What Sports and Organ Practice Have in Common?

Do you want to achieve success as an organist? In order to do this, you will need to outrank your competitors. One of the ways which helps you to become better than your fellow organists is to look around and see how people perfect their skills in other professions. In this article, I will show you what sports and organ practice have in common.

Try to be unique in your organ practice. Compare your practice to other areas of life and see if you can use similar techniques in your practice.

For example, you could take a look at athletes in various sports and see how they practice their moves. You see, sports and music are similar in that both activities require countless repetitions of similar movements which leads to mastery.

For instance, in basketball a player who wants to improve his/her shots from a certain position must practice them repeatedly hundreds if not thousands of times. In a way, the best basketball player will practice until every single one of his/her shots is successful. In a way, his/her movements have to become automatic.

The same is with organ playing. If you run into the problematic spot in you organ score and want to perfect it, you must practice it repeatedly. You must play it right until literally you just can't make the same mistake again.

In my experience, this process takes around 100 repetitions spread over time. I remember, when I tried to perfect "the Gigue" Fugue in G major, BWV 577 by Bach some years ago.

I mastered this fugue in 10 days by repeating each fragment 10 times every day. First 10 repetitions were just a good start but felt quite shaky. Then with every set of 10 new repetitions, it was exciting to see gradual improvements in the performance of this piece.

Of course, I completely memorized this fugue in the process. My feet movements became automatic thanks to pedal preparation technique I was using. I couldn't miss a note in the pedal line even if I wanted to.

Find and apply similar techniques used in sports in your organ practice today. In time, they will empower you to become a respected expert and a leader whom others will want to follow.

By the way, do you want to learn my special powerful techniques which help me to master any piece of organ music up to 10 times faster? If so, download my FREE Organ Practice Guide.

Or if you really want to learn to play any organ composition at sight fluently and without mistakes while working only 15 minutes a day, check out my systematic master course in Organ Sight-Reading.