Author: SecondTry
Date: 2021-08-08 19:11
Matt74 wrote:
> If someone had simply told me WHY you play slow, I could have
> saved hundreds, or thousands of hours of pointless
> "practicing", not to mention years of frustration and
> futility.
>
> Part of the problem is that it's very good for speeding things
> up, and for that reason it's real purpose gets confused with
> speed.
>
> You can use it to play faster, and we all do, but that's not
> the point. It really has nothing whatsoever to do with playing
> faster. It has to do with how people learn.
Agreed, and I think the best way most people learn, but not in exclusion to other methods like, say, breaking down a passage into small groups of notes, playing those small chunks without errors at or near tempo, and then grouping those chunks over time.
Taking an entire passage at a slower speed at which you can handle the most difficult aspects has its limitations. It's inefficient. It might be better to use a combination of speed and breaking down difficult sections into chunks. And in practice, to loosely quote Kal Opperman, time is your most limiting asset.
The point I'm trying to make, all while not being pedantic for the sake of nit picking is that our brains, and their abilities to process, at least for most of us, are a bit like a tank of water. For it to not overfill the spigot must flow at slow speed or short duration (at higher flow rates.)
> How slow is complicated.
I don't even believe, per se, in the ideal of taking some music "slow." I believe in taking it no faster than it can be played accurately. Often, that speed turns out to be "slow," recognizing of course that "slow" is a subjective term.
You need to start slow enough to
> reveal your mistakes, but not so slow that it become
> impossible. It only needs to be slow enough. If you play it
> REALLY slow it gets too hard and becomes counterproductive.
> It's like jumping.
Some of the above I take issue with. First, taking something too slow---while I'm not sure is impossible or best categorized using a physics metaphor where certain minimal speeds are necessary given constraints like gravity--I think is better described as just not productive. Again--this is why I choose to describe effective practice in terms of accuracy more than speed.
I remember a cello lesson I sat in on when my daughter was young. The kind instructor said to her, "well you have to learn to walk first before you can run, right?"
Perhaps we both agree that such a simple metaphor best be introduced to players early in their training.
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