practising

We are all guilty of playing something over and over and hoping it will get better, its human nature. But the truth is every time you make the same mistake, or struggle with same chord change –  it just cements itself more firmly into your subconscious. You need to play those difficult few notes PERFECTLY FIRST TIME. Or at least ASAP!

The trick is to play a small group of notes from memory watching your hands and playing in slow motion – at one mile an hour! If you play slowly enough you will execute it perfectly 1st time. Who cant do a difficult move perfectly if you leave 10 secs between notes! When you can play them easily 10 secs apart make it shorter (8 secs) then shorter again until you can play them at a comfortable speed. I stress the word comfortable not fast! Greater speed will take a few days at best and a few weeks/months at worst to achieve – BUT you will be playing the notes perfectly the whole time – and when you input the information calmly and slowly into your computer (the brain) and into your muscles, you naturally begin to speed up the relaxed accuracy you have achieved.

Guess what happens when you continually input faults into your computer (brain)? It keeps giving you the same crap! Maybe through sheer luck you get it right once every 4 times – but your brain remembers the 3 wrong times much more easily because you inputted the wrong notes/bad moves more often!!

Tomorrow I will be posting a blog telling you exactly how to practise a new piece or difficult section – so watch this space! (Unless of course you want to keep using the crash and burn practise technique that nearly every student employs?)