The Neuroscience of Smarter Clarinet Practice: My Conversation with Dr. Molly Gebrian

I've read a lot of books about music and practice over the years. Maybe three have genuinely blown me away. Dr. Molly Gebrian's "Learn Faster, Perform Better" is one of them.

What makes this book special isn't just that it validates everything I've been teaching about effective practice. It's that Dr. Gebrian, a violist and neuroscientist, proves WHY these methods work by explaining the actual brain science behind learning music.

I've been sharing this book with the Clarinet Ninja Dojo community since I discovered it, and I was thrilled to sit down with Dr. Gebrian for this podcast conversation.

From Practicing to Understanding Practice

Dr. Gebrian's journey into the neuroscience of practice started at Rice University, where she was pursuing her doctorate in viola at a research institution. She took graduate-level neuroscience classes and worked as assistant director on interdisciplinary symposia about music and the brain.

"The school asked me to teach some informal lunchtime sessions about music and the brain," she explained. "That's when I learned, oh wait, other people find this interesting too."

For the last decade, she's been a viola professor while continuing to research, write, and create content about the science of practicing. People had been telling her for years to write a book, but as any performing musician knows, finding time to write is nearly impossible.

Then the pandemic hit.

"If I'm ever going to write a book, this is the time," she realized. "I could take a whole bunch of time off from practicing to write a book."

The result is a book that can dramatically consolidate the time it takes someone to become an effective practicer. What took me decades to figure out through trial and error, you can now learn systematically through understanding how your brain actually works.

The Chemistry Teacher Who Changed Everything

Before I get into the key insights from our conversation, I want to share a personal story that connects to Dr. Gebrian's research.

In 10th grade, I took chemistry from the teacher nobody wanted. He was weird, his class was impossibly hard, and nobody passed his tests.

On the first day, he said something that changed my life: "I'm going to teach you how to think. You're doing it all wrong."

His method? Pay 100% attention in class. Take far fewer notes than normal. Then, while waiting for the bus home, remember everything that happened in class with no notes, no books. Remember where he stood, what he said, what he was wearing. Everything. Do it again that evening when you brush your teeth or go to bed.

"Everything you can recall without looking at any notes, without using any aids, is stuff that's going to go into your long-term memory and stay there," he explained.

I was a bit of a nerd and very interested in ideas I'd never heard before. This was definitely one of them.

I asked Dr. Gebrian about this: Is there a difference between retaining knowledge versus retaining skills?

Knowledge vs. Skills: What Your Brain Actually Needs

"There is a difference," Dr. Gebrian confirmed. "Factual information is much easier for your brain to learn than skills."

Here's why: To learn a fact, you just need to get the information into your brain. Repetition helps, but you don't need multiple pathways. You just need to encounter it enough times.

Skills are completely different.

"To learn a skill like playing a clarinet passage, you need auditory information, visual information, and motor information," she explained. "You're integrating all of these different sensory streams of information, and that's much harder for your brain to do and takes a lot longer."

This is why you can memorize a historical fact relatively quickly, but learning to play a difficult clarinet passage takes hours of focused practice.

The process your chemistry teacher described, what we call retrieval practice in cognitive science, is powerful because it forces your brain to actively reconstruct information rather than passively reviewing it. When you recall something without aids, you're strengthening those neural pathways.

The Power of Mental Representation

One of the most powerful concepts Dr. Gebrian discusses is mental representation. This goes way beyond simple visualization.

"Mental practice is creating a complete mental representation of whatever you're trying to do," she explained. "For music, that's auditory, what we hear, and kinesthetic, the physical sensations of playing."

This means being aware of pitch, tone quality, dynamics, shaping, and phrasing, plus all the physical aspects of playing. Being able to feel all the physical details in your mind.

Here's where it gets interesting: "If you can imagine it in your head, if you can feel yourself playing it correctly, if you can hear yourself playing it correctly, and the answer is no, you can fix it in your mind. You can really concentrate on wherever the issue is and try to feel it and hear it correctly."

"Once you can do that, it's often either solved or much better on the instrument. It kind of feels like magic."

But it's not magic. It's how your brain works.

"If you don't have a clear mental representation of how you want something to be, how would you be able to do it?" she asked. "If you think about it, it doesn't really make sense."

Mental practice is harder than playing on the instrument. It's right at your challenge point, which is where you do the most learning. If you can sort it out in your mind, then you can sort it out on the instrument.

I shared a story about a friend from Arizona State in the early '90s who won (or came close to winning) the Curtois competition. He played his piece from memory, but I never saw him practice it. When I asked how he did it, he said, "I just thought about it when I rode my bike back and forth to school."

He had developed such a clear mental representation that the physical practice was almost secondary.

The Jazz Lesson: You Must Hear What You Want to Play

This connects to something else I learned through jazz. I studied jazz seriously and worked hard at it. I was good enough that it wasn't embarrassing, but when I heard someone truly improvise at a high level, I knew I wasn't there. That taught me something crucial: you have to hear what you want to play before you play it.

"We should be doing that with printed music," Dr. Gebrian agreed. "But sometimes we're not really taught in that fashion."

She pointed out the disconnect in music education. In Europe, there's more emphasis on sight-singing and integrating aural skills with performance. In the US, you often take a sight-singing class as a freshman, as if it's a skill you can just easily add, with no discussion of how to integrate it into your practicing and playing.

"It's a skill you develop in isolation, and then there's no talk about what you do with this," she said. "Same thing with music history, music theory. You have this information, but let's actually put it into place."

This integration is exactly what I work on with students in the Dojo. Theory, history, and ear training aren't abstract concepts. They help you understand the music, frame the music in a way that you know where you are when you're playing a piece. They help with recollection and all your abilities as a musician.

The Performance Gap: Why You Can Play It But Can't Perform It

Here's a frustration every musician has experienced: You can play a passage perfectly in your practice room. You nail it 10 times in a row. Then you get up to play in studio class or your recital, and things go wrong.

"I really did not understand that distinction when I was a student," Dr. Gebrian admitted. "I thought that just because I could do something, that automatically meant I could perform it. And that's clearly not the case."

The solution? Interleaved practice.

"It's one thing to be able to do something 10 times in a row in the privacy of your practice room," she explained. "It's another thing to do things on the first try at the drop of a hat in a high-pressure situation. It's just a different skill for your brain. It's a more difficult skill for your brain, and it's a skill, so you have to work on it."

If you haven't worked on the skill of just being able to execute something on demand, knowing what you need to think and what you need to remember, of course it's not going to be there when you need it.

Block practice (repeating the same passage over and over) builds fluency, but interleaved practice (mixing different materials and coming back to things unpredictably) builds performance readiness. Dr. Gebrian describes methods for using interleaved practice to test your performance readiness in her book.

"Interleaved practice has been a real game changer for me in that regard," she said.

Challenge Point Theory: Finding Your Sweet Spot

Another critical concept we discussed is challenge point theory. Learning happens at the edge of your abilities, not in your comfort zone and not in the frustration zone.

Too easy? You're not improving.

Too hard? You're just struggling without learning.

The sweet spot? You're successful about 80% of the time.

This is where the magic happens. This is where your brain is engaged enough to make new connections but not so overwhelmed that it shuts down.

This is why the middle-out approach I use in the Dojo works so well for adult beginners. Starting with the Clarion register instead of the traditional chalumeau approach puts students right at their challenge point, building confidence while actually learning.

What This Means for Your Practice

Dr. Gebrian's research gives us a roadmap for effective practice:

1. Build clear mental representations before you even touch your instrument. Can you hear exactly what you want? Can you feel the physical sensations of playing it correctly?

2. Use retrieval practice. Don't just review. Force yourself to recall without aids. This is harder but dramatically more effective.

3. Practice at your challenge point. If something's too easy, make it harder. If you're failing more than 20% of the time, make it easier.

4. Move from block practice to interleaved practice. Yes, repetition builds fluency. But mixing materials and coming back to things randomly builds performance readiness.

5. Integrate your musical knowledge. Theory, history, and ear training aren't separate subjects. They're tools that help you learn faster and remember better.

The beautiful thing about understanding the neuroscience? You stop hoping your practice will work and start knowing it will work. You practice with intention based on how your brain actually learns.

Next Steps

This was part one of my conversation with Dr. Molly Gebrian. In part two, we dive even deeper into specific applications you can use in your daily practice immediately.

Listen to the full episode here: Apple Podcasts Spotify

If you want to learn more about Dr. Gebrian's work, check out her book "Learn Faster, Perform Better" and her YouTube channel where she shares more about the science of practicing.

Inside the Clarinet Ninja Dojo, I've integrated these concepts into our entire practice methodology. If you're ready to transform your practice and finally see consistent results, join us at clarinetninja.com.

Sometimes the best things come from challenging times. Dr. Gebrian wrote this book during the pandemic after years of people telling her she needed to. My Clarinet Ninja Dojo started the same way.

If you're working on becoming a better practicer, whether you're just starting, coming back after a layoff, or looking to reach the next level, there's a place for you in the Dojo.

Let's practice smarter together.