You’ve been practicing slowly and faithfully. Then you speed up and the piece falls apart.
Slow practice is good advice. On its own, it won’t save you. These 7 fixes make it work.
1. Don’t practice mistakes slowly
You’re playing along, you miss a note, you fix it and keep going. Your piece doesn’t have 2 notes there. It has 1.
Choose a tempo where you can be 100% sure you’re playing it right. If you’re not sure what comes next, STOP. If you’re still making mistakes at a slow tempo, you’re practicing the mistakes. That’s a waste of your time.
Kerstin L., a member of my community, noticed the difference quickly: “playing slow with no wrong note is key for me. On Friday I had my first lesson and I did far fewer mistakes as usual.”
2. Play less at a time
A YouTube commenter told me his method. He played his whole piece slowly at one metronome tempo, nudged the metronome up a little, and played it all again. So diligent. It was also a total waste of time.
Your short-term memory holds only about 3 to 7 items at once. Play hundreds of items in a row and your brain encodes the first few. That’s why you come back the next day and it’s just as bad.
Practice chunks of 3 to 5 items instead. What counts as an item depends on how your brain processes music. For a beginner, working out a single note and its finger might be an item. An advanced player might see a long run of notes as a single broken D-flat major triad. That’s one reason theory and sight reading help: your chunks can get bigger.
I used to tell kids that you don’t shove your face into your dinner plate. You take one bite at a time. Paul B. found the same: “practicing in ‘chunks’ has improved my accuracy.” (More in Chunking: Why Small Sections Learn Faster.)
3. Practice movements and fingerings that work fast
Chunking fixes accuracy. It won’t raise your final tempo by itself. Make sure what you practice slowly is something you can do fast.
Some movements will never be fast. Opening your fingers wide is one. Try it and see how fast you can get it.
Fingerings are the same. Some are fine slowly and impossible at speed. Test tiny bits fast before you commit. Can I play these 3 notes fast with this fingering? Can I get from this note to that one quickly? In my Chopin Impromptu, going to finger 3 is too big a leap at speed. Finger 5 works.
4. Practice the music, not only the notes
If you practice every note at the same volume, it won’t sound musical no matter how fast you play.
Build an image of how the piece should sound. Sit with your score and listen to recordings. Some teachers say not to listen before you start. I disagree. You need to know where you’re going.
Musical playing has many small changes from loud to soft, often several per measure. In my Chopin Impromptu the left-hand notes can’t all be the same volume, or they’ll cover the right-hand melody. So I practice the softer accompaniment from the start.
Students tell me, “First I’ll get the notes and rhythm. I’ll worry about the music later.” My way is harder at the beginning. You’ll still get there faster, because you won’t have to unlearn mechanical playing.
5. Don’t rely on repetition alone
A student told me her childhood teacher made her play the piece perfectly once for every match in a box. One mistake, and all the matches went back. I’m amazed she still plays the piano.
Repetition builds procedural memory, the reflex of playing notes in order. Studies show that memory is fragile. Take it out of the room where you learned it, to a lesson or a friend’s house, and it falls apart.
Add other layers:
- Mental practice. Play a bit, then hear it and feel it in your head.
- Variable practice. Once the notes and fingering are set, play it staccato, or flip the dynamics.
- Patterns. Think the harmony while you play: an A-flat major chord, then a note that doesn’t belong. If you don’t practice thinking it, you won’t be able to think it at full speed.
Chopin’s pupil Karol Mikuli recalled that Chopin stressed thinking and feeling every note before playing it. You can learn more about this in the 28-Day Piano Journey inside Piano with Rebecca B. Start your 7-day free trial.
6. Ask why every mistake happened
Mindless repetition was the real problem with the matches. That student had no tools for her mistakes.
When you miss, stop and ask why. Wrong fingering? Arm in the wrong place? Did your mind wander, and was that because the chunk was too long? Forgot the pedal? Make a guess, then test it on the next try.
It’s detective work, and it makes practicing far less boring. I’m not that good at sudoku, but practicing is a puzzle I can do. Meg wrote on day 28 of the 28-Day Piano Journey: “practicing slowly with curiosity is very enjoyable. (used to hate going slow)”
7. Rest more
Here’s my pattern for tiny chunks. Play the chunk 3 times. Take a 5 to 10 second break. Play it 3 more times. Then go on to the next chunk. Don’t play the first one 700 times until it feels good enough. The last 694 do nothing for you.
The break lets you forget a little. Bringing it back into short-term memory is what makes learning stick. You can also mix things up, like a basketball player switching from jump shots to dribbling to free throws.
You get better while you rest. Studies show the brain rehearses what you just did during the break, without you noticing. Sleep consolidates learning too, so review what you’re working on before bed. Sometimes take a day off from a piece. You may come back and find it better.
Lyn H. put it simply: “going slower, taking breaks and studying in small bits really speed the learning process.”
Slow practice only works when it’s smart practice
Every slow minute should do real work for your brain. Watch me demonstrate each fix in Practice Slow the Right Way.
Want the 7 biggest practice mistakes and how to fix them, in one free guide? Get Turbocharge Your Practice.