The 700-Hour Experiment: What Happens When You Treat Music Like a Serious Investment

I set a goal that scared me a little. Here's exactly what it is, why I chose it, and how I'm thinking about what comes next.

The Moment I Stopped Waiting

For years, music lived in the margins of my life. Between freelance work, travel, obligations — between everything that had to happen — music kept getting pushed to later. To when things calm down. To when I have more time.

I think a lot of musicians know this feeling. The instrument in the corner. The half-finished songs. The quiet sense that you're not quite doing justice to something you genuinely love.

What changed for me wasn't inspiration. It wasn't a dramatic turning point. It was something quieter: the recognition that "later" was a fiction I'd been maintaining for years. And that if I wanted a different relationship with music — a professional one, a serious one — I was going to have to build it deliberately. Not wait for it.

So I did something concrete. I set a goal.

700 hours of focused, structured music practice. Across 7 months. Starting 5th April 2026.

This article is about that decision — why I made it, how I structured it, what I expect it to produce, and what it means to me beyond the numbers.

If I wanted a professional relationship with music, I was going to have to build it deliberately. Not wait for it.

Why a Number? The Case for Measurable Commitment

There's a version of this decision that doesn't involve a number. "I'm going to practice more this year." "I'm going to take music seriously." These are intentions. They're real, but they're also vague enough to absorb infinite compromise without ever registering as failure.

A number changes the relationship. 700 hours is either done or not done. Progress toward it is visible. Effort is measurable. And the very act of committing to something that specific forces a kind of honesty about what you're actually willing to invest.

I chose 700 not because of the 10,000-hour rule — a figure that has been widely misunderstood and misapplied — but because my own research and reflection suggested it represents a meaningful threshold. Not mastery. Not virtuosity. But a genuine crossing: from scattered amateur to functional, confident musician.

Why 700 specifically?

It represents roughly a half-time job's worth of focused effort — ~4 hours per day, 6 days per week, across 7 months with planned breaks. It's enough hours to build real coordination, solid technique, functional music theory, and the beginning of a personal musical voice. It's not a magic number that promises effortless musicianship. It's a number that promises a real foundation.

I also wanted a number that felt serious without being paralyzing. 10,000 hours is a lifetime. 700 hours is a committed chapter — achievable within a single year, with real results visible long before you reach the end.

A number changes the relationship. 700 hours is either done or not done.

The Math: How 700 Hours Actually Gets Built

Here's how the arithmetic works:

• 6 practice days per week — one full rest day, non-negotiable

• 4 hours of focused practice per day as the target

• 26 active weeks — accounting for roughly 4 weeks of breaks, holidays, and lighter periods built in from the start

• Total: approximately 700 hours

The planned breaks are not a concession to weakness. They're part of the structure. Recovery is when learning consolidates. Any serious practice plan that doesn't account for rest is not serious — it's optimistic in a way that tends to end in burnout or abandonment.

I also want to be honest about what 4 hours of practice actually requires in terms of total time. Because of the cognitive demands of new learning, I can sustain genuine focus for roughly 20 minutes per session before needing a break. That means 4 hours of actual practice takes closer to 5 hours of real time — including small breaks, transitions, and the mental recovery between focused blocks.

This is not a side project. It's a restructuring of how I spend my days.

4 hours of actual practice takes closer to 5 hours of real time.

Why the Accordion — And Why One Primary Instrument

I've always loved too many instruments. That's part of the problem.

For a long time, my attention scattered across whatever I was excited about that week. A little flute here, some piano there, the accordion when the mood struck. It felt like richness. Looking back, it was a way of never fully committing to any of them.

So when I designed this experiment, one of the first decisions I made was also one of the hardest: one primary instrument. Not because the others don't matter, but because depth requires a home base.

The accordion became that home — and not by accident. It's one of the few instruments that lets you be fully self-sufficient as a musician: melody, harmony, and rhythm, all at once, in your own hands. It opens doors to group playing in a way many instruments don't. And at the deepest level, it points toward where I actually want to go musically — toward Brazilian forró, toward the sound that's lived in me longer than I've been willing to admit.

The piano and the flute are still part of my days — but with clear roles. The piano is a theory tool: it makes harmonic relationships visible in a way the accordion's button layout simply can't. The flute is for joy. It's what I pick up when I need to remember why any of this matters.

Knowing what each instrument is for has been one of the most clarifying decisions of this whole experiment. It means I always know where the real work lives — and what everything else is there to support.

The Instruments	Why This works
Accordion — primary focus, structured study	technique + repertoire depth
Piano — music theory made visible	understanding harmony & keys visually
Flute — for the joy of it	keeps practice exciting, not mechanical

One primary instrument. Because Depth beats breadth in the early stages.

What 700 Hours Can Realistically Produce

I want to be careful here, because the internet is full of both inflated promises and unnecessary pessimism about what practice produces. So let me be specific about what I actually expect — and what I don't.

What is genuinely within reach at 700 hours:

• A solid intermediate foundation — functional skill, not performance mastery

• The ability to play complete songs with confidence and consistency

• Self-accompaniment at a basic to intermediate level

• Real coordination built across months of consistent technical work

• Functional music theory — understanding what you're hearing and why it works

• The beginning of a personal musical style and identity

• Significantly faster learning of new material than at the start

What 700 hours will not produce:

• Virtuosity or concert-level performance

• Mastery in any traditional sense of the word

• The ability to improvise fluently in complex styles

• Professional performance readiness

The honest version: 700 hours moves you from scattered beginner to someone with a real musical foundation. That's not a small thing. That's the difference between music being something you dabble in and music being something you can actually do.

Hours	Stage	What This Looks Like
0–50h	Explorer	First real contact with the instrument. Coordination begins. Nothing is automatic yet.
50–150h	Foundation Builder	Basic technique forming. Simple pieces playable. Theory starting to make sense.
150–300h	Developing Player	Transitions smoother. Sight-reading improving. Musical decisions becoming more intuitive.
300–500h	Confident Beginner	Full songs playable with confidence. Self-accompaniment beginning. Musical identity emerging.
500–700h	Intermediate Foundation	Solid functional skill. Able to play meaningfully with others. Personal style recognizable.
700–1000h	Emerging Musician	Advanced beginner / early intermediate+. Strong foundation for any future specialization.
1000–1500h	Developing Artist	Clear artistic voice is developing. Capable, independent, creative musicianship.

As I am writing this article, I am at the beginning of the Foundation Builder stage — and already I can see the shape of what's coming. Not because progress is fast, but because it's real.

The Practice Philosophy: Investing, Not Grinding

The metaphor I keep returning to is investing.

When you invest money, you don't expect dramatic returns every day. You understand that small, consistent deposits compound over time into something significant. You trust the process because you understand the math. And you don't measure success session by session — you measure it across months and years.

I'm applying the same logic to music. Every practice session is a deposit. Some sessions feel like breakthroughs. Most feel ordinary. Some feel frustrating. None of that changes the compound value of showing up.

Growth is not dramatic. It is cumulative.

This framing has changed how I experience the hard days. A frustrating session is not a failure — it's a deposit made under difficult conditions. The value doesn't disappear because it wasn't enjoyable. It's still in the account.

It's also changed how I think about structure. An investor doesn't decide each day whether to invest — they have a system. I've built a system: a daily practice structure, a journal that eliminates decision fatigue, a tracking method that makes progress visible even when it doesn't feel visible from the inside.

Growth is not dramatic. It is cumulative.

Which brings me to something I've built directly out of this metaphor: the Skill Growth Index.

The SGI is a chart — modelled on a stock market graph — that tracks the momentum of your practice over time. Practice days make the line rise. A missed day keeps it flat. Two or more missed days in a row cause a mild decay. It's not a measure of skill level. It's a measure of consistency — of whether you're actually making the deposits.

I built it because I know myself. I'm someone who is motivated by data, by visible evidence that effort is accumulating. And I also know how easy it is to feel like nothing is happening when deep, unglamorous learning is actually taking place. The SGI cuts through that illusion. It shows you your actual investment behaviour, not just how you felt about a session.

A rising line on a hard week means more than a rising line on an easy one. That's the point.

A small note: the Skill Growth Index is not a scientifically validated measure of musical progress. It's a personal motivational tool — my attempt to make something as invisible as momentum feel tangible and visible. The decay mechanic, the growth curves, the numbers — none of it is peer-reviewed. But it doesn't need to be. Its only job is to keep me honest and moving. So far, it's doing that.

This Is Not a Perfectionist Goal

I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters for anyone who is considering a similar commitment.

This plan is serious. It is not perfectionist.

There will be weeks when I practice far less than planned. There will be days when life intervenes, when I'm ill, when I'm traveling, when the music simply doesn't come. I've built those into the structure — not as failures to be avoided, but as realities to be accommodated.

The commitment isn't to perfection. It's to return.

One missed day doesn't break a practice. Two missed weeks don't erase fifty accumulated hours. The question that matters is not whether I kept the streak — it's whether I came back. Every time, the commitment is to come back.

I've seen too many musicians abandon serious practice commitments because they couldn't live up to the version of the commitment they'd imagined. They designed a plan for an ideal version of themselves, encountered the actual version, and concluded they'd failed.

The plan I've designed is for the actual version. Including the bad weeks.

There are days when practice isn’t possible. And that’s fine.

The Inner Work: Identity, Not Just Skill

The most underappreciated part of a commitment like this is what it does to your sense of self.

There's a version of me that has spent years saying "I play a bit of accordion" with a modest, self-deprecating smile. Accurate, but also a kind of pre-emptive deflection — a way of not fully claiming the thing I actually want.

700 hours is, in part, a practice in claiming it.

Not performing confidence I don't have. Not pretending to be further along than I am. But choosing — actively, repeatedly — to be someone who takes their musical development seriously. Who shows up for it. Who treats it as the profession it's becoming, rather than the hobby it used to be.

That identity shift doesn't happen in one moment. It happens in the accumulation of sessions. In the journal entries. In the weeks when it's hard and you show up anyway. In the slowly growing evidence that you are, in fact, someone who does this.

The 700 hours is not just about becoming a better musician. It's about becoming someone who kept this promise to themselves.

The identity shift doesn't happen in one moment. It happens in the accumulation of sessions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many hours does it take to learn an instrument?

It depends on your definition of "learn." Functional, confident beginner-to-intermediate level — able to play full songs, self-accompany, and understand what you're doing musically — is realistically achievable in 300–700 focused hours for most adults. Mastery and advanced performance readiness require significantly (!) more. The key variable is quality of practice, not just quantity.

Is the 10,000-hour rule real?

The 10,000-hour figure, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, was a significant oversimplification of researcher Anders Ericsson's work on expert performance. Ericsson himself clarified that the number varied widely by domain and that the quality of practice — specifically deliberate practice with clear goals and feedback — mattered far more than raw hours. For most adult musicians, meaningful transformation happens well before 10,000 hours.

Can adults learn a new instrument seriously?

Yes. Adult learners bring qualities that often accelerate progress: motivation, focus, emotional depth, and the ability to learn analytically. The learning curve is different from childhood — motor learning may take longer to automate — but adults are fully capable of building genuine musicianship at any age. The main obstacle is usually not ability but consistency.

How do you stay motivated during a long-term practice commitment?

The most reliable approach is to shift from motivation-based practice to structure-based practice. Motivation fluctuates; a well-designed system doesn't. This means: a consistent daily structure, a journal that eliminates decision fatigue, visible progress tracking, and planned rest so the commitment never becomes a source of resentment. Community and accountability also make a significant difference over long time horizons.

How much can you realistically practice per day?

For adult learners working with cognitively demanding new material, 3–4 hours of genuine focused practice is possible — but requires building capacity gradually. Most adults can sustain focused attention for 15–20 minutes per session before quality declines. Longer daily practice is achieved through multiple short sessions with recovery intervals, not marathon blocks. Total daily practice beyond 4–5 hours shows sharply diminishing returns for most non-professionals.

What is deliberate practice?

Deliberate practice, defined by psychologist Anders Ericsson, is a specific form of focused practice characterized by: a clear, specific goal; work at the edge of current ability (not comfort zone repetition); immediate feedback on performance; and full, intentional attention throughout. It is more cognitively demanding than regular practice and produces significantly better long-term results. → Learn more about how to significantly raise the quality of your practice.

The Music Room

The Music Room is a small, intentional community for musicians building a serious practice. It meets biweekly online, stays capped at 10 people, and is built on the belief that consistency is easier in community than in isolation.

What Comes Next

This is the beginning of the journey. The goal is set. The structure is built. The first session has happened.

Over the coming months, I'll be publishing regular updates — honest ones — about what this commitment actually looks like from the inside. Not the highlight reel. The full picture: the progress, the plateaus, the surprising moments, and the days when the only victory was showing up.

If you're building your own serious practice — or thinking about it — I hope this is useful. Not as a blueprint to copy, but as evidence that the decision is worth making.

The music you want to make is waiting. It's just waiting for the hours.

Follow the journey

Subscribe to the newsletter for honest, regular updates from inside this experiment. Next up: 50 hours in — what three weeks of intensive practice actually produces.

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The Music Room is my space for musicians who want to show up for their craft — with community, structure, and a place that holds you accountable.

Next in This Series

50 Hours In — What Intensive Practice Actually Feels Like

How to Build a Daily Music Practice (Even If You Have No Time)

How to Structure a 15–30 Minute Music Practice Session (Backed by Science)