I have never liked the saying ‘practice makes perfect’. It implies that something in music is done a specific way meriting perfection. In my mind music is too human and subjective to be perfect. I once had a music teacher in high school who never gave out 100% because he said that you cannot be perfect in music, and even though that annoyed me, it always stuck.
And this is something that I have taken into my lessons with my students. I never tell them to come back to me the next week with something perfect. I just want to see that they worked on it, failed, worked on it, got better and come back to our lesson with questions. That to me is a much better goal than perfection. Instead of perfection, we should be critical about the way we practice and the things we work on. We should be able to identify our mistakes and know when something felt right. That’s why practice cannot make perfect, but rather ‘practice makes better’. And as musicians, being better than we were yesterday should always be the goal.
Hilary