Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner The Ephiphany of Technique I just had

This was a helpful and timely reminder for me, too. Thank you.

Regards,

How slow is slow? When you say slow ENOUGH, for example, are you talking about something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPLxAgKaUOw

While many on this thread advocate slow practice, I don't see much consistency in their different reasons for advocating it. (Of course, it's possible that slow practice has more than one benefit.)I also find several of the given explanations of the benefits of slow practice to be unclear in the extreme.

While many on this thread advocate slow practice, I don't see much consistency in their different reasons for advocating it.

Would you at least agree that if you can't play something slowly you can't play it at a fast tempo?

I don't know about others, however, in my case I am working on a couple of pieces and am at differing stages of development with them. The thread helped me remember that perhaps I need to slow down in various parts to get better results in the long run. Sure, this is pretty basic. However, sometimes we forget and are too close to it to see why we're not making as much progress as we could.

This thread also reminded me to check in with my piano teacher about techniques.

In the Beethoven I'm playing, I just moved on to the next section and the left hand was giving me trouble...and after 3-4 times of playing at half tempo or below, I got the left hand there SUPER clean. Slow is so nice. :].

I'll be happy to talk a bit about this, but it will have to wait until later this evening.

In general, I think most people start learning difficult pieces at a tempo slower than the final one. I think some of the posts on this thread are about the idea of practicing very slowly once one has reasonably learned the notes and can play a piece close to tempo, but I'd guess not everyone on this thread was referring to this.

Your statement is often true but such a generalization(what's slow, fast,?) that it's not always true. For example, the endlessly discussed Chopin Fantasie Impromptu is, I think, more difficult to play at a very slow speed because the 4 against 3 is much harder at this pace. Does an advanced player have to be able to play a Bach Minuet slowly in order to be able to play it fast?

My comments on this thread are not meant to imply I think slow practice is a bad idea, but an attempt to clarify the ideas about slow practice. As I said earlier, I find many of the comments about the benefits on this thread to say different things and sometimes also find them unconvincing or obscure.

Fantasy Impromptu is a great example of a piece that is almost more difficult to play slow. I've never studied the piece, but I can play the 3 against 4 at tempo pretty well but it's QUITE hard to do slow. At speed, you don't think about it. You just do it. Slowly, you have to think SO hard about where each not falls on the beat.

Here is a clear one, and it's the only one I actually need: it works. I do the slow practice, and it results in an improved ability to play the music. Simple as that.

I don't find any particular need to explain why it works to myself. Explanations of that sort, especially when something is working, are something I tend to distrust, and I do have an explanation for that distrust. It is because I find that conceptualizations of a process can get in the way and drag me down by shifting my focus to "thinking about" rather than "doing". And it is because sometimes, and in some circumstances, having a concept about what one is doing can cause a certain rigidity point of view that I find not to be helpful, many times. Since I don't need any of that to get slow practice to work, I avoid them.

OTOH, speculations about why it may work, here in this thread, don't necessarily get internalized, so they aren't really a problem. It's only a problem if I decide "this is what is happening", rather than "hmm, that might be a reason it works".

As a footnote to the discussion, I think Sandor advised not to practice "the whole piece slowly," but rather just the technically challenging passages. For example, it would be pointless to practice the first section of Chopin's F major Ballade slowly. So, the idea of playing a piece from start to finish at a slow tempo needs that little caveat. Who has time to waste when there is so much magnificent music to study?

Thank you! I write a good part of the day as part of my job. I don't feel like explaining every detail and thought about my enjoyment with the piano. I don't mind sharing a few quick observations about my experience. I just don't feel like doing much more than that. I just want to play it and try things out to get it the way I want it!

excellent insight Skorpius. You play with the brain and one must groove the brain to play fast.

My instruction manual says to practice at 40x performance speed.

At today's lesson, I brought up my difficulty bringing up the tempo in that broad flourish section of the Liszt Sonetto 104. (I can actually play it quite well, it just doesn't sound like a flourish, yet. I think it needs more speed.) I had already tried slow practice and could play it perfectly. I had also tried playing it in different rhythms. He suggested playing the notes in groups of three - very fast - like a snap - and then taking a good sized pause in between each group. When I did it, my problem area became immediately apparent because it involved a quick reach, something that would not show up in slow practice. He also suggested being fully expressive during slow practice, something I hadn't been doing. He said the problem could be due to how the hand is weighted and the direction of the phrase - which will only show up if I'm playing with expression. So, it's back to slow practice with expression and snapping through the notes in little groups. I also have to become fully confident playing those notes - without looking.

I'm planning to spend time talking to my instructor this weekend about some other issues I'm having with Clair de lune and Chopin's Prelude in D Flat Major.

One thing I noticed practicing this evening at a slower tempo was that it was easier for me to also have better posture, and my body was much more relaxed.

Until I was 21, I lived and breathed slow practice, as I had heard from teacher after teacher that it was the only way to build speed and gain technical confidence. Come 21, my first year of grad school, I began studying with a woman who was regarded as a "technique expert", and, admittedly had one of the most phenomenal techniques I have seen (She has recorded some of the cleanest, fastest Chopin Etudes ever set to record).

At our very first studio class meeting, she (aggressively) addressed all of us:

"I HATE slow practice. Slow practice is one of the biggest lies and fallacies of modern piano pedagogy. If we have a problem with a passage, we need to go back to words and sentences to fix it, NOT letters! We only slow ourselves down by practicing slowly!!"

Her suggestion, rather, was to begin practicing music up to tempo from the outset, but in VERY SMALL GROUPS. (exactly as Goddog's teacher said). Let's say you were playing a Chopin etude - you would practice the first group of 4 notes up to tempo, then silently land on the first note of the next group. Once you had the group of 4 down, you would increased the group to 8, then 12 and so on. This was, naturally, a huge change in the way I thought about practicing and my philosophy of technical work. Being her student I began to practice that way.

It didn't really work. For me at least. It didn't to any conceivable harm, but certainly didn't work the magic that it had seemed to potentiate. I learned that, incidentally, Brendel and Mischa Dichter also practice this way - they start up to tempo, but in small groups, and very rarely practice slowly. By contrast, Rachmaninoff and Shura Cherkassky famously practiced excruciatingly slowly (at about a similar tempo to the video that I posted earlier in this thread).

As for the present, I've reached the conclusion that it's important to practice at ALL TEMPOS, since every different tempo presents a different problem. The majority of my practicing, however, is at a SLIGHTLY slow tempo, but with all the phrasing, dynamics, and gestures in tact. This way, you are still getting the benefits of slow practice, but within the context of the actual gesture of the passage.

Moral of the story: It's too personal a thing to make any rule about. If you hate slow practicing and can do without it as my old teacher and others do, then so be it. If you want to feel everything at 5 mph, then so be that. It depends on each individual's brain and nervous system, and everybody physiologically executes information from the mind different ways. They key is to listen to YOURSELF, experiment in your own practicing, and reach a decision on your own observation and experiences.

Agreed. One of the most difficult things about practice methods is being able to explain WHY something works. I still don't know for sure why slow practice works, but here is the most probable theory I can come up with:

I believe that you taught math at one point. When explaining how to solve a math problem, what do you do? You break it down into steps for students.
1. 2. 3. 4. etc. Even if you can do it much faster or almost instantly in your head, the students still need to learn things step by step - aka - SLOWLY. If they do twenty of the same type of problems, chances are they can nail the 20th much faster than the 1st, because they have since become much more aquatinted with the steps.

Slow practice is the same type of thing. When we practice a passage, what we are essentially doing is TEACHING our body to remember certain small movements. Technique itself is memory - not the memory of notes, but the memory of physical movements and sensations of our body at the piano. In order to ingrain these movements effectively, we need to feed this information to the brain, and the best way to do this is SLOWLY. By doing repetitions slowly, we are injecting information into our brain at a pace comfortable enough for it to say "Ah hah!!, THAT'S it". If these movements are too fast, the brain will not have time to comfortably detect and store them. Once each individual movement is refined, and secured away in that gray, miraculous mass, then we can begin to play faster and "skip steps" so to speak.

Of course, there is the argument that we are not actually using the same movements, muscles, and gestures when we play fast as when we practice slowly, and thus the whole thing is just a huge ironical waste of time. But that's a topic for another day

I do believe sometimes the board itself has something to do with it. I'm not a good piano player, but i try (I learn without a teacher, so it goes slow ;-) ).

In example, a piece from Final Fantasy called 'Eternal Harvest'. The trick is to get it very fast but very tight on both hands. Absolutely need to have perfect sync between two hands. For many, it's actually not a that hard piece).

what I found out, is that most digital piano's weren't properly able to get you that feeling to sync. The response of the keys and the sound doesn't seem to match well. My V-piano is reasonable up to the standard, but a real piano will definitely be much easier to practice. Purely because of its directness.

I also think that's why practicing it slow does matter ;-)

Dunno what everyone else experience, but I have the urge to go fast. No apparent reason.

IIRC, Philip Fowke advocates a method something like this (and, judging from an CD of knuckle-busters he recorded, he has got technique to burn). But, the way I remember hearing about his version of it, it was divided beat to beat, and there was no requirement that you land silently on the first note of the next beat - you went ahead and played it. And also, the way I understood it, you did one beat at a time through the whole piece, before you started stitching them together. Obviously, if you simply add more and more to the beginning, you will end up with a gradation of practice over the piece where the beginning has been practiced an enormous amount compared to the ending. I can't imagine how that would be a good thing.

I've tried this out in a very limited way, and it seemed to work kind of sort of work, but not so much that I wanted to continue. But the piece I was using as a test may have been inappropriately difficult for trying out a very new technique. Maybe I'll try it again on something less challenging and see how that goes.