Student’s question:
Do you recommend practicing IFR on more than one instrument? Or is it better to achieve a high level of mastery on one instrument before expanding to another?
How we think about this in IFR:
There are advantages to both approaches, but here’s something you may not have thought about. These two goals are not in conflict with one another. You might even find that playing a second instrument is the ONLY way to unlock higher levels of ability on your primary instrument.
This is because each instrument makes certain musical discoveries very easy and obvious, while obscuring others. For example, playing a brass or woodwind instrument makes you hyper-aware of key signatures and the absolute note names. Playing the guitar or bass makes you more aware of intervalic relationships like chord shapes. And playing the piano helps you to see the overall musical landscape and the underlying chromatic scale.
Each instrument also cultivates your musical imagination in different ways, nurturing your sensitivity and appreciation for different things. I would encourage you to think of each instrument you play as a different music teacher. Each one has different lessons to teach you. And by dedicating even just a small portion of your time to these other instruments, you get the benefit of ALL of these great musical lessons. And carry this wisdom with you wherever you go. Everything you discover on one instrument is immediately available to you on all of the others.
So if you are attracted to playing more than one instrument, my enthusiastic advice would be to include all of these instruments in your IFR practice right from the start. Don’t think of your time on these secondary instruments as “taking away” from your practice time on your main instrument. Think of it as a necessary complementary activity that accelerates your learning by revealing musical secrets that would have taken you years to discover on your own primary instrument.
