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Practice
This video of tips from JustinGuitar.com on making the most from your practice
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POrIlbiDg0Y
is fascinating after just finishing _Guitar Zero_, as they are the same points made by the psychologist-author of _Guitar Zero_. Both emphasize the need to practice slowly and carefully so the student doesn't make learn bad habits, which are difficult to unlearn, and both mention that the foundation of playing well is through hours of practice, so that what starts out as a bunch of small steps requiring mental focus, such as chord changes, become an unthinking process where all those little parts merge into a whole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POrIlbiDg0Y
is fascinating after just finishing _Guitar Zero_, as they are the same points made by the psychologist-author of _Guitar Zero_. Both emphasize the need to practice slowly and carefully so the student doesn't make learn bad habits, which are difficult to unlearn, and both mention that the foundation of playing well is through hours of practice, so that what starts out as a bunch of small steps requiring mental focus, such as chord changes, become an unthinking process where all those little parts merge into a whole.
This is a topic about which I have a few opinions
As opposed to what? That is The standard universal How To Practice direction used universally in music instruction for at least the last fifty years, if not since Time Immemorial.
That said, it's also wrong, in one important way.
Practicing playing slowly is prioritizing playing the pitches accurately at the expense of playing the tempo accurately. This is fine to do if your priority is playing the pitches accurately. This is not fine if your priority is playing the tempo accurately -- so it was one of the bad habits I had to break dance musicians of.
I think it is more correct to represent the situation this way: know what you are trying to practice. If you are having trouble producing the right pitches in the right order or in the right way, then a reliable and useful practice technique is to triage the tempo -- and possibly the rhythm -- throwing either or both right out the window and slowing it down to the point you can just focus on getting the pitches. If you are having trouble with tempo or rhythm, you can throw pitch out the window and focus on that.
There are two reasons this is important. It is extremely beneficial to musicians to have a more sophisticated idea of what practice is than "trying to get it right". That more sophisticated paradigm is one of problem solving, where the musician engages with practice as a series of puzzles she is trying to figure out, about how to learn how to do a thing she can't presently do. Instead of "there is one right way to practice", she has a tool box of practice techniques, and she picks and chooses among them. This is so beneficial not just because deliberate choice of remedy is more likely to address the problem than whacking everything with a hammer, but because that mentality, of constantly asking oneself "how can I get from here to there?", is active and engaged around one's cultivation as a musician, where the OTW of practicing approach leaves the student passive -- improvement is something bestowed on one by nature in rewards for diligence in practicing.
The second reason is that tempo effects the biomechanics of sound production. Turns out, playing something fast mechanically works differently than playing something slowly. Consequently, there are things that you can't get just by starting slow and accurate and speeding up! This is a thing which I sussed out studying piano, but which was never explicitly addressed. I found it very validating to discover it is absolutely explicit in the study of recorder (and I believe some other woodwinds): there is a whole set of substitute fingerings exclusively for very high-speed use. They are inferior in pitch accuracy, but optimize for minimal hand motion so you can get to them from other notes much, much faster than the full standard fingerings: i.e. they optimize for tempo over pitch. Likewise, there are different tonguing techniques for high-speed play.
When playing slowly, Newtonian mechanics basically don't matter; playing fast, your own arms, your own fingers, have momentum that has to be managed -- compensated for. At high speed, things like the resilience and flexibility of the part of the instrument you are impacting -- the strings of the harp, the head of the drum, the body of the flute -- add complexity by imparting or not bounce. The only way to play accurately at high speed is to practice at high speed.
This is not a beginning problem, but it is a problem when beginners develop the bad mental habit of thinking that the only way to practice is play slowly the pitches perfectly and then accelerando a poco a poco ma non tropo.
the foundation of playing well is through hours of practice, so that what starts out as a bunch of small steps requiring mental focus, such as chord changes, become an unthinking process where all those little parts merge into a whole.
From my quotes file: Yeah, the point of all practice is fluency. Music instruction necessarily involves a lot of names for things, so the instructor can talk to the student and the student can ask questions: novel information about music production is imparted as semantic knowledge -- information about music production. But Ceci n'est pas une pipe: the name of the thing is not the thing, and the whole point of the names is merely to be able to manipulate the ideas of the thing, the better to do the thing. With fluency the names fall away as irrelevant. Where the beginner is thinking "Now I am to play a G. How is a G played on this thing again? Oh, right, I put my first finger in the so-and-so position...." the more advanced student thinks, "Now I am to play a G," and plays it, and the fluent musician simply knows what note they are to play -- they might know it as a sound, as an idea, as a relative distance, or as a proprioceptive experience -- and plays it.
A story: On the first day of Harmony and Counterpoint 1 in college, the instructor administered a oral placement exam to the class collectively. The very first question was, naturally, "what are the notes of a C major triad?" About forty percent of the class -- the ones with violin cases at their feet -- all chanted in unison "C, E, G". About twenty percent looked hopelessly lost. At at about the moment the first group said "C", there was a resounding WHAM as the remaining forty percent of us all slammed our hands, like Jeopardy contestants fighting for the buzzer, down on our chesks, with our thumbs all perfectly aligned with our belly buttons; we looked up at the instructor expectantly for the next question for a half a moment, then, confused when it wasn't forthcoming, realized from the violinists' example that we were expected to give verbal (!!!) answers, and belatedly provided a ragged chorus of us trying to remember the letter names of the notes we imagined under our hands: "Uh...C...um...E?....uh, G." Violinists basically don't play chords; for them, chords are a matter of theory, and they are learned as semantic knowledge. All us pianists learned chords not as something to describe, but as a position, a gesture, and a sound.
Re: This is a topic about which I have a few opinions
Re: This is a topic about which I have a few opinions