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

Animisha · 2024-06-14T07:34:52+00:00

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 co...

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.)

pseudonym58

I am very strongly right-handed, and I have noticed that when I concentrate on my left hand slightly more than my right, I tend to make fewer mistakes overall.

ShiroKuro

pseudonym58 I am very strongly right-handed, and I have noticed that when I concentrate on my left hand slightly more than my right, I tend to make fewer mistakes overall.

I notice something similar, though not because I’m strongly right handed. I notice that I often sort of put my left hand on autopilot relatively quickly in the stage of learning a new piece, but then I maybe haven’t actually learned the left hand part as well as I think I have. So making it a point to read ahead in the bass clef or focus more actively on the left hand helps me stay more grounded, focused in the piece, which leads to fewer mistakes.

TheBoringPianist

There are a lot of different sense memories that we "know" a piece in - muscle memory, visual memory of where your hands go, auditory memory of what the music sounds like, etc. and this sort of random slip-up is often an indication that that section is not as solidly entrenched across these memories as you may think.

One approach my teacher gave me to figuring out where these problem spots will be (besides of course consistently making mistakes at that spot) is to add stress by imposing some kind of constraint:

play blindfolded (are you relying too much on your eyes to position your hands?)
play every other measure and play air piano on the alternating measures (is your ability to play a section overly dependent on being able to play the entire section via muscle memory?)
melody and bass line only - (is the skeleton of the piece still intact?)
try to read or talk out loud about an entirely different topic while playing your piece (how much focus do you need to hit the right notes?)

The point of this is of course not that you'll end up having to play blindfolded or that you should do this exercise often, but the stress exposes the weaknesses — that are already there in the piece but were hidden when playing in a comfortable practice environment — which you can then fix with more normal practice methods haha.

ShiroKuro

TheBoringPianist play every other measure and play air piano on the alternating measures

Oooh, I love this idea! And it’s a great example of what I meant above by taking parts of the piece out of context as a way to go beyond muscle memory.

Another thing I have done before is count out loud but only certain beats. As in, if the piece is in 4/4, for each measure when you get to beat three, you say “three” out loud.

And for anyone wanting to try counting of any kind, remember that it always works better when you say the count out loud.

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.

TheBoringPianist

BartK yes 100%. While it is good for note accuracy to stop whenever you have a mistake and fix it, if you get too used to doing that instead of figuring out how to continue playing it can ruin your performances when mistakes inevitably pop up.

ShiroKuro

BartK 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.

Yes, this is so, so important! I used to practice this more when I had a violin friend who I played duets with. I’ve moved now and she and I no longer live in the same state, so I have completely gotten away from this kind of practice.

Thank you for reminding me of how important it is! I am going to write this down in my practice notebook actually, because I think this is one huge thing I can do to improve my “play through” ability and get me ready for both recording and playing for friends.

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!

thepianoplayer416

I tend to rely too much on muscle memory to get through my pieces. When I don't really try to learn the note sequences, I'd freeze at a specific spot and can't continue.

A lot of pieces I played in public were repetitive. Once you played a section well once you can do it again the second time. If you miss a note or 2 the first time, you can play better in the repeat.

How do you solidify your playing? There are videos from Graham Fitch "Pianist Magazine" some interesting ways he would practice his pieces including deliberately playing using different beat patterns. Slow practice in some cases.

I have my own way to tackle playing a piece up to 4 min. in its entirety. I'd learn each section really well. Before you're done with 1 section, you start learning the next. While learning a later section, I'd occasionally do a run on the previous section(s) so I don't forget them completely. After learning a 4 min. piece, I'd need to run through it from top to bottom a few times. I'd work on the spots I have trouble with and then connecting it with the section before & after. After that I try to start the piece at specific spots in the middle. At this point I wouldn't try to play through the piece from top to bottom until I'm ready.

In the beginning learning a 4 min. piece in sections each section might take an hour or longer to get all the notes. When you can play each section at the ideal tempo repeating a section would take a lot less time and you can play more & more sections together until you can finally run the whole piece from top to bottom.

pseudonym58

I have a bit of an interesting perspective in that I'm trained as a professional cellist and have worked in opera and symphony orchestras extensively. There's a certain amount of reflexive ability on the cello that's developed over the years. On the piano, however, I've taken very few formal lessons since childhood, and so I have a much more acute sense of what I don't know, and shortcomings in my technique.

Since I have limited time for piano practice - mostly for physical reasons (!),
I try to apply the cello practice techniques I've developed over the years for use on the piano. These involve frequent deliberate distortions of rhythms - for instance, if I have a long passage of even eighth notes, I will vary the way I practice using dotted rhythms to show up any shortcomings, i.e. long/short, short/long.
I'll also play a short passage backwards and forwards, play it in a different octave than what I'm used to. If it's a series of chords, I'll roll them very slowly from the bottom up one after the other, and then from the top down one after the other.

These kinds of activities are adapted from cello exercises by Janos Starker, who himself adapted them from a method by the violinist Sevcik.
In short, it represents the idea of designing brief exercises around the specific musical passages that are giving you trouble.

Player1

Mistakes happen even in every day life, let alone when we're trying to learn something new.

I don't like my mistakes and will do retakes in order to fix them if they're glaring enough. Other times I'll just let it pass because beating on myself trying for perfection is a waste of energy and time. For instance, in Butterflies I play an F# the first time for one phrase instead of the Fn but fix it for the next time. I also have recordings where I play ghost notes. I just move past those things because they're things that I can't not do and if I'm not making those oopsies, then I'll be screwing up something else just as dumb. Or worse.

So, if you're making minor random mistakes, it's all part of being human.

On the other hand, if you're making major random mistakes those are because you don't know the music well enough. I go through that as part of the learning sequence. Often I will drop out whole passages and think I played everything. On review of the recording, there is is. Or isn't as the case may be. When it happens I understand that it's because I don't know the music well enough and go back to practicing.

Stamina also plays a big part of this. As we learn we have to develop the ability to play accurately for longer periods of time. As beginners, most of the pieces we work on are usually just a bit more complex or longer than the last thing we played. This is to help up build stamina both mentally and physically. While we're doing that we'll make mistakes because we get tired. That's just part of the learning process.

« Previous Page