Practice slowly!

Practice Academy: Slow down!

One of the keys to success (and building confidence as well) is slow practice. This is a process of practicing in a slow tempo – while being fully mindful, highly engaged, and thinking intensly about what you are doing.

Practicing Slowly

1. Find the tempo that you can play pretty easily, without slowing down when a passage gets difficult or getting faster when it feels easy.  Play your piece or passage all through at that speed.

2. Now try slightly faster.  Important: You only get faster if you can play at the former tempo without mistakes from 3-5 times.  Don’t be in a hurry.

3. Get faster and faster until you start making mistakes, then stop immediately.

Practicing Slow, then jump to End Tempo

Find the tempo that you can play pretty easily, without slowing down or getting faster.  Play your piece or passage all through at that speed. Now try the end tempo once. That’s enough. Yep, it’s quite a shock!

Practicing Slow with metronome

1. Imagine your ideal tempo.

2. Set the metronome to half that tempo. If you can’t play at that speed perfectly and easily, slow it down until you can!

3. Do not play the notes mechanically, but work on musical details and expression, even at that slow speed. The point of slow practice is not just to slow things down in order to play it perfectly. It’s about fine-tuning the execution, and looking for additional ways to play it even better while we are playing slowly enough to monitor and think about the little details.

4. Increase the speed gradually to 60, 70, 80, 90   and finally 100 percent.

The Ultimate Memory Test

Play the passage or piece you are working on extremely slowly from memory.  This is difficult to do but will help you find the parts that are unsure in your brain. 

Try again V-E-R-Y slowly and with your eyes closed.

Mental Slow Practice

Close your eyes and imagine you are playing your passage or piece slowly.  Feel in your mind how your fingers are working and hear the ideal sound you are trying to produce. Please don’t let your mind speed up.