Robick and Deliberate Practice

I am *so* glad I found out about the principles of deliberate practice very shortly after I took up bass playing. A key element of deliberate practice is the idea that becoming an expert at something has little to do with "talent" or doing something a large number of times, and more to do with how you practice. Or to put it another way: it takes the adage "practice makes perfect" to "perfect practice makes perfect".

I want to focus in this article on a specific tool that has helped me put those principles into practice to support my bass playing, in particular learning new songs and transcribing songs. So I won't cover deliberate practice in much more detail here, but if you're interested in finding out more, I can highly recommend Paul Wolfe's material on the topic. Paul is working on a new website to be launched later this year (Deliberate Practice 2.0), and you can be sure I'll be signing up for that as soon as I can!

And I'm *so* glad I have been religiously sticking to the principles of deliberate practice since starting to play bass (well, "more or less" religiously). So that entitles me to preach about what I practice (pun intended!)

So back to that tool that's helped me so much. It's called Robick, and it's an iOS app (from iOS 4.2 onwards) available from the App Store. At the time of writing it costs under 3 EUR.

robick in the App Store - you'll find it under the iPhone apps (but it works on the iPad as well)

The interface is simple and functional, based around a black "doughnut" with a big play/pause button in the middle.

At the top you can see information on the track currently loaded (Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" - one of my all-time favourite bass lines, and one with so many intricacies (lots of notes, dead notes, swung sixteenth notes, laid back feeling, fastish tempo) that I would not stand a chance of ever learning this unless I approached it the right way - the deliberate practice way).

Robick has 3 "modes", you cycle between the modes using the third icon from the right at the bottom. The modes are:

• playback (the one we can see above)
• key/pitch/tempo
• EQ

Here are a couple of pictures of the other modes:

But for the moment, back to the "playback" mode:

Hitting the play button plays the track. You probably guessed that. But you know how when you're learning something it makes sense to listen to it many times in a loop, and then play the same bit many times in a loop? For example: the bridge, the last four bars of the chorus, "that fiddly bit between 45 and 52 seconds"? Well, if you activate the darker of the two rings in the "doughnut", you can adjust the ring to cover just the section you want to listen to. This is what it would look like then:

This is the bit between 0:38 and 1:09 in the song, as you can see from the info at the top right. And when playback reaches the end of the section, guess what? It goes back to the beginning and plays it all over again. (If you know more about deliberate practice and are thinking about "chunking" now, you're spot on!)




But you know how it is: all very well listening to that bit over and over again, but you can't work out what's going on (and you certainly can't play along to it) because: it's too fast.


So slow it down then. See those little tags at the bottom left? Well, if you click on "tempo", robick switches to key/pitch/tempo mode, allowing you to slow it down:

This is how I started "I Wish" - at 70% of original speed. And you know the deliberate practice mantra of (usually) 10 perfect repetitions before moving on. So, play that bit 10 times and then allow yourself to step up a notch: to 72% or 75% or 80% (I tend to go up in increments of 5%, but there is no hard and fast rule for this. The only hard and fast rule is: only "up the tempo" when you've done it perfectly 10 times (or whatever the number is).

If you know more about deliberate practice and are now thinking about Mozart, his father and the peas in his jacket pocket, you're spot on!

And the principle of starting slow (even if it feels like a dirge) is just tortoise and hare stuff.

So, I'm focussing on a little chunk of the song I want to learn, and I'm taking it sloooooowly. But I can't really hear what's going on in the bassline, there's too much - well, apologies to guitarists, keyboard players, singers and those unluckly enough not to have chosen the bass ;-) - "distraction".

So, mode 3 (EQ) can help. Filter out the mids and the highs, crank up the lows, and see what happens:

Depending on the mix of the song in question, you may need different settings, and this is a 3 EUR app remember and not a top-of-the-range equalizer. But it helps.

I'm sure you can figure out where this is going. And if you keep at it as religiously as I do (*ahem), you'll have "I Wish" in your fingers in no time. So: more tracks, please. OK, click on the little quaver symbol (second from the right at the bottom) and select other tracks from your iPod to work on (there are some exceptions (DRM protected files), but I only very rarely stumble across a file that robick can't handle).

You can group the songs you're working on in playlists (for example if you play in more than one band, or if you want to have a set of tracks for warmup (I used mp3's with simple drum tracks for example)).

Oh, before I forget: when you're up to 100% speed, it's usually worth going beyond 100%. Again, you know it is: you're on stage, you're nervous, adrenaline's rushing, and the drummer counts you in at 110bpm rather than 105bpm. If you've never practiced beyond 100% original speed, the next few minutes aren't going to be enjoyable (and you're increasing the danger of things like RSI).

And again, you practice in the original key, only to find that the singer of the band you're in has a different range, and you need to play a couple of semitones below the original key. So use the "key/pitch/tempo" mode to adjust the key (without affecting the tempo):

Of course, you can combine these are play 10 semitones above original and at 150% tempo. And low and behold, you have the "Alvin and the chipmunks on speed" cover version of "I Wish".

If you forget what all the symbols are for and how to do things, the "i" for information symbol at the bottom right of the "doughnut" will give you onscreen help:

So, is this the perfect practice app? No, of course not. But it is VERY good.

Things that would make it better:

• better searching when importing songs
• the ability to increase the tempo of an increment by x% (e.g. play the loop 10 times through at 60% speed, then play it 10 times at 60% + x and so on). On the other hand: remember, you only move on when you've played 10 times perfectly and a 3 EUR app will never be able to take that decision away from you (and you shouldn't let it, either). So, that leads me to my biggest wish:
• a sort of "reset" or "undo" function, to take all the settings in the key/pitch/tempo and EQ modes back to the original settings at one swipe). That is: from "Alvin and the Chipmunks on speed" back to "Stevie Wonder...no speed...just cool". You can achieve the same by pulling the track in from your library again, but that's a few more clicks.

In summary, this app is excellent value for money (I'd have happily paid more than I did for it).



Looking forward to your feedback (but please be gentle, this is my first non-business blog ;-)

Paul