From a book describing a summer school in which a group of amateur pianists are about to be taught by William Fong, a professor of music and concert pianist.

He turns to the group.

"Who has more than fifteen minutes to practise a day?"

Two hands go up. William looks genuinely thrown by this and gazes up at the ceiling for about ten seconds, wondering what he could possibly say.

"Because of your working lives?"

We nod.

"You have got to put in the hours. The piano, of all instruments, is the most athletic. At some point in your life you have to spend maybe two hours a day and you would see a huge difference in what you were able to do. If I have a concert coming up I can do three hours a day. But when I was 13 or 14 I was doing five or six hours a day. That means I have got money in the bank. When doing Young Musician of the Year I was working seven or eight hours a day. So my fingers really did work very well, and that helps later in life."

We all look chastised.

Mentally substitute go for music, and I think that will strike a chord. A familiar one. But then the teacher offers a little encouragement.

"There's no reason any of you can't feel the sense that your technique is growing all the time, no matter if you're 10 or 80 or 90. It will certainly improve. Now if you've got only fifteen minutes a day, you have to extremely well organised. If I had fifteen minutes a day and I was working on the Chopin G minor Ballade I'd split my time into three portions. The first five minutes I'd maybe focus on the last page. That would also be my warm-up. The next five minutes I'd work really hard at the scales. You have to be really warmed up for that."

So, if we amateur go players who can, or will, only spend fifteen minutes a day wish to improve, we have to be extremely well organised. How then do we organise our quarter of an hour? What is the equivalent way to warm up? What is the equivalent of scales?

Actually the teacher went on to make an assumption (in slight desperation, I thought!) that the amateurs would actually be able to spend 90 minutes at the weekend, so some more profound work could be done then, but he still maintained that that time had to be cut into chunks of fifteen minutes. Furthermore, he insisted that the chunks had or be kept rigidly to fifteen minutes - no borrowing two minutes from the next chunk. That way - keeping to the deadline - maximum focus and so maximum effect could be achieved. Also, one of those fifteen-minute weekend sessions had to spent on a complete performance.

My guess at a go equivalent would be that the "complete performance" would be playing over as much of a pro game record as fits into that time, and another fifteen-minute session would be spent on new tsumego problems. During the week, the equivalent of the scales practice (five minutes) would be going through tsumego problems you know and have already solved. But what else, and are there alternatives?

And what about the fifteen-minute concept in real life? I have heard there are people who claim to map out their whole lives into fifteen-minute chunks, and I have met and/or worked with people who chunk at least some of their time like this. In practice, though, it does not seem to work out as planned very often. The guy who wrote the book, for example, (Alan Rusbridger) was inspired to learn the Gm Ballade over a year or so at the rate of 20 minutes a day, but being the editor of a national paper during very eventful times he had to skip very many days, and even on the days he could practise, it was often after just a few hours sleep. His practice was, however, often spent with teachers (who sometimes gave conflicting advice!). All the time, at the age of 57, he was haunted and sometimes demoralised by YouTube videos of teenyboppers rattling off the Ballade. Yet he achieved his goal. In go terms I'd say he went from 4-dan to 6-dan, or thereabouts. So the dedication can pay off, even when highly imperfect.

What do you think are the go lessons and equivalents?

Playing a standard 8 minutes absolute time blitz game on KGS would chunk games into time slots close to 15 minutes each game.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

I don't know anything to answer the question - but the book looks rather interesting.

That timing thing rings pretty true. If I only have fifteen minutes I do some tsumego. Though, I have to be careful, somehow those can exhaust my focus for other things. In music for example I think scales(Joseki) are a waste of time for amateurs, just learn songs(Fuseki).

I think the analogy between scales/joseki and songs/fuseki is just meaningless, I can't see any remotely strong connection.

As for the general point about amateurs should learn, I suspect it comes down to what the amateur wants to get out of things. I'd say scales are clearly important and useful for improvement past a certain level, and that they are good practice in general for just about anyone. If one is happy with current ability to play a particular set of songs then whatever, but I'm not sure many people would call them a 'waste of time' for anyone looking to improve or practice efficiently.

My point is that, even if you can play scales well, you still have to learn songs, and the gap between scales and songs is so large, since scales ignore things like rhythm and large intervals, that they are indeed a waste of time. I think for younger players with a long career in front of them and professionals who are expected to sight read, scales are fine. Subjectively, I think major scales based music all sounds the same. Oh noes here comes the dominant seventh, at 240 bpm. Anyway, from an audiences perspective all that matters are songs. Same goes for Joseki out of context, they are so far from being useful, that they are a waste of time practicing the variations.

The problem with scales is they are culturally limiting. Take for example Chinese scales, they don't modulate keys, and seldom use the fourth or seventh. In fact their instruments aren't even equal tempered most noticeably the octave isn't even perfect. Just learn songs...

I don't remember the original context of this proverb but applies equally well to music, go, and everything else:

Miracles start to happen after the first hour of practice.

If you really want to improve you should certainly look into trying to get more time for go instead of trying to do as much as possible in fifteen minutes.

(Also, speaking as a decent amateur musician - I'm not going to waste time arguing with SmoothOper because that never worked well in the past. But he is dead wrong. Please don't ignore scales!)

I'm very amateur (only one year of weekly guitar lessons) but my best weeks were the weeks where I practiced just scales at home. On class day I could easily play the required passages, without needing to "think" about where that A# is. It was just "there" in my fingers.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Does that book offer any evidence that the indicated advice works? It just seems to be case of a frustrated teacher having no real answer to students who have much, much less commitment than the author did.

I think this is an issue in go, too. The life of an insei---and we can assume most professionals went through that---probably allows for a lot of inefficiencies simply because of the volume of study. As professionals, they may have no clue what they can cut down or cut out and still make some progress, because that was never their experience.

Have you ever played a guzheng? Good luck playing anything but G pentatonic on it(or D pentatonic if you retune it).

I don't see the point. I was referring to my practice with a guitar. Of course if I'm doing music by smashing my pen against my desktop I'll probably need to learn something which are not scales. But for a piano, guitar and most western scaled instruments, scales are what you need to learn to master the instrument (see biographies of Bill Evans, John Coltrane as example)

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

If you have a narrow minded "pen bashing" view of music sure lock yourself in your room and practice scales to your hearts desire. My point is there are billions of people who learn music without western notions of scales chords and key modulations, therefore as an amateur musician it is possible to ignore or at least not practice those ideas, and in fact on some instruments you only really have one scale, so there isn't much to practice there anyway.

Narrow minded? Rhythm is the basic building block of music. And I was talking (as most of this post) about instruments that DO need the 'Western notions' of scales, chords, progressions, major, minors and all these funny things.

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

So as I was saying scales are a waste of time. There is no reason to adhere to a particularly narrow minded attitude about music.

As someone with a masters degree in music performance I can speak with some small amount of authority on this subject. I partly disagree with Fong's statements as relayed by John Fairbairn. It is true that there is no substitute for hard work, but equating the amount of time you practice with work is a mistake that far too many musicians fall into. When I was preparing for my grad school auditions I was practicing about 8 hours a day, but relatively speaking I did not get much accomplished. The key to mastering music is how you practice. Two hours of well mindful deliberate practice is worth more than 8 hours of drilling a passage mindlessly. Many of the world's most famous and successful classical musicians practice for 2 hours or fewer a day.

Mindful, deliberate practice in when instead of playing a piece over and over again trying to weed out the mistakes, you stop, analyze why the mistake was made, formulate a plan to fix that mistake, and set that plan in motion. This kind of practice takes an incredible amount of concentration, and is exhausting.

In the same way, spending hours a day "studying" go will not benefit you very much of you do not engage in deliberate practice. It takes 10 times the mental effort to practice this way, but the result is correspondingly larger.

All true, but that being said, 15 minutes a day is still not enough no matter how mindfully you practice!

What do you play?

I am a percussionist. I play mostly classical; I am in a few orchestras in the Denver area. But this year I have started a wedding music duo with my wife who plays flute while I play vibraphone, so I have been learning jazz and popular style recently.

Here is my Duo's website.
http://flutevibes.com/

My sentiments agree with


As with sports, I think a certain "warm up" period is needed in training anything at a reasonably high level.
With musical instruments and sports one could argue using purely physical reasons, but I think it also applies to mind sports such as chess and go.

You just can't bring your best performance out of the blue.

But then again this may be a question regarding playing strength. Whether it also applies to efficiency of practice is another question (I think it does).

Either way, 15 minutes seems extremely short.

IMO guqin and xiao go well with weiqi. I imagine the princes of your snapping stones on the board listening to the bass notes and whooshing sound of fingers sliding along the hollow board, like flowing water.