His coaching fostered powerful inspiration...

“He offered invaluable advice on learning and practice techniques to our students through informative lectures and his uniquely insightful Practiclasses. Music students and teachers were introduced to useful new learning strategies with fresh perspectives on essential practice habits through evidence-based approaches. Mr. Goodhart brought effusive enthusiasm to his coaching and fostered powerful inspiration, which reverberates throughout the School of Music weeks after his visit.”

University of Louisville, KY

I was so disappointed with my progress that when I went to college I began studying classical music. I only did it to try and get better, and that became my major. I really didn’t see that coming as I could barely read music when I started. I knew what it was like to try and teach myself, and I figured I could use some professional guidance. I finished a masters degree in classical performance, but still had many of the same problems as other students. Really hard sections that would never go right in lessons or performance, and I was super nervous before and during performances no matter how much I worked, for instance.

There were times, especially in the early years of my music major, I couldn’t get myself to practice nearly as much as I knew I should, or was expected to. After a few years of ‘just (barely) getting by’ I finally got myself practicing more, I got better, but still had sections in my music that would fall apart in performance no matter how hard I tried. I’d be working on those sections up to the day of performance hoping that somehow I’d get it together enough to pull it off in concert. It never worked. I played well enough for some people to think I was pretty good, but I wasn’t and it really bothered me.

Then, in graduate school, I got bit by the bug. For the first time ever I started practicing 5-7 hours a day every day. I did get better, but I’d work like crazy and there would still be numerous difficult sections that would not go well in performance. I’d make all kinds of little mistakes that affected my sound too. People said they liked my playing, but I knew that nobody pays for a concert ticket to hear a player totally miss 10% or more of the intended performance.

And boy was I scared. I was scared before I walked on stage and it got worse from there. Stage fright is real and my performance always suffered a little or a lot, and no matter what I couldn’t enjoy myself.

I only realized later that the ‘method’ I was using, the ‘method’ most everyone uses (except the super ‘talented’ ones) is one I’ve heard referred to as ‘Play and pray’. I just ‘practiced’ like crazy and hoped that enough of it would eventually work. I could never figure out how to get over the hump and play like I heard many artists, or my super ‘talented’ fellow students, play.

My teachers did very little to develop how I practiced, and conversations about it with my fellow students were almost always about how much we did (or didn’t!) do not what we did when we practiced.

For my masters recital I used a technique from cognitive science, pretty much out of desperation, without even realizing it. I just kind of thought it up. We all discover bits of these science things because the science describes how learning works. If we learn a way to get better then it can be found in the science. I worked it very hard and for the first time I wasn’t nervous and gave my best performance ever, though I still had those tough sections that went badly.

Here’s the thing, I never used that technique for performance again for over 10 years, and then only sparingly. I was experiencing what I’d find the research shows – even when learners use these methods and they work most people will go back to the familiar ways that are not as effective. 

This has made me realize how important guidance and coaching is for practicing. I wish I had someone to do that for me at the time, I would have saved years and a ton of disappointment.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I even had to get up and walk off stage at one point because I completely blanked in the middle of a Bach prelude (From the second Lute Suite if you must know). I snuck out of the hall immediately and didn’t speak to anyone, it was horrible. Even that did not make me return to the perfect memory technique I had used in college(?!)

After I got my masters I was hired to begin and run a music program at a prestigious high school. I had been teaching in graduate school, and on the side, and could get students to respectable levels of early performance following the play and pray non-plan. Some did better and others not as well. I wish I knew at the time it was just a matter of making some changes in the way they practiced. The sloppy mistakes they made went unnoticed by loving parents and friends, and most people were just thrilled to hear high schoolers playing 90% of the music well.

But I had a secret. If a student really worked and got to a level in which they’d need to play those really fast scale passages, or super tough chord changes at tempo, or finger twisting arpeggio patterns I did not know how to get them there. I also spent far too much time trying to master difficult sections in rehearsal with my more advanced groups.

I could always cover for that because nobody had advanced beyond my teaching ability, but that would change as I built an excellent high school music program, and I was scared.

I was teaching beginning instrument classes. I had never been in any in high school, so I started by trying to figure out what the average, untalented, student could do so that my expectations would be fair for everyone.

After five years of looking for talent and developing my practice knowledge I found that it was only about how much and how one practices, not ‘talent’.

This process caused me to look very deeply at practicing for the first time. I developed a solid practice protocol for my students, or as solid as I could be before understanding cognitive science. 

Of course, like everyone else, over time I came into contact with some of the scientific ideas through ‘tips and tricks’ from teachers, masterclasses and presentations at conferences. This gave me a few things, and I was excited about that, but I didn’t realize I had no depth of knowledge. I learned basic ways to use contextual interference, visualization/retrieval and one or two other ideas though I had no idea what they were or how they worked. It was enough to get students to sound great as beginners, and pretty darn good as intermediate musicians.

But I had a secret. If a student really worked and got to the next level I did not know how to get them there. I also did not know how to get myself there.

For the next five years I experimented, incorporated all the good ‘tips and tricks’ I could find and improved the practice design I used for myself and my students. Then, bam, I read a book about cognitive science and talent. Ten years into teaching high school everything I had struggled to learn fell into place. I knew I had begun to find the real answers. I also realized I had a lot of holes in my knowledge to fill despite being an award winning music teacher.

I devoured books and studies in the neuroscience and psychology of skill development, and that has not stopped to this day. I never studied that stuff so it took a long time for me to learn how to understand it. The first study I ever read took me two weeks! That was not fun but I figured I needed the information. Over time I got better at it. I became even more enthusiastic as I tested more and more of this information in my teaching. Through that I began to develop ways to explain these concepts to anyone who started out just like me, with no knowledge. I learned to teach and explain these things to my students so they could understand and use the concepts creatively in their practice.

During all of this time I kept practicing and performing here and there for several years. The job took a lot of time and I liked it. I kept telling myself I would get back to full time practice, but did not for a while.

Then I messed up my hand. It was a football injury ☺ For the first day of the NFL season we have a party called ‘Goodhart Bowl’, set up multiple TV’s and turn our living room into a sports bar. This is back when TV’s were huge and heavy. Heck, when I was your age I was the same age as you are right now.

I was carrying one of those TV’s back to my bedroom and smashed the ring finger of my left hand between the TV and the door jamb. Worst pain I ever felt. Luckily I bandaged it well enough to keep it from getting infected, but lost feeling in a third of the finger and went to see a doctor. I had to take an extended time off playing, and then start back with two 15 minute sessions/day. Let me tell you it is harder to do that than three hours. You barely get going then have to stop.

I had never considered that I might never be able to play again, and it was a hard realization. I’ve been playing my whole teenaged and adult life. That is when I realized what it really meant to me.

This was around the same time I discovered cognitive science. I figured I could only be a few thousand hours away from being really good, and I was discovering the path to take, so I’d rededicate myself to practicing using this new information as my rehab when I could practice more than 15 minutes.

There was one problem I only figured out later, it would take years of experimentation and learning to really understand how to do this. I kept trying new solutions and refining the way I did things. I found that some things weren’t working and got rid of them. Sometimes I’d find years later I was using those things wrong and use them again correctly. I’d learn more from the science I was reading and that would change things. It takes years of experimentation to discover this stuff.

I felt, as most people do, that I put in enough effort to be really good. I was a lot better, but still was not where I wanted to be. This is because the practice journey is not a straight line, and unless we’ve got someone to guide it in a very specific ongoing way we will have to make our own way. That is if we figure these things out at all.

I spent years reading studies and books, going to conferences and interacting with other teachers who had some of this knowledge. I experimented with my practicing and when things worked I had my students do them and would refine. My playing ability shot up dramatically the more I learned. I learned even more by teaching it to students over thousands of hours.

At this point I got my music teachers together and started teaching it to them. All of this applied to academics as well, so invited other faculty to meetings to teach them. I even applied it to sports coaching.

I wanted to share this with everyone and started lecturing at conferences, writing about it and visiting schools to train teachers and students of all levels. I’m as surprised as anyone that some high school music teacher has put this together, but I have and it is SO MUCH FUN to share and watch the results. I have developed personal coaching programs, video lectures, book instruction and more to spread the word. I left the formal teaching world years ago to focus on this. 

My other ongoing project is focusing on my own practicing which continually updates my coaching and instruction. For the first time in my life I’m happy with how I play. 

All of this did something else as well. Without addressing it at all the fear and nervousness I had in performance just disappeared in myself and my students. I’ve always had it as bad as anyone, as did everyone I knew. Nothing I tried seemed to help and I really worked hard. I thought I had tried everything. It turned out that there was still something I had not tried. It was amazing. It turns out that even when we work really hard we usually miss the type of things we need to do to play confidently with ease. What happened? I found that once I learned the best way to practice I would get on stage and my hands would move automagically to everywhere they needed to go whether I was scared as heck or not. As this continued I felt more and more at ease and found enjoyment in the performance.

Mic drop.

☺