Your Strategies for Bringing A Piece Within Your Skill Level to Tempo

Pallas

You haven't been playing for very long. From my own beginnings, I've found that I inevitably hit a speed barrier. I can manage a piece quite well at a slower pace, but as I gradually increase the tempo, I reach a point where I cannot go any faster. Trying to push beyond this limit, I start making mistakes and lose a lot of the musicality. When this happens, I have to significantly reduce the tempo to correctly play the piece again.
What I've learned to do in these situations is to accept my final tempo, at least for the time being, and move on to the next piece.

PS I see now that PianoMonk gave quite a similar response, in a different way though.

Pallas Animisha You haven't been playing for very long.

That's true! How is it pertinent to my question? I'm a little confused. My question couldn't have been more general, I think.

I simply think that playing a piece correctly, musically, and quickly takes quite a lot of time and practice. And of those three, the first two are the most important to focus on as a beginner. A high tempo requires lots of movements to be automated, and automation happens by itself, if you practise dilligently. Which you do!

iternabe alternate between faster tempo and slow tempo during practice

This is exactly how I do it - I don't follow all these Youtube channels because I just do as I think I should do, but that's what I do naturally I never practice it faster than my brain or fingers can handle though, because this is what happens in my case:

iternabe Working on a fast piece (well, at least for beginner) now. One thing I noticed is multiple run-throughs at fast tempo can get me tired very quickly. I remember a suggestion (by YT channel The Independent Pianist) to alternate between faster tempo and slow tempo during practice. The faster run is done at a tempo that just slightly push oneself, and the slow run is done to re-check everything (rhythm, articulation, dynamics, pedal) is still done correctly.

I've kept that video on my YouTube play list for fast tempo advice (the title has to do with metronome). For a long time, his method was my "go-to" method for increasing tempo, although towards the upper end of his chart the tempo would increase too much for me and I'd go back to 5 bpm at a time.

My new favorite method for increasing tempo is Dr. Molly Gebrian's interleaved clicking up.

I thought I wouldn't reply to this thread because I feel like many people are too obsessed with speed when it's usually not what they should be focusing on, but when I saw this I had to react:

Pallas In the thread where this post originated, the advice was to prioritize speed over accuracy, and I was wanting other opinions, because I disagreed.

You should never sacrifice accuracy for the sake of speed. Speed comes from control. Greater control means greater speed. You do not increase your max speed by practicing speed but by being able to fully control your movements and gradually compressing the time it takes to execute them. Your max speed gets better very gradually over time and there isn't any point in trying to force it.

Here is an anecdote which I told several times on the othe forum about my scale speed. I used to practice scales every day for several years (I stopped now because I'm prioritizing other things). Over those years I almost never practiced for speed. When I did speed runs it was only to check myself to see how fast I could go. All of my normal scale practice was slow and in total control. Guess what happened? Each year my max speed went up. This continued to this day and what once felt like "there is no way my fingers can ever move that fast" now feels like "this is so slow I'm falling asleep". Every "impossible" wall I faced eventually vanished without me ever having to force a higher speed than I was capable of.

It's fine to use the metronome to click up to the quickest tempo you can reasonably achieve but don't fret about it if you hit a wall. Practice your scales and arpeggios diligently and you will get faster over time. I promise.

BartK don't fret about it if you hit a wall

This is great advice!

@Pallas it'll all happen in time (haha, no pun intended) as you improve your skills. I am truly amazed at how much I've improved as a pianist as an adult, over the past decade. In my head, my skill level as a teenager is where I plateaued but I am a much better pianist now. Just keep at it, and with time it'll naturally happen!!

BartK I have had some success "forcing" (cajoling?) myself to play faster. My max speed does go up gradually overall, but I quickly managed to play quite quickly and usually don't hit speed walls.

The way I do it is to think about the movement, how I'm feeling physically, and try to "choreograph" the movement at a slow tempo. Then, play very small groups of 1-4 notes or half a measure, say, at the intended tempo. And then to analyze where exactly you can speed things up, where tension is holding you down, or where you are using too much movement, or misalignment. I guess the troubleshooting process pretty much just gets better with time. But I find it to be more efficient than just practicing and hoping to get better.

Also, when you try to push speed - Try to keep it to the minimum amount of information possible. Take out everything that comes before and after the spot that is difficult, take out the other hand if it is easy. You can even hone in on a specific group of say 2-4 notes. Isolate the difficulty very precisely. For instance, while playing scales, you can only practice the thumb crossings for a while. I find this sort of practice to be very good at quickly increasing speed.

Pallas people have offered various strategies BUT sometimes the issue is just that you're not ready to play at that tempo yet. But since you have a teacher, hopefully you don't experience the latter issue!

I think it's very common for people to have a dream piece that's beyond their skill level, and of course they want to play it at the tempo of the recording they love, but it's way too difficult! In those cases, maybe you have to sacrifice accuracy to have the feel of the piece but you have a lot more fun playing it like that. It's not "good practice" but if you're an amateur just playing for your own enjoyment, it wouldn't be so terrible, there are lots of "bad practice" habits out there. I don't know if this is even related to your original question here or elsewhere

The last piece I played the tempo is just over 60 BPM. What's the fastest tempo possible? I'd start from the fastest speed I can execute consecutive notes and work my way back starting from the shortest notes. Suppose the fastest notes I can play is at 200 BPM and a piece has 16th as the shortest notes. If I play at the top speed, 16th notes would be at 200, 8th would be 100, quarter would be at 50. A metronome set to 50 for each beat is the fastest I can go.
If a piece has 32nd notes as the shortest, my tempo would drop to 25 BPM for each beat to accommodate the fastest notes.

Obvious keeping your hands low on the keys and using efficient fingerings help. By the time we start tackling fast notes, the accuracy would probably go down significantly so always aware of the speed limit your hands can go.

Hi

I'll mention one recent example where I used multiple different ways to improve part of a piece. This relates to the 3rd page of Scott Joplin's The Cascades, which has a lot of running octaves in the LH and RH, and many other difficult bits. I'm learning it for ABRSM grade 8.

I had been struggling with this page for a while, so about a month ago I sat down to practice it and I spent 20 to 30 mins playing the same page over and over, hands together and separately at different speeds (slower, normal, faster), the whole page in one play, in multiple sections, switching hands between sections - i.e. starting RH for 4 bars, then LH for 4 bars - and all of these options at different speeds.

After doing this, when I went back to playing it normally, it did seem to have improved. This was confirmed when my Teacher commented on how improved that page was at my next lesson. I hadn't told her what I'd done btw.

If I'm honest I think the piece is (or was) probably a little above my skill level. The bottom line is a lot of practise and practise in a lot of different ways.

No guarantee this will work for anyone else of course, and I've no doubt others have suggested similar ideas. I haven't read the whole thread.

Cheers

I found the old video that I ran into while exploring the idea of "bursts". My apologies that it's violin. In the first part he talks about the usual "slow practice - gradually speed up" approach which has its merits but also limitations. He then goes into something like "bursts" - two notes super-fast almost as though a single note: then three; then four = note groupings. Then working with those note groupings. I watched this at the time of working on Sylphs and it seemed a variant of bursts.

I've been having more success lately by alternating lots of HS practice fast (within the boundary of accuracy) and HT practice much more slowly. The former pushes my muscles to move faster; the latter gets the piece in my brain solidly so I don't have to think about it as much when I get to playing faster. After a while, I do HT as fast as I can play accurately and no faster. Then repeating that, generally finding when I get back to HT fast again, I can go significantly faster than I could before.

What doesn't work for me is the whole "set the metronome slow and speed it up a little at a time" thing that I often read. That might work a bit within smaller tempo ranges, but I can't get from really slow to really fast that way. It's more like a work on it until I find there's a more sudden leap ahead in tempo. After enough leaps, hopefully I'm at tempo.

TC3, you gave me some new things to think about. Thank you

keystring

That is what I've been saying; to get speed you have to practice speed. If you concentrate on accuracy while trying to play faster, you will get accuracy, not speed.

The main thing is to get the muscle memory on the hand positions for different notes. Play faster gradually. If you start to make more mistakes or hesitate, you may want to try other fingerings to get a smoother run. Also check for hands relaxation. If you muscles start to tense up, it's harder to play fast.