Slow Practice

iternabe

This video about slow practice explains quite well what I have been going through recently.

TC3

This is great stuff, thanks. I've been thinking about fast vs slow and HS vs HT a lot lately. I'm going to watch this again, give it some reflection, and then post some jumbled thoughts about it. 🙂

KevinM

The take away for me is play so slow that you are reading all the notes, if you are about to make a mistake, that you have time to recognise from the score that you are about to do that and have time to adjust.

For me at my current reading ability this is dead slow.

TC3

Piano seems like a bundle of contradictions sometimes.

You need to play slow before you can play fast. But then, as everyone points out, playing fast requires different movements than playing slow, just like running isn’t walking really fast. So if you practice the wrong movements slow, you’ll hit a speed wall, just like the fastest walk you can do without ever running.

Practicing hands separate can help with this, since you can get each hand up to speed faster on its own, and then put them together. But then the brain wants to make similar movements once both hands are together (just like patting your head and stomach is easier than patting your head while rubbing circles on your stomach), so the HS practice might not mesh together well. So maybe you need to figure out the right movements HT first.

It seems like you have to practice fast before you can practice slow before you can practice fast, and you need to practice HT before you can practice HS before you can practice HT! 😃

So what’s the solution to all this? Maybe just making sure you’re not practicing anything too much harder than you can at your particular level, and ramping things up in very small increments, just letting your hands and brain figure it out as you go …

ShiroKuro

TC3 You need to play slow before you can play fast.

This is true, but I often find that the real benefit of slow practice comes after I can already play at a pretty good tempo, and either I’m trying to iron out wrong notes, or I’m trying to kick the tempo up just a little more.

In those situations, returning to slow play is incredibly useful.

So maybe what we sod say is something like, you need to play slow before you can play fast, and you need to return to slow play before you can play faster.

I wonder if this is where many people get stuck, because piano practice should be iterative. In other words, there’s a need for a back and forth in terms of what and how we practice something.

Slow practice is one of those, we don’t just do a round of slow practice in early stages of learning a piece, ne need to return to slow practice again and again over the course of learning and polishing a piece.

This is very good advice for me to remember at just this point, because I played my jury piece in public on Sunday, and I struggled because I played it too fast. Now is a good time to return to a little more focused slow practice.

iternabe

TC3 But then, as everyone points out, playing fast requires different movements than playing slow, just like running isn’t walking really fast. So if you practice the wrong movements slow, you’ll hit a speed wall, just like the fastest walk you can do without ever running.
...
So what’s the solution to all this?

The solution is to have a good teacher. I did not know this until I have one. Now I think the biggest advantage of having a teacher is that I am being lead on a path, and kept from going astray, on which the movement and technique I put time and effort practicing is guaranteed to work.

And we do work on a lot of new technique very very slow so that my teacher is satisfied that I am getting every nuance of the movement of my finger, hand, wrist, arm exactly right. I must say some of the new movement even feel awkward at first. But those are the exact same movement my teacher uses at performance tempo. Therefore they do eventually work, wonderfully and naturally, as I have repeatedly found out.

ranjit

TC3 Piano seems like a bundle of contradictions sometimes.

You need to play slow before you can play fast. But then, as everyone points out, playing fast requires different movements than playing slow, just like running isn’t walking really fast. So if you practice the wrong movements slow, you’ll hit a speed wall, just like the fastest walk you can do without ever running.

Rather, I find most piano advice to be grossly oversimplified. It's like they are nuggets of wisdom for dumb 8 year olds, not meant to be taken literally in an adult discussion, imo.

pianoloverus

TC3 Piano seems like a bundle of contradictions sometimes.

You need to play slow before you can play fast. But then, as everyone points out, playing fast requires different movements than playing slow, just like running isn’t walking really fast. So if you practice the wrong movements slow, you’ll hit a speed wall, just like the fastest walk you can do without ever running.

Not exactly a contradiction IMO. Unless one is an incredible sight reader and has incredible technique one has to play slowly just to get the notes and rhythms under one's fingers. So there is simply not much choice there. It's true that the motions used for playing slowly are SOMETIMES different from the motions used for playing at tempo, but this is not always the case. And if one understands how those motions are different, one can sometimes practice the ones one would use at a fast tempo when playing slowly. If one tries to gradually increase the tempo and hits a speed wall, there are various practice methods that can be used to hopefully overcome that.

Finally, one could say although the motions for running are not the same as the motions for walking, one has to learn to walk before one can run.

ShiroKuro

I will have to watch this video later, but in terms of what to do while playing slow, one thing my teach will have me do is put my finger on the note before playing it. There are different ways of doing this, but it’s interesting how hard it is when you’re playing a piece of music in time (even when it’s slow).

Another thing she’ll have me do, esp when there’s a complex passage and I want to voice certain a notes but not others … say it’s the thumb that is too loud, she’ll have me put my thumb on the note but not actually play it, while playing all the other notes. To do this, you have to slow down quite a bit. But then when you go back to playing it regularly, at your desired tempo, it is so improved!

Animisha

ShiroKuro is put my finger on the note before playing it

I just tried it for a tricky passage and it worked like a dream. Stopped me from making mistakes and therefore, from learning my mistakes.

MRC

Very good video: thanks. Even an old pro like me needs to be reminded how important it is to practice slowly, even when I know a piece very well.

You might imagine that learning a piece goes like this: you start very slowly, then little by little throughout the practice sessions you increase the tempo, until the piece is finally up to speed.

But that doesn't work well. In fact we need to alternate between slow tempo, medium tempo and performance tempo in all stages of the learning process. At the very beginning, once we have put in the fingerings and played very slowly, making sure we aren't learning any mistakes, we need to play very short chunks at performance tempo, to make sure those fingerings really work at the correct speed, and get a feel for the hand choreography at that speed. Then we need to go back to a moderate speed in order to play longer chunks and experience the flow of the music...

Each tempo at which we practice a passage - excruciatingly slow, slow, moderate, nearly performance tempo, performance tempo, above performance tempo - brings a different benefit.

ShiroKuro

Ok I watched the video. Very helpful!

It reminds me of what @navindra and I were talking about in the “piano jury prep” thread. Namely, autopilot. Autonomizing is good, autopilot is not. And taking a piece that you have autonomized and then slowing it down forces you to turn off autopilot and focus on what you’re playing.

So I feel like that is quite consistent with her advice.

And then @MRC ’s comments also align with my thinking on treating practice as iterative.

Ok now I gotta go to work. 😅

TC3

iternabe The solution is to have a good teacher.

That is the plan eventually. The trick is finding a good one. I have some traumatic experiences with formal lessons on upright bass that lead to RSI issues that continue to this day ... 🙁

pianoloverus

iternabe The solution is to have a good teacher. I did not know this until I have one. Now I think the biggest advantage of having a teacher is that I am being lead on a path, and kept from going astray, on which the movement and technique I put time and effort practicing is guaranteed to work.

You are right about this and, if I remember correctly, you are studying with Seeker and I have positively commented on several of your videos. The value of good and detailed technical foundation/training cannot be overestimated.

macuaig

I’ve started learning Morse code, and it’s worth a comparison. It’s highly recommended there that while learning, you practice at a quick speed, but that you pause very briefly between bursts (Farnsworth gap) for comprehension. The goal is to learn to hear the sounds as a cluster, not to count dots and dashes as you go. Then you proceed to shorten the Farnsworth gap, allowing words and phrases to form their own aural clusters.

I like to use “shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits” as a perfect example. Nobody’s deliberately piecing the notes together to create that phrase, it’s actually hard to deconstruct it while singing or playing. And you get to the rhythmic flow immediately.

I guess that suggests learning 4 bars at a time, or similar?

pianoloverus

macuaig I’ve started learning Morse code, and it’s worth a comparison. It’s highly recommended there that you learn & practice at a quick speed, but that you pause very briefly between bursts (Farnsworth gap) for comprehension. The goal is to learn to hear the sounds as a cluster, not to count dots and dashes as you go.

Learning the cluster of sounds to form a letter is a faster path to forming words and phrases, which then have their own aural patterns. I like to use “shave-and-a-haircut, two-bits” as a perfect example. Nobody’s deliberately piecing the notes together to create that phrase, it’s actually hard to deconstruct it while singing or playing. And you get to the rhythmic flow immediately.

I guess that suggests learning 4 bars at a time, or similar?

It's usually not possible to learn piece or even four measures at full speed in the beginning unless one extremely good or the piece is a very easy one for one's skill level. OTOH what you bring up has an interesting comparison to one method I've seen recommended if one reaches a speed wall when using the common approach of gradually increasing the tempo. That method consists of playing very short snippets, sometimes less than a measure, at full speed and then joining them after one has learned the short segments.

macuaig

pianoloverus Yes, you certainly don’t start learning at full speed, but a quick pace as I said, as opposed to deliberately slow. It’s obviously about grasping groupings early, rather than building slowly from every note. Not the target for every situation or session, but a good tool to keep at hand.

pianoloverus

macuaig Yes, you certainly don’t start learning at full speed, but a quick pace as I said, as opposed to deliberately slow. It’s obviously about grasping groupings early, rather than building slowly from every note. Not the target for every situation or session, but a good tool to keep at hand.

Everyone could have a different idea of what "quick pace" or "deliberately slow" means. Depending on the piece's difficulty for a particular person, different pieces could be initially practiced at different percentages of the final speed. If the piece was very difficult for a person, initial practicing at what might be thought of as a quick pace would not be possible or reasonable. I also don't know what building slowly from every note means.

ranjit

macuaig I always start learning a piece at full speed. If I can't play it at full speed or with the articulation I want, I keep trying until I figure out how it can be done, at least in short bursts of 4-8 notes. After that, I can practice slow but I find slow practice for me to be wasted unless I am practicing the exact movements I will be playing at a faster tempo. I find it to also be useful to work on specific exercises that target the "problematic" movements. The quicker you can get to the root cause, the quicker you can learn to play it at tempo.

thepianoplayer416

The other day I started practicing the Chopin Prelude in Em with LH chords 1 after the other. In the beginning getting comfortable playing would be a challenge. After you played the first 2 lines, you can basically run through the piece which is just repetitions at the required tempo without having to slow down much.

A teacher's opinion on slow practice: