I play each part perfectly but make random mistakes in the whole piece

Animisha

I lift this almost-quote out of the thread "Learning to play vs learning to concentrate" because that thread now is more about nervousness.

Playing parts correctly, but making random mistakes, at different places, when I play the whole piece, is part of my experience also.

I have thought a lot about this problem and its cause. What is failing? Is it concentration? Memory? Stamina?

Or, is it simply like this? We are still in the process of learning a piece. We have come so far that we can play each part correctly. However, playing each part correctly is still an effortful process, taxing our brains.
When we play parts separately, there is always a little break between each part, giving our brain a short moment of rest, but when we play the whole piece, it is taxing - taxing - taxing for the brain, and somewhere at a random place, our brain cannot keep it up any more and the fingers make a mistake.

Long story short - when we can play all parts correctly, are we simply not yet finished learning the piece? Is learning to play the whole piece the final stage of learning a piece? What do you think?

MRC

Animisha Or, is it simply like this? We are still in the process of learning a piece. We have come so far that we can play each part correctly. However, playing each part correctly is still an effortful process, taxing our brains.
When we play parts separately, there is always a little break between each part, giving our brain a short moment of rest, but when we play the whole piece, it is taxing - taxing - taxing for the brain, and somewhere at a random place, our brain cannot keep it up any more and the fingers make a mistake.

I think you've summed it up pretty well. Have you tried putting the piece together bit by bit? Take two consecutive parts that you can play correctly when you play them separately, and play just these two parts without a break between them, but don't go on. Can you play just those two parts consecutively without a mistake? How does it feel? After playing just these two parts, do you feel stressed or flustered, or are you as calm as you were before?

If you can play these two parts consecutively as well as each part separately, keep doing this for the rest of the piece, always resisting the temptation to keep going after the section you've defined. If you put the piece together like this, little by little making bigger and bigger sections, you should be able to overcome the problem of random mistakes.

BartK

Animisha Playing parts correctly, but making random mistakes, at different places, when I play the whole piece, is part of my experience also.

But how reliably are you playing each section? Can you sit down at the piano right now and play each section perfectly on the first attempt, no cheating? What can happen is that you practice each section several times and of these attempts some of them have mistakes but then you correct them and finally play the section through without mistakes. But when you are in the middle of playing the whole piece you are on the spot then and there. You have one attempt at playing that section. If you mess up there is no going back and fixing and replaying that section.

This is why teachers often suggest the n-times-perfect method. If you can play several times in a row perfectly then your reliability for playing that section perfectly the one time it occurs in the middle of a piece is much higher.

Animisha

MRC Have you tried putting the piece together bit by bit? Take two consecutive parts that you can play correctly when you play them separately, and play just these two parts without a break between them, but don't go on. Can you play just those two parts consecutively without a mistake? How does it feel? After playing just these two parts, do you feel stressed or flustered, or are you as calm as you were before?

If you can play these two parts consecutively as well as each part separately, keep doing this for the rest of the piece, always resisting the temptation to keep going after the section you've defined. If you put the piece together like this, little by little making bigger and bigger sections, you should be able to overcome the problem of random mistakes.

I just did this, two phrases at the time ( 1-2, 3-4 etc) and not any further, and then I wondered what to do next, and my answer is: once again two phrases at the time, but this time play just the first phrase by itself, and then play phrase 2 and 3 together, 4-5, etc. Feels good!

hebele

I am also interested to hear how others deal with this. I assume full piece needs practice by itself, like almost everything in piano learning. But it feels more nuanced. I definitely have some concentration issues when playing the full piece. When I get too overconfident, my mind wanders and mistakes happen. And these are short beginner pieces 🙂

keff

Here is a hypothesis: no matter how well we know a piece we are still likely to make a mistake during a performance. Certainly true for me and for some of my friends with much greater piano experience than I and who tell me that they always make errors but they can easily recover such that the audience tends not to notice.

As regards those brief pauses between sections I would like to suggest that they are still observed even when the whole piece has been put together as a means of gathering ones' thoughts and getting fingers ready to play the next section. My most recent teacher would say to me many times "you can lengthen the long notes but not the short ones". It can be a way of giving oneself time to think.

Animisha

BartK

You basically say what I say, that is, when you can play each part perfectly, you are not yet done learning the piece.
Plus you give a method. 🙂

Josephine

Maybe it's also because you have more chances to make mistakes because you are playing for a longer amount of time.

ShiroKuro

@Animisha thank you for starting this thread! This was really what I had in mind with the other thread, but you’re right, the topic has shifted. Learning to overcome nervousness when performing is important, but it’s not necessarily the same as the issue you’re talking about here, and as what I was thinking of when I started that thread.

So I think the first question is: are you playing from the score or playing by memory? The answer of course informs the strategies you will want to use to combat the “random mistakes” problem.

If you’re playing from memory, it may be that your memory is not solid yet. So the practice approach would focus on memory-strengthening of the piece.
If you’re playing from the score, but you make random mistakes, is it possible that there are portions you’ve (perhaps unconsciously) memorized and so there are some spots where you’re “looking” at the score but not reading it?
I actually notice myself doing this, so one thing I try to do is force myself to really read and actively follow along with the score.
Whether you’re playing for memory or from the score, maybe your mind is just wandering? In this case, again, try to focus your attention in different ways to keep your mind from wandering. One thing I do is actively count, for example, or make it a point to read the LH part (because often I’m focused more on the RH part).
Are the mistakes truly random? Again I’m speaking about myself here, but sometimes I wonder if what I think is a random mistake is maybe actually not so random. So another thing I do is find the tricky spots in a piece, and the write in the score a little sign post one or two measures before that spot, sort of like a road sign alerting me to the possibility of trouble ahead.
Last thing: mastering sections is not the same as mastering a whole piece. IMO, once I can play each section, I sort of think of that as a sign that I’ve mastered (or at least learned) the technical details of the piece. But I haven’t necessarily mastered the piece, the musical details of it. I don’t think it’s helpful to expect to be able to play flawlessly, but I do want to be able to to play through the piece without huge mistakes, stops and restarts, that kind of thing. Doing this is mastering the piece, mastering the music itself rather than just mastering the technical aspects of playing. IOW, playing a chord, playing an arpeggio, playing alberti bass… these are playing skills, technical aspects. But playing a piece is about telling a story through music.

Or what you said here:

when we can play all parts correctly, are we simply not yet finished learning the piece? Is learning to play the whole piece the final stage of learning a piece? What do you think?

So, yes, learning to play the whole piece is the final stage of learning a piece, imo. It is at this point that we begin to be able to tell the story through music.

lilypad

ShiroKuro

Are the mistakes truly random? Again I’m speaking about myself here, but sometimes I wonder if what I think is a random mistake is maybe actually not so random. So another thing I do is find the tricky spots in a piece, and the write in the score a little sign post one or two measures before that spot, sort of like a road sign alerting me to the possibility of trouble ahead.

Good observation! When I've learned a piece that I plan to perform, I use a practice method I learned called "bug spotting". I play the piece multiple times. When I make a mistake, I only mark where I made it with a tape flag, make a mental note of what I did or didn't do, and continue on in the piece without pausing to fix it right then. After the series of play throughs, spots with only one flag may be truly random, but I often find a number of spots with multiple flags. These tell me where to practice them until I can't get them wrong.

Animisha

ShiroKuro

Very nice analysis ShiroKuro!
About the random mistakes: I both make mistakes that are actually not quite random - and yes, circling those notes helps a lot, but I also make mistakes that just happen once and then never again.

But it also happens, actually, it happened today, that in a measure that I have played correctly at least a hundred times (no exaggeration), I suddenly make a mistake, and then I play that measure again, and I make the same mistake, and I have to play the measure very, very slowly to re-learn the notes.
It is a complete mystery to me, why this happens.

twocats

lilypad I also find that if I keep making the same mistake and practice didn't fix it, simply circling that spot will often fix the problem. It tells my brain "pay attention!" when I get there and it does!

TC3

Animisha Sometimes that happens to me when I rely on muscle memory too much. My brain memory forgets how it actually goes, and then one mistake suddenly throws my muscle memory off.

I've found that lots of hands-separate review helps keep it in my brain memory so that it supplements muscle memory rather than being replaced by it.

twocats

Animisha I also make mistakes that just happen once and then never again.

It happens to me as well. Sometimes in embarrassingly easy sections. Just know that you're not alone!

Animisha

TC3 Interesting!

However, I hope that you know that muscle memory is not in your muscles but in your brain? 😎
However, my guess is that what you call muscle memory is not stored at the same location as what you call brain memory. 👍

TC3

Animisha Yes, I'm using the colloquial expressions. 🙂

Jane

Animisha

However, I hope that you know that muscle memory is not in your muscles but in your brain? 😎

Yes. But... 😉
I've always enjoyed the Indian (as in India) concept of our having 10 senses, 5 "knowledge" senses (jnanendriya) that match our Western concept. But also 5 "action senses" (karmendriya) which include the feet (you don't consciously direct each foot movement when you walk). And the hands.

But I digress. After one thinks one has fairly well learned a piece, one test of that is to play it very, very slowly. That removes a lot of the reliance on muscle memory that one has when one plays it around the correct tempo and can be informative as to how well one really knows a passage. (There's the famous story in Chasins' book about his listening to Rachmaninoff practice the étude in thirds so slowly that he was not at first able to recognize the piece.)

Stub

All of the above. No, seriously. 😀 I lose focus, my stamina flags, I may be fine with sections but don't really have the whole thing in good shape. And to re-iterate what BartK said, playing through a section correctly after several tries is a good start, but you need to be able to do it over and over again, preferably even after getting up for a short break.

One strategy to try might be moving the start and finish points on the large sections you're working on and that you will stitch together for the whole piece. Start mid-measure at some random spot and play to some random mid-measure spot instead of starting with blocks of, for example, mm. 1-8, 9-24 etc. This will disrupt your muscle memory (and require that you know what finger to start on when you start mid-measure). You will need to bring more focus to bear and think more about what you need to be doing at that point in the score.

ranjit

Don't have much advice, but I just wanted to say that I feel like it's not that useful to play pieces perfectly from memory without any random mistakes as an amateur. People will be listening to your musicality. And mistakes will be forgiven. My experience is that what people listen for is pretty much always musicality. But so many amateurs, in my opinion misguidedly, focus on perfect note accuracy. If you bring a beautiful sound out of the instrument for 5 seconds, that's it. That's what moves listeners and communicates something.

Playing note perfectly from memory takes much longer than just being able to play from memory and fudging a few notes if necessary. I question whether the time investment is worth it as you could learn 3 different pieces in the time it takes to totally nail one piece.

Obviously, it is a good thing to aim for in of itself. I just wanted to mention these practical considerations. I really need to learn to play note perfectly personally as I plan to audition. You have to be even cleaner for competitions. But I have played on public pianos and at my teacher's recitals and so on, and many people loved the way I played, and I was very far from being perfectly note accurate. There were others who played before and after, who did play note perfectly, who did not garner the same reaction. I mention this because it leads credence to my theory.

BartK

ranjit My experience is that what people listen for is pretty much always musicality. But so many amateurs, in my opinion misguidedly, focus on perfect note accuracy. If you bring a beautiful sound out of the instrument for 5 seconds, that's it. That's what moves listeners and communicates something.

Absolutely! In addition, most people don't really notice pitch mistakes unless they are very familiar with the music. Much more significant are the rhythmic discontinuity errors such as completely stopping and restarting. Your main focus should be to maintain the flow at all costs no matter what happens and never ever stop and restart.

An excellent way to learn to do that is to practice sight reading with the metronome and no stopping allowed. Not only does it help your sight reading but it also helps you learn how to recover on the fly from mistakes and move on regardless of what happens. It has greatly helped me and I highly recommend it.

ShiroKuro

@Animisha re muscle memory.... Yes, it's "in the brain" but it's not as reliable as some other kinds of memory. We might think of muscle memory as memory that we can't readily articulate. It's like saying "my fingers know where to go but I don't know the name of the note I'm playing." This kind of memory is much more vulnerable to being disrupted. And it is much more dependent on context -- IOW, say there's an 8-measure passage, and you can play that complete passage perfectly well, but you can't play the middle two measures on their own (or you can't play them without making a mistake). That's a sign that your memory of that passage is more muscle memory than anything else.

Muscle memory develops on its own, but we can convert it to more active memory by name the notes, counting the rhythm, practicing "dropping in" (starting at a random point in the score) and so on.

Also playing the piece backwards (i.e., playing the last 8 measures, then the last 14 measures, then the last 20 measures and so one) is very good practice because you don't have as much context to rely on.

PianogrlNW

If the errors are truly random, it is probably due to lack of focus and not really knowing the piece inside and out. Try slowing down the tempo and while you’re playing look ahead in the score to see where you’re going next.

If the errors are occurring at the point where you are connecting the sections together, then increase the lengths of the sections and come up with different break points. If this is happening because you’re trying to play from memory, use the score.