Slow Practice Ain’t Chicken Soup

As a guitar teacher, I could save myself a lot of breath by having “slow down” tattooed on my forehead. It’s possibly the most common thing music teachers say to their students. And rightfully so. Humans are wired to run when threatened, and nothing is so reliably threatening as a difficult passage that students try to bulldoze their way through. So “slow down” has a venerable place in music instruction.

By itself, however, “slow down” doesn’t tell us much. When we’re doing something wrong, slowing down is only part of the solution. What then do we do when we slow down? If we don’t know, we might keep doing the wrong thing we did when playing faster. We’ll just do it slower. So now we can more calmly and methodically ingrain the thing we’re doing—the wrong thing, that is.

Throughout this project, I’ve dutifully genuflected at the altar of slow practice. But absent the right idea of what I should be doing, it got me precisely nowhere. And that goes for every other strategy related to slowing down. Breaking down passages into smaller bits? Been there, done that. Adding one note at a time to a scale passage? Done it. Practice dotted rhythms? Check. Increase tempos one click at a time with the metronome? Snap notes with a sharp staccato? Kick my fingers like miniature Rockettes? Check, check, and check.

It’s all worthless without the correct aim. For learning right hand speed, this aim must be a carefully calibrated understanding and increasing control of internal tension. If I’m not learning to recognize and control internal tension, then slow practice goes nowhere slowly.

Mind you, slow practice will still be an essential part of my teaching and my own practice. Knowing what I’m trying to achieve, slow practice is still the best approach in the early stages of learning something new. But now I’m less apt to dwell in the land of slow. And I’m less apt to tell students to slow down. Rather, it’s better to tell them specifically what they’re doing wrong, and how they could do it better. Then they can practice in a new and more productive way.

Slowly, of course.

——[My next update will be October 29, 2012]——

A Bad Week Gets Better

Short post this week. My new goal is to record the Mudarra Galliard at a metronome setting of 100. (For my taste, this is a good performance tempo.) It became my new short term goal after a disturbing incident last week. While practicing a six string descending scale, I found I could hit 120 with fair consistency. So I decided to try hitting scales in the context of an actual piece of music. Dusting off the Galliard—which I’d previously worked on for months—I found I could barely hit the scales at anything above 80. Yet going back to the six string descending scale, I could still hit it at 120.

Needless to say, this sparked a minor temper tantrum.

After I calmed down, I began working the problem. (If nothing else, this project has forced me to learn patience.) Two days later, I was consistently hitting the first scale of the Galliard at 100. What particularly encouraged me was how good it felt. My hand rippled through the scale like it was nothing. And the sound was that silky smooth rest stroke sound I love so well. Of course, the long scales at the end of the Galliard aren’t there yet. But hey, that gives me a reason to get up in the morning to practice.

Later that day I worked with a student on the Courante from BWV 996. He’d watched the Jason Vieaux video lesson on this piece, and wanted to know how Vieaux had done a particular cross string trill. After figuring it out, I demonstrated the trill to my student. Happily, my right hand was still working well that day, and the trill rolled trippingly off my fingers. “Hey, look at me, I’m Jason Vieaux!” I exclaimed.

So the week began badly but ended well. And now it’s the Galliard at 100 or bust. Next week I’ll delve into this in more detail.

——[My next update will be October 22, 2012]——

A Procedure for Your Consideration

What follows is the procedure I worked with a few weeks ago. Before describing it, however, a reminder: everything begins with the exercise for recognizing tension that I described in my September 9, 2012 post. It’s also a good idea to review my September 23, 2012 post.

As you may recall, I was working with Bach’s Invention No. 8—more precisely, one half of my guitar duet transcription. Early in September, I decided to break it down and pay more attention to detail. So I started with the first sixteenth note scale passage:

I began practicing this passage by merely tapping i and m on the guitar soundboard, choosing a tempo at which I felt no tension in my right hand. (For me, this was at 60 beats per minute.) I made sure I did the tapping with the same right hand fingering I would do when playing this passage on the guitar.

After doing this three times, I then simulated the string crossing by moving my fingers to a different spot on the soundboard, precisely on the tap where my fingers would move from the fourth to the fifth string.

Let’s step back for a moment to explain why I’m doing this. Tapping my fingers on the soundboard removes the resistance of the strings. My fingers can easily do this—my a finger easily moves with m, and c doesn’t lock up. So my goal at this point is to model the easy feeling of alternating my fingers with absolutely no excess tension. Further, I asked myself this: if I can’t merely tap my fingers on the soundboard with perfect rhythm and ease, then what makes me think it’ll go any better on the strings? Rather, I should master right hand alternation in easy stages. Begin with the easiest thing, then move to things that are progressively harder. Also, throughout this procedure I stay at one tempo.

Back to work. When I can easily tap my fingers on the soundboard with perfect rhythm and ease, I now play the rhythm of the passage on one open string. (No left hand at this point.) This introduces the resistance of a string, so it’s a bit harder than tapping on the soundboard. Again, I don’t move on until I can play this rhythm perfectly on one string. And I continuously monitor the tension I’m feeling, trying to keep it as close as I can to what I felt when I was merely tapping on the soundboard.

When this goes well, I move on to the next step. Now I introduce string crossing by playing the following:

 Again, there’s no left hand here. And again, I continuously monitor tension to keep it close to what I felt when I was playing a single string.

Stepping back once more, the idea throughout this procedure is to use each step as a model to define the tension I’ll aim to feel in the next step. Playing a single open string should feel no more tense than tapping on the soundboard. Playing the open strings with string crossing should feel no more tense than playing a single open string. And so on as I continue to each new step. Breaking the scale passage into discrete and easy steps allows me to more precisely calibrate the tension I’m feeling. Again a reminder: I’m still at the tempo that I used for the soundboard tapping.

When I’ve mastered the open string crossing step, I finally add the left hand to the passage. Again, I continuously monitor tension to keep it close to what I felt in the previous step.

I maintain the same tempo throughout this procedure. Only when I’ve mastered the final step do I bump up the tempo. If I started at a slow tempo and feel very little tension in the final step, then I’ll increase the tempo by five (i. e. from 60 to 65)—if I’m working closer to the edge of my ability, I’ll increase the tempo only two notches.

Thus, I carry out the entire procedure step by step, one tempo setting at a time. When I reach my target tempo, I move on to another passage.

•                                    •                                    •

This basically sums up how I was working in early September. I’ll say more in subsequent posts.

——[My next update will be October 15, 2012]——