I cannot overemphasise the importance of learning and practicing a piece slowly. Although it is very tempting to try and get the piece up to a higher speed, don’t do it! If you keep practicing the mistakes, you will get good at them (the mistakes that is). If you practice something slowly and get it good slow, it will be much easier to bring the tempo up because you will have trained yourself.
What people don’t realize is that it is not just like training a machine, but it is like folding a piece of cardboard. When you have a crease in the cardboard, it just wants to fold at the crease. Once you have the crease in, it is very hard bend it at the right place so you have to try to iron it out, and sometimes you can’t.
Every repeated mistake is a repeated crease. It is best to fold the cardboard in the right place. So later, when you bend the cardboard back and forth, it will bend in the right place. This is also a reminder to me!
I love the efforts you have put in this, regards for all the great articles.
No problem
Angelo in terms of practicing music we agree in unison ‘Slow is Fast’.
Practice it slowly and one day it will get faster..but correctly faster…
There is cause for a ‘reminder’ to be used in conjunction with ‘Slow is Fast’ if you fall over and stop during a piece……pick it up from that phrase and get to the end…
If the student returns to the beginning all the time, the beginning will be strong purely by frequency of repetitions and the ending will be the weakest as it hasn’t been under the fingers as much.
Of course I don’t have to practice my mistakes, I just seem to have a talent for making them naturally………
yes !!! I agree !! repeating the same mistake only creates synaptic pathways in the brain that make it harder to break out of. The folding cardboard concept applies not just to music but life in general! even bluegrass pickers can learn from the book of “slow is fast”
I am extremely impressed with your writing skills and also with the layout on your blog. Is this a paid theme or did you customize it yourself? Either way keep up the nice quality writing, it’s rare to see a nice blog like this one nowadays..
Thanks for the encouragement. I modified the template to suit my needs.
You have very nice blog here.
Thanks
Peter is right – slow is fast .. in the long run.
I don’t like fast players who are sloppy, or who hide behind the wah wah pedal.