As I play fingerstyle I study hands separated by separating the bass and melody as thumb and fingers, then move to hands together.
I also analyze the piece to find the hardest as well as the most repetitive measures, work those out and pick up the rest of the piece. You also work these measures with transitions, by playing the preceding measure or half measure leading in and out of the measure you're practicing.
I typically don't get a lot of time to practice so I will pick up my guitar at random and play measures that I'm working on.
Awesome article. But tbh still very vague, I'd love to hear about some of your guys' specific practice schedule. Below is mine,
Guitar Practice: I do repertoire, technique and improvisation. For repertoire, I usually focus on the hardest passage and run it three times to the best ability and then connect the whole song together for 3 goes before I finish. For technique, I usually rotate on scales patterns/licks/ear training; review the last pattern I learned and learn a new pattern. For improvisation, I just doodle with jam track and listen and try to iterate on how I can improve (e.g., better timing on stressing notes on chord changes, building tension).
Dota Practice: I sometimes watch youtube casts on warding and laning. Also what different heroes are good to counter different heroes. But mostly I just play ranked games and try different heroes.
I play trumpet, my routine usually starts with long tones and slow articulation exercises. As I get warmed up I extend into lip slurs, faster articulation, and flexibility. After I'm completely warmed up then I go into a mix of technique work, etudes for fun, and whatever other repertoire I need to work on for performance.
Repertoire that I'm just maintaining is a mix of full runthroughs and reinforcing small segments. For new repertoire I usually work through it measure by measure, mixing air+valves reps with playing reps to save my lips.
Good advice. My wife (a pianist and piano teacher) just read the article kindly submitted here and said that that is how she practices. I've heard over the years about how she advises her students, and, sure enough, one of the key ideas is to distribute practice across multiple days each week rather than piling into one lump of time just before the lesson.
After my reading of the article, I have to say that getting a good night's sleep each night is definitely crucial for learning anything challenging. Sleep makes connections and consolidates learning.
The one thing I don't see mentioned in this article that my wife tells most of her students, after learning about it from one of her university music teachers, is how important it can be to analyze a new piece of music through multiple modalities. My wife's university teacher has a book about "music mapping,"[1] an approach to reading musical scores and adding visual notations to them, which is highly individualizable and works wonderfully for helping musicians learn where the music is in a new piece of music. Playing with musicality rather than just memorizing notes is always the key idea.
In one study, where they tried learning both ways, people felt like blocked practice was better, even though their ultimate performance was measurably better after the random practice!
Though you might improve at a task during practice, you’re less able to carry forth that improvement to the next day.
Studies have shown that consistently getting a full night’s sleep (eight hours) plays a huge role in learning motor and auditory skills
The surprising parts are usually the places that they did not account for in their mental practice.
Forget about the nasty passages for now. Instead, spend two weeks getting in touch with the musical aspect of the piece and practice it through, just for musicality.
The linked essay in the article also gives a timeline on how long in takes for neurons to connect: it takes about a week to happen.
Also: You will be much better off practicing your orchestra music for 15 minutes a day until the concert, rather than “wood-shedding” the day before the concert. Why? Because you’ll have all those nights of sleep for your brain to process the new music.
Good article, i discovered it right after i bought my violin (could have been after i got a viola, can't remember). I think you can apply these tips to learning, say, rust programming, or convex optimization. I also think a random beat generator is sort of similar to backing tracks i record in Garage band or ableton, and you should leave pieces/charts you're learning out on the stand next to your computers, and look at them often, 5x/hour.
Another tip, always remember the first time you tried to play a clarinet, cello or violin (if you can). Those for me were special moments.
Here's some other (comprehensive) books about practicing, which go from mechanical prescriptions about washing hands and brushing teeth beforehand, to the zen, in the vein of the motorcycle and archery books, like long tones/long bows/drone notes/son filé (the last is Galamian's term, his violin technique book highly recommended).
I assume you are minimizing -- maximizing
is easily NP-hard.
So, get some supporting hyperplanes
of the convex epigraph and use
linear programming to minimize
subject to those hyperplanes as
constraints. Then add a constraint
and try again. There is also
a cute way to do central cutting planes
that can be better numerically.
So, for many non-linear problems, if are
maximizing, then the dual is a
convex minimization, and that can help.
This can be called Lagrangian relaxation.
I never thought that how to do violin practice
was so tricky -- just work to get the fingers on
the notes, in time and in tune, and then
do it a lot until get a lot of facility
(hear the note(s) just before playing them),
sometimes return and play very slowly and
deliberately, and then work on
expression -- the fun part.
But then I never made much progress.
The best I did was the D major
section of the Bach "Chaconne",
and that was fantastic fun --
I played the repeated notes
that made them sound insistent!
I regard the end of the D major
section as the climax of the piece
and find it fantastic.
Kenny Werner's philosophy if you can summarize it in one sentence - is if you are a trumpet player - you must master breath control, fingering so by the time you are in performance - you are truly playing without thinking of the mechanics.
There are many analogies to really focused coding, Kenny Werner's philosophy, and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of flow [1]. You must master the syntax, the grammar, the idiosyncrasies, the rules and unwritten and written customs, and the is-isms of the language before you can "effortlessly" write code in a given platform/language. This is one of the reasons beginners to programming may stumble on the hike - they are so focused on the writing of the lines of code that they are often pushed by themselves or their otherwise well-intentioned teacher to produce code. The building blocks of code are not the lines of code - it is the concepts and the system and framework and mental model behind it (the whiteboard so to speak).
"This year, forget about the year as a whole. Forget about months and forget about weeks. Focus on days."
An excerpt from Kenny Werner's book that I just pulled out of my giant stack of books Jenga style (p.85).
> Practice
Perhaps music feels great as long as you're fifteen feet away from the instrument, but as you move closer, a different energy takes over and your connection dwindles...
How can we retain the bliss of freedom as we approach our instrument? We must let go off all desires and focus on love. To have the nectar flow through us, we must honor our inner being, and practice receiving what is being given. We must practice and strengthen this conviction daily. We may even have to go outside of music to do it. This is really important, because playing, being so addictive, pulls us easily from the true goal and draws us back into more mundane realms.
But when you have made the inner connection, playing becomes more like taking dictation from within. Work with the thought, I am the master, I am great. Then just put your hands on the instrument, trust them, and eventually it will be so.
"Do not fear mistakes. There are none."
-Miles Davis
>When she does this with students, she asks them afterwards, “Was anything fuzzy?” It’s usually the part that they were messing up that’s fuzzy.
This is genius. Reminds me of the rule that if something feels fuzzy at the instrument it's always a conceptual error about the piece rather than poor coordination or poor finger strength.
>Why is it better to practice every day for an hour, instead of seven hours on one day of the week?
For the same reason that it's better to practice for 10 minutes several times per day instead of one hour straight.
I found this article very interesting, but I'm not a musician. I know they mention sports briefly, but I'd love to see a more detailed account of this advice applied to other topics.
I don't find this to very useful, and I think the approach of this study is probably not so great. My background on this is that I'm a professional violinist. I started playing when I was 4 and was performing professionally when I was 8. I'm 35 now, and I still play as a soloist, in chamber music, and with an orchestra. I happen to make most of my money by writing code, but the violin is still a big part of my life. I teach kids, and they win big important violin competitions.
My specific issue with this article is that it seems to think of practicing as one monolithic event--as though you are really just doing one big thing when you practice: getting better at what you are practicing. I think the concept of randomizing tasks is sort of getting at a good point, but it's really not all the way there. And also, you have to understand that you are, in fact, getting something extremely valuable out of the block practicing: the ability to focus on a singular task for a long period of time. That's a skill itself. You will never do well in a 3-5 hour rehearsal with a string quartet or an orchestra if this is not something you are accustomed to doing on a regular basis.
Here are some more details.
The big thing to do when I was a kid was to send your children to a practice camp like Meadowmount, where all the Juilliard School teachers spent their summers teaching kids like me. That was all block practice. 5-8 hours a day, and a lesson every day or so. That kind of block practicing went exactly as described in the article. An hour of scales, and hour of etudes, an hour on a piece of music, etc.
In my opinion, that's a mixed bag. You need to be able to pull a scale out and just lay it down. Any scale. Any time. It's a kind of a musical Fizz-Buzz problem. You just need to be able to do it even if it's not really interesting. Although, it's not like Fizz Buzz because scales are actually really hard. Etudes are a sort of micro-problem to solve. You isolate a particular bow or finger technique, and you spend some time every day working out that physical skill--the logistics of getting x fingers from point a to point b in the requisite amount of time.
Putting in a block of time on your musical piece is also important in itself because you have to commit that music to memory. Not just the notes and the finger motions involved, but all the little things like the bowings and phrasings and dynamics and stuff. The parts that take notes and turn them into "music."
The reason I think the study is flawed is that I think it's studying a strawman of an idea. No great players actually practice in the way that this article describes. There's this idea of a mindless slaving away that we do for hour after endless hour. That's not real. I mean, it's probably real for some people. But great players don't do that to begin with. And good teachers don't recommend this approach.
There are some popular methods of learning difficult things. There's a thing that people do to tackle a difficult bit of notes where you just practice slowly with a metronome and you gradually increase the tempo. Start with a tempo slow enough for you to get the notes out, no matter how slow. Then you just gradually make it faster and faster. This should work, right? No. It should not work. And it doesn't work.
--a brief interlude before I explain why that doesn't work--
What you're doing when you play a musical instrument is that you're solving physical problems--usually without the necessary tools. You are working a variety of physical challnges. The logistics of moving fingers from one place to another, you're solving acoustical problems by managing the friction between your bow and your string(s). Or if you're a wind player, you're dealing with the physical properties of your breath interacting with a vibrating reed or you're vibrating your lips when you play a horn of some kind. There are two parts of every musical problem. 1. There's the conceptual problem: "How should I be trying to execute this solution?" 2. The physical part: "How do I train my fingers, arms, hands, lips, whatever to perform this solution?"
Tempo matters when you are planning out these solutions. A slow tempo uses different physical motions, and it takes a different mindset. Slow tempos (yes, tempi, I know, but I don't feel like the word is so foreign that I need to pluralize it in Italian, so tempos) allow for larger motions and gestures. Slow tempos do not need to have efficient motions the way fast ones do.
--back to my point--
Practicing slowly will never get you to perform things quickly. You are practicing the wrong thing. If you want to learn to play things quickly, you have to practice them quickly. But in small chunk. Take 2 or 3 or 5 notes. Play them even faster than you ever intend to perform them, and do it with a metronome, so your rhythm is good. Chain them together, and gradually slow down and enlarge your motions.
I don't know the details of this study: who were the participants, where they came from, or what their experience is. But to me, this seems like a situation where the block practicers are basically dumb practicers. Because no good musicians practice that way. I think you would have positive results doing absolutely anything to break up this kind of a thoughtless, put-in-some-time-and-hope-I-get-better kind of a routine. Random exercises are probably better than that.
I can see how these results make sense. Randomization is probably a good thing for a certain type of musician. But I would argue that it's definitely not better than a thoughtful, focused, problem-solving approach applied for long periods of time.
Anyway, just thought I would throw some things out there. Cheers.
> Tempo matters when you are planning out these solutions. A slow tempo uses different physical motions, and it takes a different mindset.
I can totally relate to this. I play harmonica, and what I've been working on for fun lately is the vocal parts from some Fleetwood Mac songs: Dreams, You Make Loving Fun, Gold Dust Woman, etc.
My goal is that when I play these songs, it almost sounds like Christine or Stevie singing. (Yeah, you may say, dream on! Humor me...)
Now these are not complicated vocal parts, but given my lack of musical talent, I definitely had to slow them down to learn the notes.
You might think that the vocal part for Gold Dust Woman is pretty simple, and you'd be right. But it took me quite a while playing it slowly just to learn the notes.
And that was the easy part!
I could play the notes, but they sure didn't sound like anything you'd want to listen to. I still had to practice and practice the breathing and intonation and whatever you call it that makes the instrument sing instead of just playing a bunch of notes.
I'm getting there, but man is it a lot of work. And this isn't something that can be slowed down. Can you imagine You Make Loving Fun at a slow tempo? What would that even sound like?
So it's full speed ahead with these songs, and thank you Christine, because You Make Music Fun.
> Practicing slowly will never get you to perform things quickly.
Learning something at a very slow tempo and then slowly increasing to written tempo is a strategy taught by many teachers and in my personal experience it's worked well. Aspects of your playing are going to be different at different tempos, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid learning technique.
Funny observation you made about practicing slowly. Indeed, once you increase the speed, you effectively need to start from scratch and it feels like you relearn what you are doing.
I'm a mediocre hobbyist piano player, but it resonated with me.
Hoever, one day I exercise and even after some serious effort I can't seem to play the bars without error consistently. But I can the next day after the first try.
I remember in my teenage years hanging out with some friends. The son was always encouraged to perform. Even when he did not want to. Even at age 12, he was phenomenal. He now plays professionally for an orchestra in the string section. I wish I remembered more about how he practiced - I think he did it because he really loved playing.
[+] [-] deadfece|11 years ago|reply
The author made it available for free at http://pianopractice.org/
As I play fingerstyle I study hands separated by separating the bass and melody as thumb and fingers, then move to hands together.
I also analyze the piece to find the hardest as well as the most repetitive measures, work those out and pick up the rest of the piece. You also work these measures with transitions, by playing the preceding measure or half measure leading in and out of the measure you're practicing.
I typically don't get a lot of time to practice so I will pick up my guitar at random and play measures that I'm working on.
[+] [-] noname123|11 years ago|reply
Guitar Practice: I do repertoire, technique and improvisation. For repertoire, I usually focus on the hardest passage and run it three times to the best ability and then connect the whole song together for 3 goes before I finish. For technique, I usually rotate on scales patterns/licks/ear training; review the last pattern I learned and learn a new pattern. For improvisation, I just doodle with jam track and listen and try to iterate on how I can improve (e.g., better timing on stressing notes on chord changes, building tension).
Dota Practice: I sometimes watch youtube casts on warding and laning. Also what different heroes are good to counter different heroes. But mostly I just play ranked games and try different heroes.
[+] [-] kevan|11 years ago|reply
Repertoire that I'm just maintaining is a mix of full runthroughs and reinforcing small segments. For new repertoire I usually work through it measure by measure, mixing air+valves reps with playing reps to save my lips.
[+] [-] tokenadult|11 years ago|reply
After my reading of the article, I have to say that getting a good night's sleep each night is definitely crucial for learning anything challenging. Sleep makes connections and consolidates learning.
The one thing I don't see mentioned in this article that my wife tells most of her students, after learning about it from one of her university music teachers, is how important it can be to analyze a new piece of music through multiple modalities. My wife's university teacher has a book about "music mapping,"[1] an approach to reading musical scores and adding visual notations to them, which is highly individualizable and works wonderfully for helping musicians learn where the music is in a new piece of music. Playing with musicality rather than just memorizing notes is always the key idea.
[1] https://www.areditions.com/books/rs001.html
[+] [-] MrDom|11 years ago|reply
That makes me wonder why sleep deprivation is such a large part of the college experience.
[+] [-] read|11 years ago|reply
Though you might improve at a task during practice, you’re less able to carry forth that improvement to the next day.
Studies have shown that consistently getting a full night’s sleep (eight hours) plays a huge role in learning motor and auditory skills
The surprising parts are usually the places that they did not account for in their mental practice.
Forget about the nasty passages for now. Instead, spend two weeks getting in touch with the musical aspect of the piece and practice it through, just for musicality.
The linked essay in the article also gives a timeline on how long in takes for neurons to connect: it takes about a week to happen.
http://mollygebrian.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/what-musicia...
Also: You will be much better off practicing your orchestra music for 15 minutes a day until the concert, rather than “wood-shedding” the day before the concert. Why? Because you’ll have all those nights of sleep for your brain to process the new music.
[+] [-] gtani|11 years ago|reply
Another tip, always remember the first time you tried to play a clarinet, cello or violin (if you can). Those for me were special moments.
Here's some other (comprehensive) books about practicing, which go from mechanical prescriptions about washing hands and brushing teeth beforehand, to the zen, in the vein of the motorcycle and archery books, like long tones/long bows/drone notes/son filé (the last is Galamian's term, his violin technique book highly recommended).
Kenny Werner, http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Mastery-Liberating-Master-M... (recommends pianists practice long tones ?!)
Sterner: http://www.amazon.com/The-Practicing-Mind-Developing-Discipl...
Bruser: http://artofpracticing.com/book/ (Gerald Klickstein' book is also good, i remember)
Julie Lieberman has soem good violin-specific eg http://www.halleonard.com/product/viewproduct.do?itemid=6954...
[+] [-] graycat|11 years ago|reply
> convex optimization
I assume you are minimizing -- maximizing is easily NP-hard.
So, get some supporting hyperplanes of the convex epigraph and use linear programming to minimize subject to those hyperplanes as constraints. Then add a constraint and try again. There is also a cute way to do central cutting planes that can be better numerically.
So, for many non-linear problems, if are maximizing, then the dual is a convex minimization, and that can help. This can be called Lagrangian relaxation.
I never thought that how to do violin practice was so tricky -- just work to get the fingers on the notes, in time and in tune, and then do it a lot until get a lot of facility (hear the note(s) just before playing them), sometimes return and play very slowly and deliberately, and then work on expression -- the fun part.
But then I never made much progress. The best I did was the D major section of the Bach "Chaconne", and that was fantastic fun -- I played the repeated notes that made them sound insistent! I regard the end of the D major section as the climax of the piece and find it fantastic.
[+] [-] wallflower|11 years ago|reply
Kenny Werner's philosophy if you can summarize it in one sentence - is if you are a trumpet player - you must master breath control, fingering so by the time you are in performance - you are truly playing without thinking of the mechanics.
There are many analogies to really focused coding, Kenny Werner's philosophy, and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's concept of flow [1]. You must master the syntax, the grammar, the idiosyncrasies, the rules and unwritten and written customs, and the is-isms of the language before you can "effortlessly" write code in a given platform/language. This is one of the reasons beginners to programming may stumble on the hike - they are so focused on the writing of the lines of code that they are often pushed by themselves or their otherwise well-intentioned teacher to produce code. The building blocks of code are not the lines of code - it is the concepts and the system and framework and mental model behind it (the whiteboard so to speak).
"This year, forget about the year as a whole. Forget about months and forget about weeks. Focus on days."
http://austinkleon.com/2013/12/29/something-small-every-day/
An excerpt from Kenny Werner's book that I just pulled out of my giant stack of books Jenga style (p.85).
> Practice
Perhaps music feels great as long as you're fifteen feet away from the instrument, but as you move closer, a different energy takes over and your connection dwindles...
How can we retain the bliss of freedom as we approach our instrument? We must let go off all desires and focus on love. To have the nectar flow through us, we must honor our inner being, and practice receiving what is being given. We must practice and strengthen this conviction daily. We may even have to go outside of music to do it. This is really important, because playing, being so addictive, pulls us easily from the true goal and draws us back into more mundane realms.
But when you have made the inner connection, playing becomes more like taking dictation from within. Work with the thought, I am the master, I am great. Then just put your hands on the instrument, trust them, and eventually it will be so.
"Do not fear mistakes. There are none." -Miles Davis
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
[+] [-] ics|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ytturbed|11 years ago|reply
This is genius. Reminds me of the rule that if something feels fuzzy at the instrument it's always a conceptual error about the piece rather than poor coordination or poor finger strength.
>Why is it better to practice every day for an hour, instead of seven hours on one day of the week?
For the same reason that it's better to practice for 10 minutes several times per day instead of one hour straight.
[+] [-] vshan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chipgap98|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianamartin|11 years ago|reply
My specific issue with this article is that it seems to think of practicing as one monolithic event--as though you are really just doing one big thing when you practice: getting better at what you are practicing. I think the concept of randomizing tasks is sort of getting at a good point, but it's really not all the way there. And also, you have to understand that you are, in fact, getting something extremely valuable out of the block practicing: the ability to focus on a singular task for a long period of time. That's a skill itself. You will never do well in a 3-5 hour rehearsal with a string quartet or an orchestra if this is not something you are accustomed to doing on a regular basis.
Here are some more details.
The big thing to do when I was a kid was to send your children to a practice camp like Meadowmount, where all the Juilliard School teachers spent their summers teaching kids like me. That was all block practice. 5-8 hours a day, and a lesson every day or so. That kind of block practicing went exactly as described in the article. An hour of scales, and hour of etudes, an hour on a piece of music, etc.
In my opinion, that's a mixed bag. You need to be able to pull a scale out and just lay it down. Any scale. Any time. It's a kind of a musical Fizz-Buzz problem. You just need to be able to do it even if it's not really interesting. Although, it's not like Fizz Buzz because scales are actually really hard. Etudes are a sort of micro-problem to solve. You isolate a particular bow or finger technique, and you spend some time every day working out that physical skill--the logistics of getting x fingers from point a to point b in the requisite amount of time.
Putting in a block of time on your musical piece is also important in itself because you have to commit that music to memory. Not just the notes and the finger motions involved, but all the little things like the bowings and phrasings and dynamics and stuff. The parts that take notes and turn them into "music."
The reason I think the study is flawed is that I think it's studying a strawman of an idea. No great players actually practice in the way that this article describes. There's this idea of a mindless slaving away that we do for hour after endless hour. That's not real. I mean, it's probably real for some people. But great players don't do that to begin with. And good teachers don't recommend this approach.
There are some popular methods of learning difficult things. There's a thing that people do to tackle a difficult bit of notes where you just practice slowly with a metronome and you gradually increase the tempo. Start with a tempo slow enough for you to get the notes out, no matter how slow. Then you just gradually make it faster and faster. This should work, right? No. It should not work. And it doesn't work.
--a brief interlude before I explain why that doesn't work--
What you're doing when you play a musical instrument is that you're solving physical problems--usually without the necessary tools. You are working a variety of physical challnges. The logistics of moving fingers from one place to another, you're solving acoustical problems by managing the friction between your bow and your string(s). Or if you're a wind player, you're dealing with the physical properties of your breath interacting with a vibrating reed or you're vibrating your lips when you play a horn of some kind. There are two parts of every musical problem. 1. There's the conceptual problem: "How should I be trying to execute this solution?" 2. The physical part: "How do I train my fingers, arms, hands, lips, whatever to perform this solution?"
Tempo matters when you are planning out these solutions. A slow tempo uses different physical motions, and it takes a different mindset. Slow tempos (yes, tempi, I know, but I don't feel like the word is so foreign that I need to pluralize it in Italian, so tempos) allow for larger motions and gestures. Slow tempos do not need to have efficient motions the way fast ones do.
--back to my point--
Practicing slowly will never get you to perform things quickly. You are practicing the wrong thing. If you want to learn to play things quickly, you have to practice them quickly. But in small chunk. Take 2 or 3 or 5 notes. Play them even faster than you ever intend to perform them, and do it with a metronome, so your rhythm is good. Chain them together, and gradually slow down and enlarge your motions.
I don't know the details of this study: who were the participants, where they came from, or what their experience is. But to me, this seems like a situation where the block practicers are basically dumb practicers. Because no good musicians practice that way. I think you would have positive results doing absolutely anything to break up this kind of a thoughtless, put-in-some-time-and-hope-I-get-better kind of a routine. Random exercises are probably better than that.
I can see how these results make sense. Randomization is probably a good thing for a certain type of musician. But I would argue that it's definitely not better than a thoughtful, focused, problem-solving approach applied for long periods of time.
Anyway, just thought I would throw some things out there. Cheers.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|11 years ago|reply
I can totally relate to this. I play harmonica, and what I've been working on for fun lately is the vocal parts from some Fleetwood Mac songs: Dreams, You Make Loving Fun, Gold Dust Woman, etc.
My goal is that when I play these songs, it almost sounds like Christine or Stevie singing. (Yeah, you may say, dream on! Humor me...)
Now these are not complicated vocal parts, but given my lack of musical talent, I definitely had to slow them down to learn the notes.
You might think that the vocal part for Gold Dust Woman is pretty simple, and you'd be right. But it took me quite a while playing it slowly just to learn the notes.
And that was the easy part!
I could play the notes, but they sure didn't sound like anything you'd want to listen to. I still had to practice and practice the breathing and intonation and whatever you call it that makes the instrument sing instead of just playing a bunch of notes.
I'm getting there, but man is it a lot of work. And this isn't something that can be slowed down. Can you imagine You Make Loving Fun at a slow tempo? What would that even sound like?
So it's full speed ahead with these songs, and thank you Christine, because You Make Music Fun.
[+] [-] kevan|11 years ago|reply
Learning something at a very slow tempo and then slowly increasing to written tempo is a strategy taught by many teachers and in my personal experience it's worked well. Aspects of your playing are going to be different at different tempos, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid learning technique.
[+] [-] yonibot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alinajaf|11 years ago|reply
Since you program too, do you think there is much crossover? Some analogous form of practice that makes you a more effective coder?
[+] [-] louwrentius|11 years ago|reply
I'm a mediocre hobbyist piano player, but it resonated with me.
Hoever, one day I exercise and even after some serious effort I can't seem to play the bars without error consistently. But I can the next day after the first try.
[+] [-] wallflower|11 years ago|reply
I remember in my teenage years hanging out with some friends. The son was always encouraged to perform. Even when he did not want to. Even at age 12, he was phenomenal. He now plays professionally for an orchestra in the string section. I wish I remembered more about how he practiced - I think he did it because he really loved playing.
[+] [-] larrym|11 years ago|reply