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We asked school- and college-aged instrumentalists ( N = 32) to imagine an ideal performance of a brief passage of music, record a performance of the passage, and describe discrepancies they noticed between their imagined and actual performances. The more experienced participants took at least as much time to imagine their idealized performances as it took to perform them; less experienced participants took less time to imagine what they were about to play. There were no differences among experience levels in the numbers or types of discrepancies identified. The differences between more and less experienced participants were also evident in a subsequent practice period. More experienced musicians’ practice included more frequent moments of pause, whereas school-aged participants seldom paused and tended to address performance issues other than those identified in their commentaries.

During evening practice sessions, 32 nonpianist musicians learned a short melody on piano, and then either learned a second short piano melody, learned a difficult unfamiliar piece on their principal instruments, practiced familiar material on their principal instruments, or engaged in no other music-related motor behavior prior to sleep; practice on the target melody was limited in terms of time and number of repetitions. All participants returned the next morning and were tested on their performance of the target piano melody. Previous research has revealed overnight enhancement of skills as a result of sleep. In the current study, however, our participants showed significant decrements in performance between evening training and morning test, though the extent of the decrements varied. We speculate that the lack of overnight improvements may have resulted from our regulating participants’ practice of the target melody during the training sessions and that strict, limited practice protocols may interfere with consolidation-based memory enhancement.