believe that exercises fall into two broad categories:

Isolating details to practise separately

Playing an instrument is a complex task with multiple things happening at once, and yet we can only consciously focus on one thing at a time. Many exercises exist to isolate a detail, so that we can give it our whole attention.

This includes exercises made from parts of a song, and in particularly difficult cases it can be taken to a much smaller scale. You could start with clapping the rhythm, then learn the fingerings and breath pressures later.

Exhaustively learning an instrument

One way of approaching an instrument is to learn only what you need to play one song. But, if this is done, there are many note transitions that are not being practised.

That becomes a problem when learning new music, because every time you encounter a note transition you haven't learned yet, it will feel abnormally difficult. If you're sight reading or improvising there's a good chance your flow will stall.

The point of exercises like scales, arpeggios, and intervals is to exhaustively learn the instrument: to learn every single possible note transition, and learn which notes are often played together.

Etudes are another kind of exercise in this category. They take something like a scale, arpeggio, or other note pattern and arrange it in a way that's musically interesting.

What kinds of exercises should I practice?

It really depends on where you are in your music journey. For instance, if you're a total beginner eager to learn to play some songs, being expected to learn a huge collection of scales would probably be off-putting.

If you are a beginner, the best kind of exercise is probably to identify any parts of the songs you're learning that you find difficult, and practice these slowly in isolation.
As you gain experience the value of practising things like scales, intervals will start to become apparent, and it would then be worthwhile starting to introduce them into your practice, possibly learning them in the order of increasing sharps / flats.

In any regard, its important to understand why you're practising the exercise, and what value it's offering you.

For an exercise to be valuable it need to be appropriate for your level and if something is too difficult it may feel unbearable leading you to abandoning it. Exercises can always be made easier by breaking them into smaller chunks, and there is some guidance on difficulty scaling in the article Practising sight reading.

Other tips

Another great way to find interest in technical exercises is to look at the details. While at a surface level a technical exercise may appear to be a repetition of the same thing, if you really pay attention to what you are doing, you will see that this is not the case.

Every time that you play through the exercise, your performance will be slightly different. There is value to be found in noticing how those errors reduce over time.

Also, mix up your practice of exercises with other things you enjoy doing. Say:

Work on scales for 5 minutes.
Then play a tune
Then work on intervals for 5 minutes.

There is a good chance that this is actually more efficient as well due to the spacing effect, people learn best in short practice sessions spread out in time.