How to ace your music, part 2

Seriously here, I'm not talking about the amount of time you spend, though that is important. I'm talking about how you spend your practice time and what songs you're working on in it. What's more important than just time is that every day you do practice, you are moving a section, even just one measure, from a place of clunky stiffness to the point where the listener can forget about the details and difficulties of the piece and just enjoy it a little. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to flow some. I define 'flow' as the ability of the listener to correctly predict where the next beat and measure will be. If a listener can't do that, they can't relax into the song (neither can you). That's why muscle memory (what I'm doing feels natural to do) and the macro-rhythm (the next beat happens where it should) are so important - as I've said here many times, MORE important than playing or singing every pitch correctly. And also you need to usually work on songs that you can learn in 1 to 3 months.

That's why lots of us know someone who's a very sloppy player or does really simple stuff, yet people around them think they're great - those musicians have learned the secret of prioritizing the flow, drama, and emotion of the music over the pitch correctness of the music. Your song is not a math test, or if it is, it's a two part test. Like someone taking the SAT, we need a strategy for acing this bear of a test (this song). Part one is all the technical, pitch accuracy issues; part 2 is not pausing or breaking the flow of the song. Your strategy is: make sure you get part 2 down first AND THEN you can obsess over part one.