Welcome to the Upside Down: Where Your Practice Gets Weirdly Creative
- Apr 25
- 6 min read
For this blog post I am going to give you some tips on how to practice a musical instrument (or voice) in a way that makes you improve quickly but involves doing the complete opposite to what you would normally do.
I am a brass player, and a lot of my examples will be directly suitable to brass playing but there is no reason that the same logic cannot be applied to any musical instrument and be suitable for a musician of any ability.
I practice a lot (currently in between watching Stranger Things 🤣) and also do a lot of teaching, so finding new creative ways to practice is important in order to have fun and keep making progress. Something I find myself doing, is altering what I am playing in a way that completely changes what I am learning, yet still manages to help me get better at whatever needs improvement.
Think about it this way, if you regularly practice doing something more challenging than what you eventually need to do, then that thing will start to feel easier. Too many times I hear teachers, conductors and students labelling things as 'hard', but all this does is teach us that something is hard. If we believe it is hard then it will be, whereas a better approach is to try and tackle something beyond or just creatively different to what you need and you will then improve through a process of evolution.
Above the Clouds / Below the Abyss
High or low range is something many musicians have to work on and how to master the extremes of range can be a secret that few ever find out. When learning something that is very high, here are a few things you can try:
1) Play it down the octave or even down multiple octaves while you are learning it. This way, you will not drain your strength but in fact, should strengthen your core breathing muscles and solidify your understanding of the intervals required.
2) If you have a very high passage to learn, write the part up a tone and practice it like that rather than at the actual pitch. You might prefer to have a romantic meal with a Demogorgon, but this is the point of this blog post, finding completely different ways to tackle musical or technical challenges will lead to a higher level of musicality and technique.
Freakish Scream / Creepy Whisper
Similarly to high and low range, if you have a piece of music that is all to be played very loud, this can be tiring to practice. Resting time during your practice sessions are vital but if you are playing very loud for long periods, while this is great if done sensibly, you might feel you need longer to rest. It could mean you get less practice done that day which is obviously not ideal. So, it is such a simple tip, but working on music at a comfortable dynamic can help you learn the music faster.
Sometimes it is those very quiet moments in music that can create the fear for us as musicians so never be afraid to practice these bits loudly because it can boost your confidence. Once you are feeling confident you can back off the volume.
Another great way to practice slow music, is to add large crescendos and diminuendos (like a fast swell up and down) on all the long notes. It feels very awkward to do this and totally disrupts the flow and shape of the music, meaning once you put it back to normal, it feels nice and smooth.
Bike Chase / Frozen in the Void
Again, a very obvious practice tip, which this time relates to the tempo you work on things. I always learn new pieces at half-tempo. Young students often lack patience and practice things too fast or without a metronome. To flip this idea upside down, if you are learning a slow piece of music, would you ever try playing it at a really fast tempo? I find this helps a lot with pitching and just from doing this a few times it can make the slow, correct version feel so much easier to play.
Clean Transmission / Signal Distortion
Articulation is a huge area for every musician and important for colours and emotion in the music you play. For a brass player we might have music all tongued, all slurred or a mixture of both. I regularly practice with the opposite articulation and find it helps a lot.
Accents can also be used when they are not written in the music. Practice accenting off-beat notes in the passage you are learning. It will feel strange and not very musical but when you remove them you will have one less thing to think about, making what you need to play feel easier.
Left/Right Confusion
This is easier on some instruments than others but can completely mess up your mind in a good way! The simple act of playing your instrument is suddenly made to be almost impossible when you swap from your dominant hand to your weaker hand. It might be you have to hold your instrument completely wrong or make each hand do the complete opposite job to what they should. If you then do a bit of work this way round on music you are learning, you will notice the difference when you go back, you have tricked your brain and will have a new grateful appreciation for the comfort of being back to normal.
Remote Viewing Ability
A powerful skill for any musician is visualisation and one area this works with, is performance anxiety. Perhaps you fear a large concert hall, but if you work on visualising that you are sat in your practice room then it is possible to imagine that while on the stage. The important part of this though, is with how you prepare, because you need to do the opposite when you are in your practice room. Imagine you are on the stage, imagine a full audience with lots of famous people in the front row. Practice running your concert repertoire all the way through with no stopping so that you can then perform accurately while under pressure.
Another powerful visualisation technique is to imagine the outcome you want to happen. Imagine that it has already happened and you are celebrating from your successful performance. Belief and positivity are the killers of worry and stress, so force yourself to think like this even if it doesn't come naturally to you.
Morse-Code Messages
Changing rhythms in the music you are working on works in similar ways to many things I have mentioned already. Even rhythms are much easier to play than uneven rhythms. For example, if you have a lot of fast running semi-quavers to learn, you can try turning the rhythm into a swing style, this then forces you to have to move faster between half of the notes. As before, after doing this for a while, it feels like you have more time and space when you put the rhythm back to normal.
There are many variations in this sort of exercise, so get creative or if you wanted help with how to use these techniques, think about booking a lesson with me.
Sensory Deprivation
In Stranger Things, the character 'Eleven' gets put in a sensory deprivation tank to allow her to channel her psychic abilities. Playing in the dark is something I do, usually when running through pieces of music which I will be performing from memory. In some concert halls, it is so dark off-stage that when you are a soloist stood at the front, the light on you is so bright, you cannot see the audience. This is a strange experience, so preparing for it really helps. It is also good just to remove one of the senses (sight) and you might find that you play more musically.
This is also useful for rock musicians who often perform on stages where lighting might change and you cannot rely on looking at your guitar frets. Practice under performance circumstances and you will be guaranteed to perform better.
My brass teaching is based on my experiences and you might need to adapt or experiment a bit to see what works for you. Try and set measurable targets in your practice so you can easily track your own progress.
If you enjoyed watching Stranger Things, why not read the books, take a look here or grab the audio soundtracks here. These are affiliate links.
Thanks for reading and good luck! ❤
Mark Glover
25/4/26
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