Music Video Lesson: Is slow practice important?

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin here at virtualsheetmusic.com and livingpianos.com with a very important subject for you. Is slow practice important? All right, this is a great subject, and I have covered this for pianists. Today we're talking about all instrumentalists, and it's not as simple a question as you might think. All right. Well, you know, you see some amazing things in this world. For example, the Great Pyramids, or have you ever seen a painting with very, very fine, little tiny dots, and yet it all grows into some magnificent image when these dots are combined and the colors are just right? And you wonder, "How can some of these achievements, whether they're personal artistic expressions or monumental architectural wonders of the world, how is it possible?" Well, everything starts with one little step at a time. With the Pyramids it had to be one stone turned and building upon building, one stone to the next. Same thing with a painting, hours and hours of tedious work to create an image of great beauty.

Well, the same thing is true in your practice. Even though you listen to somebody play something fast and jewel like, with elegance and total relaxation, the process of getting there has to break things down, and one of the most intrinsic ways of doing that is by going slowly. Now the reason why I want to bring this up specifically for all instruments instead of just the piano, as a general video, is because there are some unique challenges that different instruments face in slow practice. For example, on a wind instrument, sometimes it's not practical to practice very slowly because the breathing will all be in different places, and so it's very, very difficult to get a sense of things. However, in fast music, slow practice is absolutely essential to get the evenness, for example on a woodwind instrument or a brass instrument, being able to coordinate the tongue and the fingers. If you just play fast all the time, there's gong to be a lack of precision, so this is why slow practice is absolutely essential, and any great musician you've heard on virtually any instrument, I can assure has not only has practiced slowly, but continues to reinforce practice by going back to difficult passages, playing them slowly, and the key is, working them up.

Now, before we even get to the idea of working up the speed, the biggest thing you have to remember when you are working slowly and increasing speed is to not increase the speed at all until there's total fluency and solidity at a slow tempo. If you take the time at the front end to really master your music slowly, where you can play it again and again not only accurately, but in a very relaxed manner, that is the time to raise your metronome one notch, yes, only one notch. And why one notch? Well, if you want to have real refinement in your playing, you don't want any rough edges or distortions to be introduced. So for your most difficult passages, one notch at a time is an absolutely great way to build speed. But that slow practice to begin with will get you in the zone, and indeed, you will find that if you do nothing else but take a piece that you play, maybe you have a piece that you had on performance level and it's getting a little bit rusty, it's just not quite as clean as you'd like, just going back and playing it slowly, even without necessarily going through all the metronome speeds, can be incredibly enlightening. It refreshes the score in your head, in your hands and in the rest of you, depending upon the instrument you're playing.

So, I recommend slow practice very highly to all musicians, of course there are some exceptions. In literature where it's not practical, with bowings and breathing, that maybe slowing things down doesn't make sense in certain contexts, but over all, for your difficult, fast passages, slow it down, get comfortable then speed it up, and you will find, you will have that jewel like refinement of a great painting or monumental achievements like the Great Pyramids. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at virtualsheetmusic.com and livingpianos.com.

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